ABSTRACT
This chapter summarizes ethnoscience and human ecology is at the intellectual roots of traditional ecological knowledge. It provides the documentation of species lists of different cultures, and it elaborated a science of folk taxonomies of plants and animals and, later, of other environmental variables. The chapter discusses functional relationships of the elements of local knowledge so documented, including the study of human perceptions of ecological processes, and the process of human adaptation to the environment. Some of the work of human ecologists in the 1970s and the 1980s emphasized territoriality. In this new emphasis, access rules are only one set of rules within a larger set of rights and obligations. It considers the context and worldviews are of key importance in human ecology. Reichel-Dolmatoff pointed out, the researcher needs to study the worldview as the organizing concept behind the cultural ecology of a group, without which the logic of many traditional management systems would be difficult.
