a few brief thoughts on Meet the Neighbors

[alyaza]

Alyaza Birze (October 8)

busy once again, but here's a quick update

programming notes

my interesting links page is live; for the time being it's furnished with a bare minimum of interesting research and essays of importance to me, but eventually i'll be adding to it substantially. additional big updates to it should be noted in future posts.

what i'm reading (44/40)

i've finished Meet the Neighbors (Brandon Keim) and it's a very good book; lots to think about here, mostly for future posts. here are some quick ones and interesting points in the book that i want to break out right now, though

animal democracy

i suspect most people think of voting as a distinctly human concept because of the social significance we've constructed around the concept and democratic process generally―but: this is not true. voting (even as we understand it) seems quite common among non-human animals;¹ they in fact exhibit a wide array of procedures for arriving at decisions, just as we do. some of these processes are remarkably participatory and direct democratic. honeybees, for instance, use a weighted-additive strategy of decisionmaking (in which every alternative is evaluated "in light of all the relevant attributes, weight[ing] each attribute according to its importance, sum[ing] the weighted attributes for each alternative, and finally choos[ing] the alternative whose total valuation is the highest") to acheive consensus on nesting sites. some are strongly hierarchical, as with African wild dogs, who require different levels of quorum and agreement for certain individuals in the social hierarchy to direct collective decisions. and some are in the middle: both American and European bison generally require about half of their herds to agree to movement, but the process of movement can be influenced most strongly by older female bison.

this will probably be the subject of a future post; i'll definitely have some more thoughts on this when i get through several related books i've picked up.

the Wuikinuxv Nation and fish management

British Colombia's Wuikinuxv Nation ([ʔuwik'inuxʷ]) historically were the beneficiaries of a massive salmon run through their traditional lands; this changed with the arrival of colonial powers and commercial fishing on Rivers Inlet. gradual salmon population decline through the 1800s and 1900s due to overfishing culminated in a total collapse of the salmon population in the 1990s; in this decade, there were not enough salmon for the Wuikinuxv and fewer still for the bear population in their tradtional lands. a catastrophic (and emotionally wrenching) bear starvation event followed; in the Nation's retelling, "[Bears] wandered the streets of the village in search of food, fur hanging from their emaciated bodies, pressing themselves against windows and even breaking into homes. Mothers stopped defending their cubs." several had to be killed out of mercy or danger presented toward humans. the trauma of this event still lingers in the Nation due to the cultural significance bears have in this region.

one consequence of this event for the better, however, is a change in fish management practice from the Wuikinuxv Nation. as Meet the Neighbors recounts this change:
 

“The people who were living here at the time had seen so much of the suffering those bears had gone through,” [Jennifer Walkus] said. They started thinking about how to ensure that the bears had enough fish to survive. The Wuikinuxv have a term for this: n̓àn̓akila, to look ahead, to watch out for someone. That value would guide the scientific study of how to ensure that grizzlies had plenty to eat. And they would not be asking scientists from the government—the same government whose biologists supported the trophy hunting of their kin, who had allowed the fishing industry to decimate the salmon and the timber industry their habitat, who didn’t take their own expertise seriously—for help. “They’re the ones with the loudest voices,” said Walkus of the industries. “The only ones speaking for the bear and the fish and the eagles are us.”

Walkus went to Chris Darimont, science director at the Raincoast Foundation, who had worked on their collaboration with the Heiltsuk. He sent them Megan Adams, an idealistic young ecologist working toward her master’s degree. She would help take Walkus’s questions out onto the landscape. How many grizzly bears lived in their home? How much did they eat? How many salmon did they need, and how could their own salmon harvests include the needs of the bears?

a thorough study on the subject by Adams and the Wuikinuxv yielded results that now guide the Nation's practices―that of prioritizing the bears and their share of salmon first, then taking only what they need from the share that remains:

[...]If current salmon populations held steady—around 200,000 sockeye now return each year—and the Wuikinuxv caught no more than 45,000 fish, or roughly 10 percent below what had previously been calculated as their sustainable limit, grizzly populations would be about 10 percent smaller than if they caught none. This seemed like a fair balance.

