Item Details

abstract

Decolonizing the discipline and practice of Sustainability is recognizing the inherent value of indigenous knowledge ways; we cannot clearly or neatly delineate the course of knowledge creation and use to exclude the people who have suffered the most under Western scientific and political hegemony. Traditional knowledge and praxis reflect the spiritual ecosystem service provided by humans’ metaphysical relationships to seeds, their ecological community, ancestral generations, and future generations. These relationships allow human and plant populations to grow within specific or a variety of environmental conditions, thus demonstrating ways to adapt to environmental change. The Western academy has compartmentalized science and religion, science and spirituality, science and traditional forms of knowledge; but to many human communities in the world, they are far from separate. An inherent problem of Sustainability and ecology frameworks like ecosystem services is that it requires economic valuing of the nonhuman world, based in the legacy of colonialism and exclusively Western values of economy. Ecotheology is the framework that connects the western concept of ecosystem services and spirituality or metaphysical relationships that are reflected in physical processes and relationships. Ecotheology bridges western traditional thought and interconnectedness or the relationality of all things found in TEK. We keep and use the cultural-spiritual ecosystem service from the ecosystem services framework because it does not rely on Western economic valuation; it is instead the bridge between the Western framework for understanding ecosystem services, or how the nonhuman world provides for our life and well-being, and the non-Western traditional ecological knowledge ways that depend on the nonhuman world for guidance on how to live in ecological balance with it.

subject

colonialism

decolonize

indigenous

science

spirituality

traditional ecological knowledge

contributor

Diaz-Reyes, Taina Mari (author)

Pace, Leann (committee chair)

Meiburg, Albert S (committee member)

Gandolfo, Elizabeth O (committee member)

date

2020-01-08T09:35:22Z (accessioned)

2019 (issued)

degree

Sustainability (discipline)

2024-12-30 (liftdate)

embargo

2024-12-30 (terms)

identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/10339/95949 (uri)

language

en (iso)

publisher

Wake Forest University

title

ECOLOGICAL RELATIONALITY AND MODELS OF SUSTAINABILITY: TOWARDS A SOCIAL, INTERGENERATIONAL, MULTI-SPECIES ENVIRONMENTAL ETHIC THROUGH THE EVALUATION OF CULTURAL-SPIRITUAL ECOSYSTEM SERVICES

type

Thesis