Bridges and Escalators: Metaphorical Engagements with Non-Scientific Knowledge in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment

This paper reflects on the way in which the Sub-Global Working Group of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment has tried to grapple with the role of local and indigenous knowledge in the construction of a ‘multi-scale’ assessment of the world’s ecosystems, and more especially, on the way in which these issues were addressed in a conference on ‘Bridging Scales and Epistemologies’ held in Alexandria in March 2004. The paper also deals with the very marginal role which anthropology and anthropologists have played in these deliberations, and hence with the question of what anthropologists should be saying about the efforts of ecologists to build the ‘bridges and escalators’ that will connect their scientific knowledge with the other forms of knowledge which lurk at the bottom of their own global food chain. The author’s reflections stem from his own role as the only self-confessed anthropologist in the Sub-Global Working Group, whose primary role has so far been to entertain the rest of the group with alternative metaphorical constructions of their work.