The bears’ needs would also come first. Right now, said Walkus, talking to me in spring, not long after the salmonberries—named for their orange-pink coloration—had bloomed, the fishery remains closed until 100,000 sockeye have passed the counting station in the village. Only then is fishing opened to the Wuikinuxv Nation’s several hundred members. For now, they take a small fraction of their newly calculated limit, said Walkus; they stay well on the safe side of what the runs can support, though hopefully a day will come when that number rises. But even then the bears will be first in line, followed by the Wuikinuxv, and it’s unlikely that there will ever be enough fish to support a commercial fishery. “That’s the scientific argument that we’re going to use to keep the feds away from opening the fishery,” Walkus says. “There’s not even enough fish for the system to sustain itself. It’s barely enough fish for people and bears to share. But there’s enough. Leave it alone.”

in prioritizing the bears, the Wuikinuxv Nation also ensures the nutrients of the salmon proliferate through the environment. what salmon the bears don't eat or leave behind provide a banquet for scavengers to feast on; and beetles, flies, and other decomposers ensure the nutrients of salmon are passed further through the ecosystem to the pollination of plants and flowers. as a rule: where the salmon are abundant, biodiversity flourishes―something that obviously benefits the Wuikinuxv more than taking their share first and leaving what remains for the bears.

what might it look like to attempt this sort of prioritization everywhere? i'm not sure. but i hope there are more efforts like this in the future.

Comments

[malymin]

I eagerly await your further writings on animal democracy, when you've compiled them.

As for the Wuikinuxv Nation and the impact of commercial fishing on the local ecosystem... it's horrible that an ecological crisis of that scope happened that recently. I'm glad to hear that the current management system the Wuikinuxv and their allies have set up is focused on allowing the salmon and bear populations, and by extension the entire ecosystem, to recover from the damages first and foremost... I hope more efforts along these lines crop up elsewhere, too.

Yes ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> i suspect most people think of voting as a distinctly human concept because of the social significance we've constructed around the concept and democratic process generally―but: this is not true. <<

Well put.

It happens in some primate troops, where just being a really badass individual is not enough to maintain leadership. You might win a dominance fight with the previous leader, but if the rest of the troop dislikes you, then they may all dogpile you -- and you can't fight all of them at once, even if they are individually weaker.

... not that much different from human politics.

>> honeybees, for instance, use a weighted-additive strategy of decisionmaking <<

They have a vote-up / vote-down option for foraging too. A site that is very good will have a very excited bee dancing its directions, quickly surrounded by a large crowd of more excited bees watching, and pretty soon more foragers returning to dance with further updates about it. A smaller site that gets emptied out, however, will have the dancer interrupted by others headbutting her to discourage the signal.

>> a thorough study on the subject by Adams and the Wuikinuxv yielded results that now guide the Nation's practices―that of prioritizing the bears and their share of salmon first, then taking only what they need from the share that remains:<<

That is very wise, and also, typical of resource management throughout most of Turtle Island.

Another example practiced in clam gardens: Humans build the garden (a stone wall that collects a flat stretch of sand inside) to make more room for clams and other edible seafood, but many more species benefit. So the first thing you do when you go to a clam garden is check that wall and replace any rocks that have fallen. Then you start harvesting, and you count 4 clams. Throw back the smallest as too young, and the biggest to make more big clams. You keep and eat the middle two. This way, you don't cut off either the biggest size, or the young clams needed for renewal.

Tribes all have their own traditions for telling how much of a particular local resource may be harvested and when, along with stop-commands that they accept from nature. So for instance, when the fawns separate from the does and the bucks shed their velvet to start rutting, that's the signal for when you can hunt deer; you don't hunt when the fawns are nursing or the bucks are growing antlers, and it's not just a calendar date. Among the most widespread stoppers is if a hunt goes so badly that a hunter is severely injured or died, that means quit hunting that type of animal and/or that area for some amount of time. The rules for ricing include that when you travel, you throw wild rice one water body farther than its current extent; and when you harvest, you do it traditionally so that some rice falls in the water to reseed instead of stripping it bare. It's the job of the elders to remember all this stuff, observe, gather reports, and then advise the younger hunters and gatherers about the harvests. They did eventually get pretty good at that -- certainly a lot better than most modern cultures bother to be.

>>in prioritizing the bears, the Wuikinuxv Nation also ensures the nutrients of the salmon proliferate through the environment.<<

Yeah, salmon are keystone species and ecosystem engineers. They're a massive pump of nutrients and bioenergy from the ocean clear up to the mountain riverheads.

>> what might it look like to attempt this sort of prioritization everywhere? i'm not sure. but i hope there are more efforts like this in the future.<<

Well, we wouldn't be gutting the biosphere and cooking off the atmosphere. >_< Modern humans can't even figure out "Don't saw off the branch that you're standing on." But it used to be the norm to think holistically about the environment, so you can find plenty of examples in history. Current versions, aside from tribal peoples, include things like permaculture, food forests, biodynamic farming, and other types of regenerative or restorative land use.