Wetlands remember. On how traditional ecological knowledge can become helpful in conservation

The history of wetlands is written in the field – in the mowing season, in how the water stands after snowmelt or how quickly it drains away in summer, in the plants that return after a wet spring and those that disappear after a dry season. Dr. Joanna Sucholas, an ethnobiologist, educator, herbalist and agroecological farmer, shows that the memory of the landscape also has a human dimension: over generations it has been perpetuated in language, in the ways we use and in our understanding of the surrounding nature. In a conversation with Agnieszka Hobot, she discusses why traditional ecological knowledge is not an ethnographic curiosity, but a material that can support conservation if treated as valuable data, set in context and tested in dialogue with science. Because before we start planning river restoration, wet meadow protection or small-scale retention, it’s worth listening to those who have lived for years in the rhythm of water and learned to read wetlands like a map.

Agnieszka Hobot: What made you decide, as a biologist, to address the traditional knowledge of wetland inhabitants? Where did this research direction come from? And what was the path to this topic like?

Joanna Sucholas: I’ll be honest: the road to the subject I’m researching was quite a long one. Although I am a humanist by nature, I have always been enthralled by nature, so my curiosity about how it works made me choose biology as my field of study. I was particularly fascinated by plants and especially in the context of their importance in human life, such as medicinal uses. Actually, my first passion was ethnobotany – I started exploring it while I was still a student. It is about how plants are used by people, how they fit into local practices and traditions, what ideas and beliefs there are about them. I was equally interested in cultural threads, especially concerning Polish traditions and rural heritage – this was the stage when I began to consciously seek a connection between biology and the experience and knowledge of communities, not just scientists.

It was a breakthrough for me to discover that local community knowledge can have a role in conservation. This kind of research has been going on for decades in other European countries: there is a current that explores the traditional knowledge and practices of people who have lived for many generations in a particular ecosystem. Because if a community lives in a particular landscape, stays in close contact with it, and works in it day after day, using various resources, it naturally develops a practical knowledge of nature – its cycles, possibilities for use, as well as its limitations. What’s more, I began to understand that it was these long-standing practices that often co-created ecosystems that we today consider particularly valuable – so-called semi-natural, seminatural habitats. And this was a real enlightenment for me: humans are not always intruders in the face of nature, and in many cases their presence and activities have been an element that such a landscape has maintained and supported. In other words: part of what is naturally valuable and we protect today was created and sustained by human activity and knowledge.

Then the question arose: if we are trying to protect these ecosystems, why do we so often do so without asking for clues from people who have lived in a given landscape for a long time? About what exactly they practiced, what it looked like in detail, what pace and rhythm it had, what it depended on. What is the local community’s perspective and perception of these ecosystems. We scientists come in as outsiders, convinced that we know best what serves local nature. But are we sure this is the case? It’s worth considering. For me, as a person studying biology, this was particularly powerful, because when I was learning about semi-natural habitats, such as grasslands, it was said rather laconically that they require human intervention. On the other hand, the question wasn’t asked: how exactly were the meadows used, what were the old, traditional practices, do they also matter now, and most importantly – no one asked who was behind these activities. In this sense, it was another enlightenment for me – the mere term interference, the need for mowing, are too vague if we don’t know the exact practices, the local context and see the role of people in this puzzle.

International experience gave me a lot. For a couple of years I went to an ethnobiology, ethnoecology school in Hungary. It was there that I learned how to conduct such research, collect data in the field. Hungarians are relatively experienced in this – there is quite a large community of ethnobiologists there. Interestingly, the country’s landscape is largely shaped by livestock grazing, and Hungarians take this fact into account in conservation. One of our science camps was held in a national park where, on the one hand, biodiversity is protected, but on the other hand, it is understood that this biodiversity largely persists due to grazing, and it is officially supported there. There is a dialogue with pastoralists: solutions are consulted, their traditional knowledge is incorporated, and they are treated as partners, not as a problem to be removed from the landscape. This was an important experience for me, because it showed that these approaches can be combined in a meaningful rather than declarative way.

In parallel, my Polish path began: I was looking for a place where I could conduct research on traditional ecological knowledge. I didn’t want to go abroad just to be sure that I would find communities and landscapes where such knowledge still exists – I wanted to explore such a context in our country, also because it is important to have a good understanding of the language, which is most often local, dialect. And this was not at all easy, because this knowledge is drastically disappearing. Today it tends to be a relic, especially if we are talking about oral transmission. We know how radically lifestyles have changed in recent decades, how much society has globalized (including rural society) and agriculture has intensified. Meanwhile, traditional knowledge develops and sustains only when certain conditions exist: multi-generational living in a given landscape, frequent and close contact with nature, continuity of practices, their extensive and refined nature and repetitive activities in the rhythm of the seasons.

