The Cooperative Economic Logic of Indigenous Environmental Practices: Lessons for a Sustainable Future

Abstract

For millennia Indigenous peoples in their cultural and environmental practices have commonly treated nonhuman organisms and the places they occupy with respect and care. In the modern world, where capitalist forms of economic organization predominate, nonhuman natural organisms and their habitats are frequently treated as things subject to commodification for wealth maximizing purposes. For this reason, those organisms and their habitats fail to be utilized in an environmentally sustainable manner. To resolve modern existential threats to the biosphere posed by the global economy, a new logic of economic organization is needed to swing the biophysical pendulum away from destructive commodification. Case studies in this paper show how Indigenous U.S. tribes today, within a predominantly capitalist context, successfully follow a commons-based cooperative economic logic that recognizes nature's organisms and their habitats as deserving of respect and care. Indigenous economic and environmental practices thus offer lessons for implementing such a logic in the larger economy.