Leveraging Scientific Research into Underground Ecosystems to Support Indigenous Rights and MOTH Rights
Underground ecosystems are home to around a quarter of the planet’s species and provide the foundation for much of life on Earth. However, despite their vital importance, underground ecosystems have been overlooked in environmental frameworks, climate change strategies, conservation agendas, restoration efforts, legal actions, and enforcement. This is a problem: the destruction of these diverse habitats through activities like mining and deforestation accelerates both climate change and biodiversity loss, among other ecological challenges.
Key players in underground ecosystems are mycorrhizal fungi: largely invisible ecosystem engineers that supply nutrients to plants in exchange for plant carbon. Through this ancient association, carbon floods into the soil, supporting intricate food webs above and below ground. These vast symbiotic networks comprise an ancient life-support system that easily qualifies as one of the wonders of the living world. When we disrupt these networks, we jeopardize the health and resilience of the organisms on which we depend.
The Science Across Cultures Initiative aims to use data from comprehensive mycorrhizal fungal surveys to support the campaign of the Sarayaku Nation – an Indigenous people from the Ecuadorian Amazon – to defend their territories from extractive industries such as oil drilling and mining.
The Sarayaku Nation has been engaged in a decades-long struggle to resist extractive industries in their territory and protect their rights, an effort that led them to file what has become one of the most important cases on Indigenous rights in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. As part of this long-standing effort, the Sarayaku launched the Kawsak Sacha – or, Living Forest – Initiative. The Living Forest Initiative is based on the Sarayaku’s understanding of the forest as an interconnected living entity.
As part of the Science Across Cultures Initiative, researchers from the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN) and the Fungi Foundation will travel to Ecuador and work with the Sarayaku to survey the fungal diversity of their territory above and below ground by making taxonomic collections and sequencing soil fungal DNA. SPUN and Fungi Foundation researchers will train Sarayaku youth in techniques to describe and document fungal diversity, which will allow ongoing monitoring of fungal communities.
The NYU MOTH team, the Sarayaku, the Fungi Foundation, and SPUN together will devise a multi-pronged strategy to mobilize this data in support of the implementation of a recent court ruling as well as the broader Kawsak Sacha Initiative. For example, the fungal data will likely elucidate critical biodiversity present in the territory, triggering domestic and international obligations and norms around the protection of biodiversity; this, in turn, would strengthen the Sarayaku’s opposition to extractive activities within their territory. The data and analysis will also clarify how above-ground ecosystems depend on and are connected to below-ground ecosystems, including mycorrhizal fungi; this will help elaborate the interconnectedness underpinning the Sarayaku’s claim for recognition of their territory as a subject of rights. This particular effort will also include a campaign element that helps communicate the findings and their implications to a wider audience. Importantly, the plan is not to use the assessment of fungal diversity to try and “prove” in scientific terms the Sarayaku concept of the living forest, but rather to provide additional evidence that the Sarayaku can use in support of their Living Forest Initiative and legal mobilizations. To make effective arguments against the destruction of underground ecosystems through, for example, mining, it is important to draw attention to the countless organisms that live underground and the vital roles they play in mitigating climate change and supporting above-ground biodiversity.
Through the work with the Sarayaku Nation, the Initiative hopes to develop tools that will be more generally applicable: to leverage fungal data to support struggles for environmental justice, and to advance the case for inclusion of fungi in environmental frameworks and legal actions.
A New Path Forward: Collaboration Between Indigenous Knowledge Systems and the Modern Sciences
There are many ways of knowing and observing. The modern sciences are a diverse collection of tools, methods, and values that have led to countless discoveries of fundamental importance. But these frameworks have historically undervalued and discounted the value and importance of Indigenous knowledge systems, while frequently enabling violence towards Indigenous peoples. One of the core concerns of the MOTH Project is how Western scientists and Indigenous knowledge holders and scientists might enter into generative, two-way collaboration, both to bring forth insight and understanding and to apply that understanding technologically.
In this spirit, the Science Across Cultures Initiative seeks to explore ways that the Sarayaku Nation might fruitfully collaborate with an international team of scientists from SPUN and the Fungi Foundation. Part of this exploration will take the form of dialogue around the fungal sampling process: the scientists will discuss the limits and possibilities of their sampling techniques and devise hypotheses together with the Sarayaku based on particular questions the Sarayaku have about fungal communities in their territories. Another part of the exploration will take place in ceremonies hosted by the Sarayaku and in sustained dialogue about how the modern sciences and Indigenous knowledge systems might inform each other and work together to advance protections for the living world. The NYU MOTH team has extensive experience running workshops with Indigenous nations and has developed effective approaches to facilitating interdisciplinary and inter-cultural, two-way exchange.
The Sarayaku Nation has a media lab; all aspects of the project will be filmed by Sarayaku filmmakers and used to produce a documentary film about the living forest and ways in which Indigenous nations might collaborate with scientists. The film will play an important role in increasing the public reach of efforts designed to protect the more-than-human world, like Kawsak Sacha. This aspect of the project forms part of a larger MOTH inquiry into the ways that storytelling can be used to break through disciplinary silos and communicate the ideas that emerge from generative exchanges between different knowledge systems.