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NATURE CONSERVATION AND TRADITIONAL ECOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE Anna Varga When people heard someone mention nature conservation any time between the late 19" century and today, what appeared before their mind’s eye were mostly images of species either extinct on the verge of extinction, or images of national parks with park rangers in green outfits trying to protect the closed and intact pristine wilderness from humanity (Standovar — Primack 2001). The protection of nature has been constantly present in the history of humankind, unnoticed. This paper discusses the paradigm shift in the science of ecology and in present-day conservation with the appearance of the role of humans and human sciences, as well as traditional ecological knowledge. In recent years, with the spreading and application of the approaches of Environmental Humanities (hereafter EH), the focus has shifted to the historical and social aspects of modern nature conservation on account of it being a human activity. Moreover, the ecological and conservation professions themselves have also concluded — having realized their mistakes, their limitations and searching for effective solutions — that taking into consideration the social and individual contexts and human activity itself is indispensable for the conservation of natural values. “Indeed: why shouldnt we let the full arsenal of our human faculties assert themselves (during our inquiries into nature), but in a more appropriate, wiser array? — emotions and fragmentary, but useful knowledge alike? Why should we repeat in this undertaking all our previous mistakes and blunders? seeing everything in a silly hierarchy, activism, art, science. Obviously, this undertaking is made compulsory by the sinking ship’, the many concerns of the Earth, the devastation at a frightening pace of the biosphere, the flora and fauna. In this undertaking, we need and shall need more and more sorely the enrichment of our wretched nature concept with aesthetic, moral, metaphysical, etc. content; especially, in a wiser and more tolerant but radical reinterpretation of the relationship between nature and human beings. From another angle, it is necessary because the spirit of the modern age has de-sacralized nature, so its re-sacralization (in a more up-to-date sense of Saint Franciss existential democracy) is an imperative, inevitable program.” (Juhasz-Nagy 1993: 47). The idea I presented as a motto of my paper is from the academician and Széchenyi Prize-holding ecologist Päl Juhäsz-Nagy’s book Nature and Man (1993), in which he pointed out to the Hungarian biologist and ecologist profession the significance of understanding the “relationship between the landscape and the human being”, then still an unfamiliar concept. By today, it has become a significant research area among Hungarian ecologists, too, and its role in nature conservation is gaining traction (Zs. Molnar et al. 2009:
