[MUSIC] The departure point for a system of knowledge as we were discussing before, is the way our minds frame an image of nature, and minds are exposed to different kinds of, Phenomenons in nature. We grow in the middle of seasons, in the middle of flocks of birds, in the middle of noisy crickets, or birds that are singing around myself. But in many cases, the way our mind frames nature is completely different than ours in the western culture. Greeks created a way of seeing the world, of understanding the world. But there are hundreds of different ways of creating and building an image of the world into our brains. One of the most striking examples I know is that of the Ayahuasca or Yage cultures. The Ayahuasca culture is mostly found in the Amazon, and many different groups share that way of knowing and framing an image of the world. And the most interesting issue of the Ayahuasca cultures is that people at the age of nine or ten start to drink the result of a mixture of plants, one of them being the vine of Ayahuasca mixed with other plants. And through that, they start to dream while being awake. And that dream, it's a real neurological change of the brain functions. And through that type of dream, they are able to talk to nature, to talk to plants and even to become a plant or to become an animal. In the shamanistic cultures, you can become a wolf in the Russian steppes. You can become a coyote in the United States Great Plains. Or you can become a jaguar in the rainforest. That's not an invention. It's something that your brain under the training and under the views that you get through the Ayahuasca creates. Therefore, the image of the world, the image of the ecosystem is quite different. The experience that you have in the middle of kind of, you can say, virtual reality that is created by the use of Ayahuasca is completely different than the Western view. When you have a conversation with people that live in the rainforest, and they talk to you about very specific conversations they have with certain beings that they encounter through their lives. Such as the jaguar person, such as the anaconda or snake person, you just smile and you say, okay, that's imagination. That's a way of thinking but in fact there's a full set of categories that are behind that way of thinking. You just done think that plants are the same than for Linnaeus in the Western taxonomical system. Therefore botany, zoology, soil science on even ecology uses quite different categories for describing the world than most of the local communities. And we have to accept that some of those categories cannot be translated. You just have to accept that the word means differently to different communities or to different people. And as you grow old, you understand that those vision of the world are equally valid, equally important and in fact they enrich the daily lives of everybody. That those views are a demonstration that the mental abilities, intellectual abilities of humanity are quite diverse and we need not just to enjoy them, acknowledge them, but make them some room in our dominating institutions. We need those visions of divergence of the world, and we need the visions of the local people about the local environment even if the categories that they use to describe are managed, those issues are really, really different than ours. Local communities that depend, by example, on fishing, there's plenty of societies in our continent in America that really need a fish on the plate for every day meal. And they got it from very different species. We have 400 species of fish in the Columbian Amazon or in the Magdalena River. And people knows the behavior of the fishes. They know the ecology the natural history and because they rely on that knowledge for surviving. But as I mentioned before, they also have ways of talking to the fish, they have ways of naming those fishes. They have allocated rights on the properties for that fish. Therefore, the meaning of well-being of that needs that lie behind our existence may vary quite much. People may be satisfied with just one fish and let the rest go away even if they can get them to take them to the market and make money. Values and knowledge are quite related in that situation. People knows or believes that they don't have the right, they would misbehave, or they just will damaged their own futures if they take more than they need. But that's also a fact of each culture. It's socially and culturally defined and that's why there are many conflicts between cultural views about nature and about biodiversity, who has the right to name something as a resource. Who can stand defending some type of animal or plant because of their preferences, or his or she's preferences. And therefore we are in the middle of a cultural struggle that has many ways of being solved, but the first and most important dimension has to do with respect, appreciation and mutual understanding. I think that the approach that the IPBES by example is following, or the CBD, the Convention of Biological Diversity is going to that way to really invite all knowledge systems that lie behind specific portions of the land and specific societies. To be expressed freely, to be developed and to be included into the decisions of the governments and the institutions for protecting and managing sustainability in the world. Finally, I want to mention that knowledge systems are never static. Even the most traditional indigenous have knowledge systems that evolve, that adapt, that are able to incorporate new languages, new knowledge, new values. And therefore, there's a double dimension on the existence of knowledge systems. The knowledge that the people has and the community shares, and of course the politics that emerge from that knowledge. People have the right to position their values and their ways of seeing and understanding nature in the middle of other communities and in the middle of social struggles or territorial struggles. That's history of Earth, but they also have the right to contribute through that view to the process of innovating ways of adapting to the world changes. And particularly in these times when climate change is really affecting everybody, it's affecting all of the land of the lands and all the societies. Indigenous and local knowledge system are thinking about the challenges and the way their own views of biodiversity and the natural phenomenons can be handled to adapt to such situations. So the political and scientific linkages are alive in every community and we cannot pretend that local communities, indigenous communities don't express that those beliefs and those values and that they are not incorporated into a wider political discussion. And there is where science sometimes fails thinking that everything is objective. And that we can handle the changes of the world just with knowledge and not with some advocacy. [MUSIC]
