164 Hunter-Gatherer Societies, Ecological Impact of commodities Hunter-gatherers now have, under these conditions, a growing demand for cash and market goods Under these conditions, it is less likely that people will give priority to conservation unless it is economically profitable (Daily et al., 2000) Land Tenure, Institutions, and Biodiversity One political factor that is almost universally common among hunter-gatherers today is that they often not own or have control of the land they live on Until recently, their remoteness meant that they and the resources on which they depended were somewhat protected from outside influences Thus, resources were locally controlled by informal norms through individual behavior Now, however, national governments and private entrepreneurs, among others, have put native lands to ‘‘productive’’ use This means that if the market for some product is strong, it will be exploited or cultivated regardless of environmental impact (Lambin et al., 2001) For example, the strong local demand for aguaja (a local plant) in the Peruvian Amazon has led to destructive harvesting In theory, most hunter-gatherer communities have use rights to their territories but old laws and treaties are continually violated Legalizing communal resource-use rights is a way of giving hunter-gatherers a long-term stake in conserving the resources on which they depend Securing rights to resources can occur through various management and development institutions This means that hunter-gatherers, who formally did not have institutions for collective action in the formal sense, find the need to work with formal western institutions to acquire control over their lands The future of biodiversity, conservation, and huntergatherer sustainability depends on understanding that there are fundamental differences in the concept of conservation for westerners and for indigenous hunter-gatherers, though this too is changing Understanding that there are different worldviews toward nature is fundamental to forming a relationship between conservation groups and hunter-gatherer peoples The reality is that even if hunter-gatherers are using resources, selling wild animals, and cutting down trees, they perhaps remain the most effective conservationists for their region Therefore, acceptance that there are different ways of knowing the world is a first prerequisite to working with indigenous hunter-gatherer populations Second, it is necessary to recognize that there are no ‘‘pristine’’ hunter-gatherers and they have needs and aspirations just like the rest of us Third, securing land tenure for hunter-gatherers and biodiversity conservation is required as a basis of a ‘‘sustainable’’ interaction Economic Development and Biodiversity Conservation Community-based conservation is a concept aimed at involving local people in the conservation of wildlife or protection of biodiversity The concept developed from the realization that much of the planet’s wildlife and biodiversity exist outside protected areas and in regions occupied by rural people in developing countries (Galvin et al., 2008) Models of community-based conservation adhere to the notion that if local communities can derive some value, nominal income, through conserving biodiversity, they will so This promising concept has been widely promoted as ‘‘the answer’’ to conservation in developing countries Thus, several models of community-based conservation have developed (Goldman, 2003; Berkes, 2007) such as Integrated Conservation–Development projects However, results from community-based conservation projects suggest that there are more failures than successes (Goldman, 2003; Berkes, 2004) Many communitybased conservation efforts involve local communities in name only Locals are neither involved in project identification and planning, nor are they beneficiaries; thus, these projects are not really community-based conservation projects Other scenarios for failure also have in common insufficient involvement of the local people at all levels in the project For community-based conservation to work, people need to be considered a component of the system being conserved and brought into the project process from the beginning (Carlson and Berkes, 2005; Reid et al., 2009) It is Useful to View Hunter-Gatherers and Biodiversity as a Social–Ecological System One of the fundamental problems with community-based conservation is that hunter-gatherers as well as other indigenous populations are often viewed as an external disturbance to the natural system rather than as integral components of the ecosystem But hunter-gatherer societies see their relationship with the environment as one: they are part of that environment Though not a study on foragers, but rather herders who some hunting and gathering, the South Turkana Ecosystem Project (Ellis and Swift, 1988; Little and Leslie, 1999) is one of the only truly interdisciplinary and long-term projects to study the social behavior, knowledge systems, demography, human biology, and ecology of a group of people An important goal of this study was to understand how the environment affected human management and how people affected the environment In this case, people and livestock (camels, cattle, sheep, goats, and donkeys) lived in a harsh, dry, and highly seasonal environment This assemblage of people, livestock, plants, and other organisms within a semiarid ecosystem produced a remarkably interactive system Vegetation structure in this tropical savanna and dry woodlands was shown to be hierarchically constrained by physical factors: by climate at regional scales, by topography and geomorphology at landscape scales, and by water redistribution and disturbance at local and patch scales; livestock and humans played a small role The pastoralists did influence vegetation composition and cover by burning, woodcutting, and through seed distribution by livestock These influences were small Livestock ecology and production followed those of the seasonal dynamics of plants The different patterns of forage utilization by different herbivores, plus differential habitat use, led to almost complete niche separation among this suite of domestic herbivores; among all five species, they managed to utilize a wide variety of the available plant types in the ecosystem Thus, physical heterogeneity of the Turkana landscapes ultimately resulted in