ABSTRACT
Indigenous knowledge is said to be holistic in the way it deals with the world. Environmental systems are complex systems, showing a number of characteristics not seen in simple systems, such as scale, uncertainty, self-organization and nonlinear dynamics (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 makes ecosystems extremely diffi cult 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.
