Sustainability has become the dominant framework for thinking about humanity’s relationship with the natural world. The word appears in corporate reports, government policies, university curricula, and design briefs. It has become so ubiquitous that questioning it feels almost heretical. And yet, the concept carries assumptions that deserve scrutiny — assumptions that indigenous knowledge systems have been quietly challenging for millennia.
The core problem is in the word itself. To sustain means to maintain, to keep going, to preserve the current state. But what if the current state is the problem? What if the systems we are trying to sustain — industrial agriculture, extractive economies, growth-dependent capitalism — are precisely what is destroying the ecological conditions for life? Sustainability, in this light, is not a solution but a holding pattern: a way of slowing collapse while refusing to address its causes.
What Indigenous Systems Actually Know
Indigenous ecological knowledge operates from a fundamentally different premise. Rather than maintaining existing systems, it is oriented toward regeneration — the active restoration and renewal of ecological relationships. This is not a romantic abstraction. It is grounded in thousands of years of empirical observation, experimentation, and adaptive practice.
The San peoples of southern Africa possess one of the oldest continuous ecological knowledge systems on Earth, stretching back tens of thousands of years. Their understanding of landscape, water systems, plant cycles, and animal behaviour is not simply “traditional knowledge” in the sense of inherited belief. It is a sophisticated empirical system, refined through countless generations of careful observation and tested against the unforgiving reality of arid and semi-arid environments.
“The land does not belong to us. We belong to the land. This is not a metaphor — it is a description of how ecological systems actually work.”
The Scale of What We Are Losing
Southern Africa is home to extraordinary botanical diversity and an equally extraordinary depth of knowledge about it. Research published in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology (2024) has documented approximately 3,640 medicinal plant species used across the region — a pharmacopoeia that represents millennia of systematic observation and testing. This is not folk medicine in the dismissive sense that the term is sometimes used. It is an empirical knowledge system of enormous complexity and value.
Hutchings et al.’s landmark documentation of Zulu medicinal plants represents one of the most comprehensive attempts to catalogue this knowledge in a Western academic format. But the very act of cataloguing raises questions: who benefits from the documentation? Who controls access to the knowledge? And does the process of translating indigenous knowledge into Western scientific categories distort or diminish it?
Beyond Preservation: Lesley Green and Relational Ecologies
Lesley Green’s Rock | Water | Life (Duke University Press, 2020) offers one of the most compelling frameworks for understanding why Western environmental science struggles to engage with indigenous ecological knowledge. Green argues that the problem is not a lack of respect or goodwill but a fundamental ontological difference. Western science treats nature as an object of study — something out there, separate from the observer, available for measurement and management. Indigenous knowledge systems, by contrast, understand the human and the ecological as fundamentally entangled. The researcher is not outside the system they study; they are part of it.
This ontological difference has profound practical implications. A sustainability framework that treats nature as a resource to be managed will always tend toward extraction, however carefully it tries to limit that extraction. A regenerative framework that understands humans as participants in ecological systems will tend toward reciprocity — giving back as much as is taken, restoring as much as is used.
The Institutional Challenge
The difficulty is that our institutions — universities, governments, corporations — are built on the Western ontological framework. Environmental management departments manage nature as a resource. Conservation organisations preserve ecosystems as if they were museum exhibits. Even the most progressive sustainability initiatives operate within a logic of calculated extraction: how much can we take while still leaving enough?
Indigenous knowledge systems suggest a different question entirely: how do we participate in ecological processes in ways that strengthen rather than deplete them? This is not sustainability. It is something more demanding and more hopeful. It requires us to understand ourselves not as managers of nature but as members of it — with all the obligations and reciprocities that membership implies.
The shift from sustainability to regeneration is not merely a change of vocabulary. It is a change of worldview. And it is a change that indigenous peoples across southern Africa and beyond have been practising, refining, and defending for far longer than the modern environmental movement has existed.
References
Green, L. (2020) Rock | Water | Life: Ecology and Humanities for a Decolonial South Africa. Durham: Duke University Press.
Hutchings, A., Scott, A.H., Lewis, G. and Cunningham, A.B. (1996) Zulu Medicinal Plants: An Inventory. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press.
Mothibe, M.E. and Sibanda, M. (2024) ‘Medicinal Plants Used for the Treatment of Diseases in Southern Africa: A Comprehensive Review’, Journal of Ethnopharmacology, 318, pp. 1–28.
Odora Hoppers, C.A. (2002) Indigenous Knowledge and the Integration of Knowledge Systems: Towards a Philosophy of Articulation. Cape Town: New Africa Books.