What I'm reading: Traditional Ecological Knowledge and a memoir about Lyme disease
Photo by Robin Lyon on Unsplash
This caught my eye recently:
If you come into contact with people working in and around natural resources in Minnesota you may hear the term TEK. It’s a popular buzzword, which, confusingly, has little to do with technology.
It’s the acronym for Traditional Ecological Knowledge, an umbrella term for information about the natural world collected by countless generations of Indigenous people.
Through observation and life experience, they gained knowledge — what plants were good to make teas to soothe a sore throat, what bark to harvest to bring down a fever, how certain species adapted to changes in climate and how fire can revitalize the forest floor to produce an abundance of berries.
That knowledge was shared, often orally through stories or songs. Once dismissed as unscientific, there’s now increasing interest in incorporating Indigenous knowledge into the policies and practices of Minnesotans working with forestry and wildlife.
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“Some of these stories talked about ecological concepts, like burning off a forest to chase away the bad spirits and bring back the good spirits,” Price said. “From a scientific term, that would be called forest regeneration. You’re talking about the same thing from two very different worldviews.” READ MORE
This reminds me of something Ross Douthat wrote in his book Deep Places, his memoir of his experience with Lyme disease. When the CDC published diagnostic criteria for Lyme, there were simultaneously good and bad results:
Diagnostic standardization was supposed to establish a consistent baseline for national case reporting, not rule out the possibility of atypical cases or constrain doctors from diagnosing them. But in practice it did exactly that, narrowing the range of cases that counted as “real” Lyme by encouraing doctors to limit their diagnoses to a CDC-approved set of symptoms…
The incentive structures forged by the CDC were a fascinating case study in how bureaucracy shapes science as much as the other way around, how without any conscious decision, let alone conspiracy, scientific research can end up pushed again and again down the same well-worn tracks. The narrow diagnostic criteria became the benchmark not just for doctors treating patients but for researchers when they applied for public grants, so that Lyme research increasingly focused only on the most certain diagnoses and left all ambiguous cases and potential false negatives alone. This approach ratified the establishment’s confidence in their own rules of evidence: A study might show that most Lyme patients had the typical presentations (clear blood tests, consistent early symptoms), but only after making one or more of these presentations a prerequisite for being admitted to the study in the first place.
Likewise…insurance companies began to deny payment for Lyme cases that didn’t meet the CDC criteria. If you were a doctor who wanted to diagnose or treat more broadly, you basically had to become a medical outsider — a maverick, the sort of weird specialist who didn’t take insurance, who risked scrutiny from state medical boards, and so on down a list of attributes that self-selected for eccentricity, stubbornness, and a touch of crankery. (pp. 39-40)
Both of these texts should serve as a reminder that, while the clear and rigid standards of the scientific method are good and beneficial in a lot of ways, we should be cautious in limiting our beliefs or ideas of truth only to that knowledge that has gone through the scientific method. One of my college professors used to tell us, “Run this through your experience.” He meant to say, think about this idea in light of your own experience of the world. Does it make sense according to how you have experienced the world?
When the Potawatomi living in present-day Minnesota harvested bark from a certain tree to bring down a fever, I doubt they did chemical testing and all the things that went into the production of acetomenophin. But if it worked, it worked, and that’s valuable knowledge, regardless of how scientifically it was obtained.