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

非洲人民、耕种者、牧民和渔民积累了对自然环境的民族生态知识。近年来，人们必须通过结构调整计划来应对气候、地形、植被和景观的自然环境变化，以及市场经济体制下的经济和社会变化。该研究项目着眼于非洲民族独立后近年来的环境变化，澄清了耕种者和牧民的民族生态知识。随后，我们开展了关于人类对剧烈环境变化的反应的案例研究，包括地质生态、社会政治和经济条件。案例研究的比较表明了区域或民族学理论下人-环境关系的句法。该项目集中在西非的尼日尔、中部非洲的喀麦隆和东非的肯尼亚这三个稀树草原地区。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，以审查生存方式和人类反应。我们应用遥感和地理信息系统技术来了解气候-景观和植被的复杂性，以及人类对自然环境识别的长期实地研究。我们进行了尝试，以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.