When Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648?-1695) famously described the natural secrets of cooking, she invoked some of the foundational terms of colonial science and society, from Aristotelian paradigms to Columbian acts of claiming. Scholars have long noted the importance of scientific knowledge to Sor Juana and underscore her engagement with Indigenous cultures, languages, and traditions. But few scholars have examined the intersection of Indigenous knowledge and scientific writing in Sor Juana’s ouvre. This chapter, grounded in a reading of classical natural philosophy, as it was expressed in Sor Juana’s Respuesta (1695), represents an effort to bring these research areas into dialogue. By juxtaposing Mayan-language documents from colonial Yucatán with Sor Juana’s masterful defense of knowledge in central New Spain, this chapter analyzes how Indigenous ways of knowing may have shaped one of the most important treatises on knowledge in colonial Mexico, thus suggesting. ways in which colonial letters both mark and help to promote critical transitions in the meaning of knowledge, epistemological categories, and the nature of knowledge production itself.

The economic and social welfare of people living in Australia has been shaped by different sets of laws: Indigenous laws that meant individual welfare was ensured by family and kin, British laws that decreed welfare a distinct domain for managing the casualties of a hierarchical social order, and a settler colonial adaptation of the British system in which the colonial state provided the infrastructure for growth. This chapter argues that while state investment worked in positive ways for settler economies, it acted as the motor of Indigenous dispossession – though Indigenous communities maintained customary law and adapted settler welfare for their own well-being. White women were marginalised in settler economies but feminist agitation focussed on state welfare as the source of reform. The last 30 years have seen social investment in retreat, though it was revived during the Global Financial crisis and against Covid-19. The early 21st century has also witnessed the increasing dissemination of Indigenous ideas of well-being. The histories of these enduring strands provide some clarity on how we might approach what some have argued is impending automation and a ‘post-work future’.

The Foreword by John Borrows, the famous Indigenous legal scholar, presents a perspicuous representation of the guiding spirit of the volume from his Anishinaabe perspective. Mutually sustainable and ecosocially just democracies should be grounded in relationships of self and other co-determination with each other and with all our more-than human-relatives.

In this concluding chapter I present major points of action suggested by the application of the EV model to the case studies and discuss the ethics and policy approaches that can either detract from, or effectively guide, future actions to reduce EV in the human niche. I outline several frameworks and potential trajectories that may guide thinking and action in (re)imagining our future and the role of EV in it. The aim is to set the foundation for future work by researchers, practitioners, and others to build on using the EV framework. This volume is not the place to complete this pursuit, however, because EV is manifold: the only way to address EV holistically is to explore many paths. A final task that remains is to forge a chart of the most relevant ethical approaches and potential policy pathways to reducing EV, and to, likewise, chart the foreseen impact of each approach on the human niche. These outlines of future ethical approaches and policy pathways will guide the continued exploration of the EV model.

At a meeting in Alaska in 2000, when several indigenous speakers shared stories about the rapidly shifting climate, sea ice, and weather in their home areas. I was amazed by how thoroughly they analysed signals of change and how nuanced their observations were, compared to the crude models of prehistoric climate change available in the literature. For many people living in the more temperate mid-latitude areas, ‘climate change’ is about heat and warming. Not so in the Arctic, where the best summary of climate change is that “it’s not cold enough” (Krupnik et al. 2010c). Indigenous people in the North, particularly those living on the seacoast, depend on long cold winter to build solid offshore ice. They monitor the ice for six to ten months every year; they travel on ice, and hunt from it to catch the animals that sustain their life. The Eskimo explanation “it’s not cold enough” has perfect sense from the principles of sea ice geophysics. It requires long cold days to build solid ice. If the ice is weak and broken, comes late or leaves early, more heat is absorbed into the ocean producing thinner and weaker ice next winter. This is a synopsis of what scientists call ‘Arctic amplification’. Over the past 40 years of satellite observations, Arctic sea ice has declined dramatically – in its seasonal extent, overall volume, age, and duration. In the northern Bering Sea, sea ice distribution in winter has changed, in professional terms, from a predictable system of icescapes to a mixing bowl of drifting floes. Hunters in many communities report that they have not seen thick bluish multi-year ice of their youth in years. Arctic people have noticed this transformation very early and they have spoken about it loud and clear since the late 1990s. Yet they monitor the ice from their particular vision of users, not as scientists. This paper introduces the study of indigenous sea ice nomenclatures as a path to document, sustain, and ‘co-produce’ local knowledge about ice and Arctic change.

Storytelling among indigenous peoples is central to the intergenerational transmission of indigenous and local knowledge (ILK), allowing for human adaptation to new social-ecological contexts. However, little attention has been paid to the potential applications of storytelling in guiding climate change adaptation efforts. In this chapter, we present a number of case studies from all over the world in which indigenous stories and traditional oral narratives have been applied to inform culturally sensitive climate change adaptation strategies. We contend that greater consideration of indigenous ontologies, as transmitted through storytelling, can contribute towards making climate change communication and adaptation more acceptable to local communities, facilitating intercultural discussions and bridging worldviews. Our chapter shows that attention to and promotion of indigenous storytelling can lead to enhanced understanding of diverse values and perceptions around climate change, hence allowing climate change adaptation strategies to become tailored to the local contexts where they are implemented.

