But around the world, where there are still indigenous peoples, you'll usually find healthy ecosystems. That's true from the coastal swamps of South America to the sands of the Sahara, from the ice floes of the Arctic to the coral reefs of the South Pacific. Indigenous homelands also shelter a disproportionate share of the earth's biological diversity. Native peoples maintain a body of knowledge about nature that continues to astonish Western-trained experts. Their understanding of medicinal plants alone has aided billions of people elsewhere.
Native peoples cultivate unique varieties of the world's major food crops.
These varieties form the gene pool that Western crop breeders use to protect modern strains against pests and changing soil and climate conditions. They sow more than 100 varieties of rice, making their fields jigsaw puzzles of genetic diversity. Indigenous peoples are not hands-off preservationists. But the way they use forests, grasslands, farms, fisheries, and wildlife usually sustains those resources over the long term. Indigenous systems of ecological management persist in places where native peoples win legal control of their land and other resources, organize themselves to withstand outside pressures, and find allies in the dominant society.