IFABW is primarily about celebrating and championing people and nature. People and nature go hand-in-hand, sometimes the collaboration is beautiful, often ordinary, and unfortunately, often ugly, but even our ugly exploitation of nature can sometimes be necessary.
On the one hand I love nature, and want to preserve it, leave it untouched, especially those incredible ecosystems around the world that are more or less intact. On the other hand, I love how people around the world, and over the ages, have worked with nature and carved out their habitats and livelihoods and through observation and ingenuity created the most amazing societies and cultures. I am thinking of how our forefather and mothers, in an effort, often struggle, to feed and nourish themselves, collected wild seeds, domesticated and bred them, to give rise to the amazing diversity of food plants we have today, many of which we have never heard of. The same goes for the domestication and meticulous breeding of animals to be productive, yet suited to different climates and cultures, that provide us with a wide range of incredible benefits, not least nutrition but also working animals, sheep dogs, companions and cute cats.
I am not sure if I will ever reconcile the dichotomy between wanting to protect nature, yet at the same time appreciate its careful utilisation by man. Certainly I believe man has the right to use nature, to make fire, to burn wood, to eat meat and so on, and in my opinion we should strive to protect these basic rights.
Furthermore people like me, in the more developed parts of the world, should not try and restrict the right of people elsewhere to develop, even if its not always to our own liking. This is not least because in the development of our own countries, the original nature was in many cases almost wiped-out, when man settled Britain 6,000 years ago, it is estimated that 75% was covered in native woodland, today its only 12%. Despite this people, rightly so, marvel at the beauty of the rolling green fields of England, you could say the same about the beautiful rice terraces of Asia and many other man and nature collaborations. In Japan there is even a name given to this type of beautiful traditional landscape: 'Satoyama' which describes the mosaic of traditional agricultural land use systems of the country.
Certainly one of the most breathtaking experiences I have ever had was arriving a viewpoint in Ethiopia looking far and wide across the rift-valley that just opened-up in front of me and seeing a whole landscape of agricultural activity, with villagers, young and old, all simultaneously harvesting produce and tilling and sowing fields, with camels on their knees in the fields being loaded with sacks of grain to walk up the sides of the valley to the road where horse and carts and teams of donkeys were waiting to meet them and to take the produce to market or for storage. It was stunning.
Having said that, much development is carried out at the expense of, not only nature, but also people, the bounty that nature has given us is often grabbed and utilised by a minority of interests that frequently don't even originate from the same region, or even country. The results are indeed often ugly, and the benefits to the local people often take generations to trickle down, if at all. The struggle of the common, yet extraordinary man and woman, against the elements, and against other men, is a complex one. Many have sacrificed much over millennia, in the hope it will at least benefit the generations that follow.
While IFAWB tries not to make huge sweeping judgement calls, it does advocate for the common man and woman, and their rights and freedoms, especially their right to express themselves through livelihoods of their own. It champions their rights and capacity to develop their livelihoods, communities and societies, on their own terms, from the bottom-up, rather than imposed from the top down. It resists, where necessary, even if often futile, the imposition of a global paradigm that crushes the creative force and freedoms of the individual, yet celebrates those that do manage to express themselves, even in the 'smallest' of ways.
We can't push a one size fits all approach on people. Often the options that people have to survive, let alone thrive, are limited. Often they need to take what others might consider to be the ugly option, such as burning coal to keep warm, or to driving old vehicles with combustion engines that are polluting, but which are essential for their lives and which they can maintain themselves. Bush people hunting wild animals for food is often hard to watch, but for many its their way of life, and its actually the wider loss of these habitats, due to large scale agriculture or development, that causes the most destruction.
On the other hand people that kill the world's wild animals for ivory, or for the traditional medicine trade for example, are often, but not always, driven by greed, and there must be, in many cases, a better option. Is it really necessary to kill an elephant for its tusks? I am sure the answer is no, but the use of wild animals by a tribe for their own food and medicine, is a much different proposition, to the exploitation of these animals for example by international traders. We should be careful however, not to demonise traditional practices, not least as they often have a long and sophisticated history of use that points to their value to people over millennia, but rather look for much better alternatives, especially for those that cause the most harm.
At the end of the day we can't, and shouldn't, try to control everything and certainly, what appears abhorrent at one point in history, can appear to have had positives outcomes further down the track. There is no single way, and certainly here at IFABW we no doubt contradict ourselves constantly, even within this article, but that is inevitable and perhaps part of the complexity of life. We can however learn from the past and the present, and improve, not only the way things are done, but why they are done, and importantly who gets to choose what is done! We can promote what works for both people and nature, and importantly, empower individuals the world over, to appreciate their backgrounds and their environments, and encourage them to create a more beautiful world, one person at a time.