Forgetting the Forest: Assessing Medicinal Plant Erosion in Eastern Brazil

Local Perceptions of Changes in Traditional Ecological Knowledge: A Case Study from Malekula Island, Vanuatu

“…TEK erosion was perceived to be a past and current reality by the vast majority of participants, thus corroborating the fears of authors from Vanuatu (e.g., Hickey 2006), the Pacific (e.g., Case et al 2005;Brosi et al 2007), and around the world (e.g., Voeks and Leony 2004;Quinlan and Quinlan 2007). Participants noted that traditional knowledge and practice-or kastom-now play a reduced role in everyday contemporary life, driven by a variety of factors that are nested at local, national, and international scales.…”

“…Very few quantitative studies have considered religious affiliation or integration as a factor in TEK variation (cf., Voeks and Leony 2004), and we are aware of none that measure intra-community factors (such as individual attitudes toward TEK) in relation to variation of ethnobiological knowledge. In particular, this finding highlights that erosion of TEK is not a process driven entirely by outside actors and influences; rather, that erosion of TEK may represent active choices and changing values amongst younger community members (Zent and Maffi 2009).…”

“…In general, the approach to quantifying these patterns has been to measure participant knowledge within a sub-domain of TEK (e.g., ethnomedical knowledge), and examine inter-or intra-cultural variation according to demographic (e.g., age) and social (e.g., level of education) variables (Godoy et al 2009). Most data indicate declines in levels of TEK that are associated with social change (e.g., Voeks and Leony 2004), although some studies do show remarkable persistence of TEK over time (e.g., Zarger and Stepp 2004). These studies also tend to note that drivers of TEK erosion are interactive and complex, and can vary across spatial contexts and between domains of TEK (Reyes-Garcia et al 2007).…”

Traditional Knowledge in a Rural Community in the Semi-Arid Region of Brazil: Age and gender patterns and their implications for plant conservation

“…The use of more specific analyses allowed us to draw up a detailed profile of how knowledge is distributed, indicating that younger informants have less complete knowledge about useful native plants; however, this pattern is due to the age differences in plant use knowledge among females. This may be related to the short contact period for younger females with the plant resources; however, these differences do not always mean the loss of traditional knowledge throughout time (Voeks 2004). Males also have greater knowledge in another rural community in the Brazilian semi-arid region (Igarassu, PE, Almeida et al2012).…”

“…The most sensitive to these changes are young people, who usually have less interest in the cultural knowledge of their ancestors. The older people retain a pool of qualified knowledge that was appropriate and of great use for survival in a past context, but today is of little practical use or interest to the younger generation (Voeks & Leony 2004). These aspects may lead to the erosion of knowledge regarding the identification of, and processing techniques used for, a given species (Voeks 2000).…”