Traditional Ecological Knowledge

This paper discusses the future of the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), a market-based certification program, in developing countries and exposes the challenges and opportunities for fish producers. The MSC needs to attract the interest of more fishing enterprises from these regions to increase its global presence. Because most fisheries in developing countries cannot meet the MSC standards, or afford the certification process costs, it is suggested that there is a need for developing different levels within the MSC system and additional third-party assessing organizations. MSC certification may mean adoption of improvements in fisheries management and approving fishing regimes in developing countries. However, post-certification benefits may decrease as more fisheries become certified.

Changing fire regimes in the context of climate change call for new understandings of their diversity, use, policies, practices and politics. While catastrophic
fires are redoubling calls for suppression, new political ecologies debate fire
prohibition politics and emphasise understanding and incorporating local knowledge into management decisions. Latin American countries are characterised by
strong regional tensions associated with environmental policies, agriculture and
infrastructure development that often compete with local livelihoods, traditional
management and a range of resource use practices. Landscape knowledge
systems that inform customary use, access and resource interventions have
become a new node of contestation; these are added to the perennial question
of land rights, especially as carbon politics and other environmental services
become more important in the structuring of autonomy over land uses. This
themed section presents research conducted in different countries and biomes in
Latin America and explores the historical and current tensions around the development of the science of burning by local populations. Research outlines the
contradictions and tensions between fire control policies and rural livelihoods,
and the emergent political factors and ideologies that inherent in fire conflicts
and could help shape solutions. Our four case studies in different regions of
south America (Amazon, Cerrado, Chiquitana), explore the production, application and circulation of knowledge about fire and its consequences using an
array of methods: classical descriptive models, analytics from political ecology,
and the complex arena of science and technology studies. The latter help us to
understand the conflictual dynamics associated with “new fire management,”
which relies on more technological means of fire control as well as legislation,
payments, and new governmentalities to transform traditional practices. Overall,
the papers place fire management in its new active political and ecological
framing, namely at the heart of current development debates in the Latin American tropics.

At the request of the City of Mukilteo, students and staff from the Learn and Serve Environmental Anthropology Field (LEAF) School at Edmonds and Everett Community Colleges surveyed Japanese Gulch and Big Gulch for spawning salmon from November 1 through December 15, 2013. The survey demonstrated that adult coho have returned to Japanese Gulch for the second year in a row after the completion of a significant stream restoration project removing four major barriers to salmon migration. The survey also confirmed reports of chum returning to spawn in Big Gulch. Both streams provide valuable salmon spawning habitat in an urban setting.