144 Before Agriculture
been said of Australian Aboriginal tribes could be said in hundreds of other cases
of local peoples around the world: ‘Coincidences of tribal boundaries to local ecol-
ogy are not uncommon and imply that a given group of people may achieve stabil-
ity by becoming the most efficient users of a given area and understanding its
potentialities.’^10
Linguistically anthropogenic landscapes
In this light, then, it becomes possible to suggest that landscapes are anthropogenic
(human-made) not only in the sense that they are physically modified by human
intervention – as ethnobiologists and ethnoecologists have shown contra the myth
of pristine wildernesses – but also because they are symbolically brought into the
sphere of human communication by language: by the words, expressions, stories,
legends, songs that encode and convey human relationships with the environment
and that inscribe the history of those relationships onto the land.
Traditional place-naming also both occurs in an ecological context and carries
high cultural significance for indigenous peoples, ‘as a framework for cultural
transmission and moral instruction, as a symbolic link to their land, and as a
ground for their identity’. Named landmarks convey and evoke knowledge on
both the physical environment and daily human activities, historical events, social
relations, ritual and moral conduct: ‘wisdom sits in places’.^11 Landscapes are net-
works of such places of knowledge and wisdom and thus, in this sense also, anthro-
pogenic.
Losing the Link
The extinction of experience
It is this inextricable link between language and the environment that is lost when
external forces begin to undermine traditional cultures, pushing them into the
‘mainstream’. Whether this process is propelled by dispossessing local peoples of
their sovereignty over land and resources, trampling their cultural traditions, or
promoting linguistic assimilation (generally, all three phenomena occur at once
and are mutually reinforcing), the end result is the same. Local peoples lose control
over, and contact with, their natural and cultural environments. As they are
removed from their lands, or subsist in highly degraded ecosystems, and are
absorbed into a market economy in which there normally is little room for tradi-
tional subsistence practices and resource use, local ecological knowledge and beliefs
find the wisdom about human–environment relationships begin to lose their rel-
evance to people’s lives.
This phenomenon has been called the ‘extinction of experience’, the radical
loss of direct contact and hands-on interaction with the surrounding environ-