The Ethno-knowledge and the human struggle to environmental changes in Africa

非洲人民、农耕者、牧民和渔民积累了对自然环境的民族生态学知识。近年来，人们必须通过结构调整计划（SAP）来应对气候、地形、植被和景观等自然环境的变化，以及市场经济体制下经济和社会的变化。本研究以非洲国家独立后近几年的环境变迁为研究对象，厘清农耕民族与游牧民族的民族生态知识。随后，我们就人类对环境急剧变化的反应进行了个案研究，包括地理生态、社会政治和经济条件。案例研究的比较表明了区域或人种学理论下人与环境关系的句法，该项目集中在三个稀树草原地区，即西非的尼日尔、中非的喀麦隆和东非的肯尼亚。在这些地区，我们继续深入研究民族生态知识与剧烈环境变化的关系，以考察生存模式和人类反应。我们应用遥感和地理信息系统技术，了解气候景观和植被的复杂性，以及人类对自然环境的认识的长期实地研究。我们尝试重新评估民族生态知识的重要性。

People in Africa, cultivators, pastoral people and fishermen accumulated the ethno-ecological knowledges to the natural environment. Recent years, people must response to the natural environmental changes of climate, topography, vegetation and landscape, economic and social changes to the market-oriented economy systems by the SAP (Structural Adjustment Program). This research project focus on the environmental changes in recent years after African nation independence and clarified the ethno-ecological knowledge of the cultivators and pastoral people. subsequently, we carried out the case studies on the human responses to drastic environmental changes, including geo-ecological, socio-political and economical conditions. The comparison of the case studies indicates the syntax of the human-environment relationship under the regional or ethnological theories.This project concentrated on the three savanna regions, Niger in West Africa, Cameroon in central Africa and Kenya in East Africa. In these regions, we continued intensive research on the relationship of the ethno-ecological knowledge and drastic environmental changes in order to examine the mode of subsistence and human responses. We applied remote sensing and GIS techniques for understanding the complex of climate-landscape and vegetation as well as long-term field research on the human recognition to natural environment. We made trials to re-estimate the importance of the ethno-ecological knowledge.