How recognising cultural practices in environmental regulation can help protect natural resources like sandalwood — podcast

• When natural resources are connected to cultural, religious or spiritual practices, conservation needs to consider both biological and cultural diversity.
• Indian or red sandalwood (Santalum album), highly valued for its wood and oil, is a natural resource with significant economic and cultural value.

Cultural and medical applications

• A wood of particular significance to him because of his personal cultural connections, Hettiarachchi researches sandalwood cultivation and its applications.
• “It has been there from some of the earliest perfumes created in western or modern perfume styles.”

A history of endangerment

• Ezra Rashkow is an environmental and South Asian historian at Montclair State University in the U.S. His research considers historical environmental conservation policies as they relate to the endangerment of natural and cultural resources.
• Rashkow describes sandalwood as a natural resource that has often been regulated for various political and economic reasons.
• “Sandalwood finds an extremely important place in early colonial world history because sandalwood was one of the very few commodities that the Chinese were willing to trade for gold and silver,” Rashkow explains.

Intertwining nature and culture

• Nature became separated from culture beginning with the Renaissance period, and this has increased throughout the Industrial era.
• Jules Pretty, professor of environment and society at the University of Essex in the United Kingdom, studies human-environment relations.
• “Nature and culture, they are the same thing.
• They have always been the same thing in human history until a kind of separation of nature and people (came along) with agriculture, cities, modern economies, and so forth.” Pretty describes sandalwood as a perfect example through which to explore the relationships between nature and culture.