ABSTRACT
The Wola are keenly aware of their natural environment, its limitations and opportunities. The have a profound knowledge of their region’s natural resources, albeit embodied more in a lived than a verbalised tradition. And they have evolved a subtle relationship with their environment, notwithstanding it having possibly undergone a revolution a few generations ago with the arrival of sweet potato. While they are attuned to their homeland’s climate, land resources, vegetational successions, and so on, it would be stretching a point to suggest that they are conservationists. On the other hand, it would be untrue to depict them as agents of degradation. Their relationship with their environment is more equivocal, less easy to pigeon-hole by the black-or-white oppositions common to our ideological discourse. They do not agonise about protecting nature, nor do they heedlessly destroy her — they hover intriguingly somewhere in between.