That’s why I was looking for a place where such a traditional way of life has lasted longer and where there may still be people who remember the old practices and can talk about them. The carriers of knowledge are most often elderly people: they remember traditional agriculture, local ways of using wetlands or meadows, they have their long-established natural observations, which have not been recorded in any textbook, yet have been tested in practice for decades. And so, step by step, this research direction became a natural choice for me – a combination of biology, ethnobotany, field experience and the belief that the perspective of local communities is a real part of the story of nature, not a footnote in the margins.

A.H.: What examples of knowledge of Biebrza Valley residents surprised you the most, because they turned out to be accurate from the point of view of hydrology or ecosystem functioning?

J.S.: What surprised me at first was that this knowledge was still there. When I went on a pilot study in 2017 and started visiting villages, I knew very little about the ethnography of these places. There aren’t many studies that could help me pose questions and identify local ways of talking about the marshes. Rather, I had general indications: that there are a lot of open ecosystems along the Biebrza River, that there are meadows, including swamps, and that grazing and swathing for hay used to be done there. I also knew that in Podlasie traditional agriculture had persisted longer in many places than in other regions, such as Greater Poland, where I am from. I hoped that people would still remember the old life and practices.

And indeed, when I started talking to the community, it became clear very quickly that they had their own consistent way of describing the marshes. In the methodology of ethnobiological research, general questions are asked at the outset: does anyone still use the marsh meadows, when was the last time they did so, do they remember mowing the marshes with a scythe, what grazing looked like, how was the work planned during the season. These are the questions that open up the story. The interview at the beginning is supposed to be open-ended, allowing you to get to know the interviewee’s world and how he sees it, rather than introducing categories from the outside right away. This is very important, because people sometimes feel that I am examining them on their school knowledge, that they have to answer as it is in the textbook. And when they are given space to tell a story, they begin to speak in their own way, with their own language and their own order.

And it was this language that was my first strong surprise. I immediately heard that they have their own ways of describing the marshes and their vegetation, that they say: here cress grows, there mistletoe, there sticky and brain, and that this is their local nomenclature, describing plants that have other scientific names. I was discovering that people there have their own taxonomy and ecology, a way of organizing and describing the world of plants and habitats. This was my first research experience of living traditional knowledge, deep, brilliant and accurate in nature. I felt I was learning a lot from these people.

Moreover, I was struck by how much this Biebrza way of classifying overlaps with what anthropologists describe in various indigenous and local communities around the world. Traditional communities naturally organize the plant world, which has the same pattern everywhere: they distinguish between trees, shrubs, herbs, grasses, and then only go down to lower levels of detail. And when I talked to people along the Biebrza River, I saw exactly the same order. It made me feel that I was touching something very traditional, very old, embedded in the long experience of living in this landscape.

At this stage, that was the most striking thing to me: not a single piece of information, but that there is a consistent language, a consistent classification and a consistent way of thinking about wetlands. And that this is knowledge developed by these people, allowing them to describe vegetation, wetlands and their variability in a way that is locally specific to them. It was an encounter with something very special for me, in addition, heard from people in whom this knowledge is still very much alive. Rarely does one have the opportunity to experience such continuity of traditional perspective in speech and practice.

A.H.: How can local observations of water, plants or seasonality of phenomena support the planning of conservation measures, such as river restoration, peatland protection or small-scale retention?

J.S.: First of all, it should be noted that before such knowledge is translated into concrete actions at all, its implementation must be preceded by reliable data collection. By this I mean a good study, conducted by specialists who can recognize, collect and describe this knowledge. And this is a task for ethnobiologists: people with anthropological competence, on the one hand, who can see and understand this knowledge in its own context, and on the other hand, with a strong biological and natural science background to assess its value and how much it can be meaningfully used.

Because the truth is that practices varied. When I say practices, I mean what people realistically did in the landscape. And it is always necessary to consider and verify whether what was used in the past is still right, in line with modern knowledge and conservation goals. Sometimes we may come to the conclusion that certain things should not be repeated, even if they were once part of traditional use. In my research, for example, there was a theme of mowing the river. And such a practice immediately raises the question: is this something that would make sense from a conservation standpoint today, or is it something that would be detrimental and harmful? Is it worth exploring and adapting it at all, or is it better to treat it as an element of usage history? I, for one, am not a specialist in river hydrology, so I won’t rule on whether this is a good direction, but such knowledge triggers questions that then need to be worked through substantively, already in dialogue with conservation science and practice. And this is what my work is all about.

