What even is Ethnoecology?

Most people I meet aren’t familiar with the field of ethnoecology or ethnobotany. It is a rather unique field of science, but it is rather broad in application, so it encompasses areas of research that many people would find interesting and relatable.

Ethno- the prefix refers to the human and cultural aspect of the study, as in ethnography, the practice of documenting traditions and customs. So it incorporates many methods used in anthropology to look at how people interact, understand, and learn about ecology. This is important because our beliefs, cultures, and spirituality can inform how we interact with the environments around us.

I have learned from my time studying ecology and other sciences that we scientists are not as objective as we like to pretend to be. The scientific process is even based on biases that we need to acknowledge, because our research processes are based on the previous work of other scientists. If we do not acknowledge these biases, we ignore the influence they have on our work and results. This can be detrimental to our findings and how science is applied to our lives. A perfect example of this is something I uncovered in the past year.

I work in tropical Central America and have grown fascinated by the plants that are used in these regions. One that is extremely popular around the globe is vanilla. This sweet ingredient is the only spice produced by an orchid and is the second most expensive spice in the global economy (saffron is #1)! As a scientist interested in pollination ecology, I decided to look into who pollinates vanilla. I was inundated with amazing information about the history of hand-pollination of the crop and how Edmond Albius, a 14-year-old enslaved boy in Madagascar, mastered the technique we still use today to pollinate the orchid. Still, I struggled to identify the natural pollinator.

Eventually, after digging through the literature, seeking assistance from my herbarium curator, professors in my department, and even the leading botanists studying vanilla (Ken Cameron), I learned that we actually do not know who the natural pollinator of the vanilla orchid is. I was astounded! How could a plant so important economically remain so understudied? How did we not have a culprit for the natural pollination of this beautiful flower? This was just another reminder that science doesn’t have all the answers and there is so much we have yet to learn about the natural world. Rather than becoming dismayed or frustrated by this lack of knowledge, I grew excited by the potential to one day uncover this secret. Maybe one day I, or another scientist, will uncover the identity of the natural pollinator of vanilla!

To be clear, we have some suspects. We just do not possess evidence to confirm the pollination of the orchid. And this may seem like trivial knowledge to some, but part of the high expenses of vanilla comes from the intense manual labor that is required to hand-pollinate the plant and produce that sweet fruit. If we can confirm the identity of the pollinator (likely a bee from Euglossini) we could produce vanilla more easily and reduce the pressures on small-scale farmers.

So this is a great example of how ethnoecology is a valuable field of science. It is vital to incorporate the human experience into the study of nature as we have been a part of it since the beginning. Excluding ourselves from how we study the environments around us isn’t effective science, and if we are to learn the truth, we must challenge that mindset.