ABSTRACT

Indigenous knowledge is said to be holistic in the way it deals with the environment. Environmental systems are complex systems, showing a number of characteristics not seen in simple systems, such as scale, non-linear dynamics, and uncertainty (Levin 1999). The idea of scale is key to understanding ecosystems. Ecosystems are nested systems, for example, with a small watershed inside a larger one and so on. In ecosystems, there is scaling in time as well as space, for example, there are fast and slow processes (e.g. growth of an annual plant versus the growth of a forest). Such scaling in space and time make ecosystems extremely difficult to predict and control. Uncertainty results from the unstable and unpredictable relationships among the variables in these multi-scale systems. Hence, managing ecosystems, and dealing with multi-scale environmental problems such as climate change, create huge problems.