We have entered the era of the Anthropocene. Our rapid transformation of the planet poses a particular threat to socio-ecological systems and the Indigenous peoples who create and sustain them. A strengthened partnership between Indigenous knowledge holders and scientists is required based on decolonized knowledge co-production (DKC). Quite the opposite of scientific extractivism, which selectively exploits local and Indigenous knowledge to its own advantage, and more ambitious than the mere recognition and appraisal of Indigenous knowledge, DKC requires dedicated partners from knowledge systems who have learned through years of collaborative work. This introductory chapter proposes a methodology and ethic for DKC based on a problem-oriented and engaged approach built around mutual trust and benefits, and a profound equity between knowledge systems. It examines the intellectual contributions that laid bare the legacies of colonialism and the hegemony of science, opening the way for DKC: Elinor Ostrom who first coined the term co-production, Bruno Latour and Sheila Jasanoff from science and technology studies, with decisive insights from, among others, Edward Said, Vincent Deloria and Tuhuwai Smith.

Much of climate change policy treats indigenous peoples (if at all) as hapless victims rather than active participants in all components of climate change research, adaptation, mitigation and policy. Most Tibetans are cognizant of recent, rapid Himalayan climate change including rising temperatures, increasing and unpredictable precipitation, glacial retreat, glacial lake formation and outburst, and altering natural resources. Integrating scientific research with Indigenous knowledge leads to innovative perspectives and solutions. Our 1500 km (900 mile) transect across the eastern Himalaya, with intensive, long-term ecological alpine plant monitoring shows rapidly increasing plant richness, biodiversity and endemism, especially at higher elevations. Traditional ecological knowledge and economic policy often prescribe rival adaptations for Himalayan peoples; traditional culture and economics become competing paradigms by which to analyse the impacts of and adaptations to Himalayan climate change. We have even documented the appropriation and monetisation of successful Indigenous adaptations by government and economic entities to the detriment of the same Indigenous people who developed the strategies.

Several studies have shown that indigenous peoples are among the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change, and attention has been drawn to indigenous knowledge as an important component of climate change adaptation strategies. This paper argues, however, that in order to take indigenous knowledge seriously, indigenous realities and understandings of climate change need to be taken seriously. This is because knowledge is not produced in an ontological void. Rather, knowledge is produced in relation to notions concerning the nature of reality and being. Moreover, in order not to make a mere instrumentalist use of Indigenous knowledge, this paper argues that the practical outcomes of Indigenous knowledge ought to be acknowledged, along with the ontological lifeworlds within which such knowledge is generated.

This paper is based on many years of ethnographic fieldwork with and among Aymara people in the Bolivian Andes and poses questions about how the partial connections between different ways of producing knowledge, of experiencing and explaining climate change, and of experiencing and generating realities are transformed into spaces of conflict, domination and resistance.

The Epilogue summarizes some key general principles to guide the knowledge co-production process as outlined in the Introduction and individual chapters in the book. To create the new intellectual space for rethinking co-production, it is important to view it as a special path, quite different from the previous agenda of documenting Indigenous people’s knowledge for environmental, management and climate mitigation purposes. Its guiding definition is co-production, as being repeatedly argued by Indigenous constituencies worldwide. The Epilogue also addresses the issues of geographic, cultural and historical inequalities in practising co-production and in the acceptance (inclusion) of its outcomes by agencies, governments and academic science. In the early 21st century, knowledge co-production remains an actively ‘negotiated’ process, whose emerging parameters are to influence its eventual application and outcomes.

This chapter examines East India Company botanical gardens at Saharanpur and Mussoorie. The history of colonial gardens has borne much fruit in recent years, but in the case of India, this has overwhelmingly focused on Calcutta. Instead, this chapter follows the largely untold story of the ‘northern’ gardens, and their roles in the remaking of the Himalaya in European scientific and imperial imaginations. In focusing on the ambiguous position of these gardens – straddling the uplands and lowlands – this chapter demonstrates the inherent complexity in attempts to categorise the vertical globe. The chapter begins with the modification of the existing Mughal garden at Saharanpur for the purposes of scientific botany. Next, it considers debates around the need for a higher garden and the way altitude factored in the acclimatisation of plants. This is followed by a discussion of the centrality of two South Asian gardeners – Hari Singh and Murdan Ali – to the functioning of Saharanpur, and the role of indigenous collectors in the mountains. The final section considers the problems of distance and limited resources as the gardens became spaces for an increasingly globally oriented science.

Altitude sickness was little understood in the early nineteenth century, and the inconsistency of symptoms led some to doubt a constant cause. This led to tensions when European travellers were forced to compare their bodily performance against their South Asian companions. This chapter begins by contextualising altitude sickness in relation to lowland colonial anxieties around health, acclimatisation and air. Next is a discussion of indigenous understandings of altitude and a consideration of the ways the performances of bodies were recorded in travel narratives. Finally, the chapter considers experimental approaches around quantification. The chapter argues that there was a politics of comparison that developed around altitude sickness at multiple scales: in the way bodies, European and South Asian, experienced altitude sickness; in the way comparisons affected interactions within expedition parties; in the way these were represented in written accounts to avoid upsetting supposed superiority; and in the way these ultimately constituted high mountains as aberrant environments in relation to lowland norms.