Bill Harp – Indigenous Rainforest Knowledge

Business-Organization: Darién Information Systems, Inc.

Bill Harp is a technologist, cultural anthropologist, and a geospatial analyst who has worked as a cultural anthropologist in Panama. During his time in Panama he did research among the Emberá people in eastern Panama, and subsequently earned his MA in Anthropology from the University of Oregon where he specialized in the ecology and cosmology of tropical lowland, indigenous cultures of the new world. From 1986-2000 he worked for the U.S. Department of Defense, Southern Command, specialized in technology, training and geospatial applications in defense and intelligence. He was also a program manager for a large, national mapping project of land use and forest cover with the United Nations REDD (Reduction in Emissions, Degradation and Deforestation) program in collaboration with the Panamanian Ministry of the Environment.

He served as a Commissioner with the Panamanian Ministry of Tourism for sustainable heritage and eco-tourism. From 2004-2011 he worked at Esri (www.esri.com) where he became the Defense and Intelligence Industry Manager. For the previous three plus years, Bill worked as the Director, Technology for Bonner County Government (Emeritus). He also writes popular articles on science and technology for the Sandpoint Reader weekly newspaper and served as a Commissioner for Historic Preservation for the City of Sandpoint. Bill and his wife Susan, also an archaeologist, journalist, editor and anthropologist, alternate between their country homesteads in Coclé, Panama and Sandpoint, Idaho where they maintain subsistence gardens and orchards.

Sandpoint, ID
United States

Website: http://trail2.com/ecology

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Workshop(s)

Workshop 1: Subsistence Technology, Ecology, Ethnobotany and Cosmology – Indigenous Knowledge from the Panamanian Tropical Rain Forest

Abstract:

In Latin America a number of cultures still practice traditional subsistence horticulture. The Emberá of eastern Panama are one of these small-scale, egalitarian, lowland tropical rain forest cultures that not only practice traditional horticulture but speak their native language, hunt, gather and fish from the rain forest and still practice their beliefs in spirits and associated rituals. They have an encyclopedic knowledge of plants and an extensive ethnobotany that includes the use of entheogenic plants.

Many of their subsistence technology concepts are in congruence with the ideas of earth repair. This talk explores this convergence and how a traditional Native American belief system or cosmology may inspire our understanding and relationship to our natural, cultural, geological and geographical landscapes. Earth Repair, as an integrated systems of complex relationships of belief, ecology and cosmology, builds on the knowledge, practice and spirit of traditional subsistence cultures. This undeniable heritage, reaching back thousands of years, energizes and educates our commitment as earth repair practitioners to sustainable living, energy efficiency and belief in the resilience and power of the spirit of living systems.