It is also worth noting that in my case the situation was unique in some respects, because I was able to talk to people who still have very deep knowledge from their own experience, mainly from their youth. However, traditional knowledge is fading through oral transmission, disappearing with the passing of the oldest depositors of this knowledge. I was doing analysis and it was clear that younger generations already know much less than older people. Lifestyles and work have changed, young farmers have dramatically less contact with the swamps, they have never mowed with a scythe, they no longer graze animals in the swamps, they work on tractors. This knowledge has no way to perpetuate and produce itself. Therefore, it makes sense to document what still functions in the memory of the oldest people.

And if oral transmission is already very limited, we can still look to written sources: historical records and studies, ethnographic materials about the areas in question. By properly analyzing them, it is possible to extract traditional knowledge, reconstruct elements of past practices and better understand how humans co-shaped the ecosystems we consider valuable today.

Finally, this approach makes particular sense in places where people’s practices have actually played a role in maintaining biodiversity or in the functioning of semi-natural habitats. Local observation can be an additional source of data: about water, about plants, about seasonality, and about how the landscape responded to specific practices. But in order for this to work well, it is necessary to first reliably identify the topic, then evaluate it, and only at the end to meaningfully incorporate the tradition into the planning of conservation measures. I don’t know if I’ve explained this properly.

A.H.: You put it very aptly and understandably. However, if we tried to systematize the issue: how to reliably conduct research on traditional ecological knowledge, how to treat this knowledge as a source of environmental data, and not just an ethnographic curiosity?

J.S.: I would say that this is a complex topic and difficult to encapsulate in a simple step-by-step description. But if I were to point to the foundation from which it all starts, it is the recognition that something like the traditional knowledge of local communities exists and that it is valuable and has a practical dimension. In our community, among conservationists, this is still work to be done: to see that local communities have historically co-evolved in shaping certain ecosystems and that their practices made ecological sense under specific conditions.

I also say this a bit polemically, because I know how circular opinion works, including public opinion, and how this pattern often works: man, especially local man, is seen as someone who destroys. And indeed, historically, but also nowadays, this is often true, because agricultural intensification, land reclamation, drainage and landscape transformation actually degrade wetlands and many other habitats. It’s just that this doesn’t exhaust the subject. There is a difference between what is happening today and traditional agriculture. A number of past extensive practices were sustainable and played a key role in maintaining valuable habitats, landscape mosaics and biodiversity. And in my opinion, the first challenge is precisely to break this one-dimensional narrative and recognize that in certain contexts, humans were not just an agent of pressure, but also a positive element sustaining key processes.

The second step is to be open to interdisciplinary work. Such knowledge does not unveil itself and cannot be reliably gathered without anthropological preparation. That is why it is necessary to include anthropologists, and preferably ethnobiologists, that is, people who can combine cultural and natural perspectives. The point is, on the one hand, to be able to perceive and understand this knowledge in its own language, and, on the other hand, to be able to evaluate and select what for nature conservation can be useful.

And further, this already enters an area that is more procedural, sometimes even institutional. I haven’t worked in the development of conservation plans, and I don’t know all the legislative or official mechanisms well. But from what I learned in Hungary, I think there has to be a mechanism for dialogue. That is: inviting people who have the deepest knowledge in the community to the conversation. Traditional knowledge does not belong to every elderly resident. Usually they are exceptional people – great observers, remembering details, able to describe the variability of the terrain, the rhythm of the seasons, the behavior of water, the reactions of vegetation. And it’s worth including them not to embellish the process with consultations, but to really hear what they see and how they understand it.

And one more thing that I think is crucial, and sometimes difficult: recognizing that you don’t have to be an academic to have valuable knowledge. In our culture, we strongly value formal education. Meanwhile, the purveyors of traditional knowledge are people who have just not necessarily graduated from a lot of schools, but are extremely insightful, savvy, have a memory for details and years of experience in the field. And that’s part of the shift, too: learning to show respect and treating that perspective as an equal voice in the conversation about landscapes and ecosystems.

If I had to sum it up: the first step is to recognize the knowledge of local communities and understand the historical context, the second is interdisciplinarity and sound methodology, and the third is to create a real dialogue with the people who have this knowledge. On the other hand, this is not a subject where it is possible to simply lay out a ready-made step-by-step guide in Poland today. I think we are only at the stage of opening up to this perspective and trying to integrate it into conservation practice.