more about other systems of environment classifications and to compare them to Western scientific taxonomies. Principles Ethnoscience emphasizes the importance of how societies make sense of their own reality. In order to understand how cultures perceive the world around them, like the classification and organization of the environment, ethnoecology borrows methods from linguistics and cultural anthropology. Ethnoecology is a major part of an anthropologist’s toolkit; it helps researchers understand how the society conceptualizes their surrounding environment i and that it can determine what the society considers "worth attending to" in their ecological system. This information can ultimately be useful for other approaches used in environmental anthropology. Ethnoecology is a field of environmental anthropology, and has derived much of its characteristics from classic as well as more modern theorists. Franz Boas was one of the first anthropologists to question unilineal evolution, the belief that all societies follow the same, unavoidable path towards Western civilization. Boas strongly urged anthropologists to gather detailed ethnographic data from an emic standpoint in order to understand different cultures. Julian Steward was another anthropologist whose ideas and theories influenced the use of ethnoecology. Steward coined the term cultural ecology, the study of human adaptations to social and physical environments, and focused on how evolutionary paths in similar societies result in different trajectories instead of the classic global trends in evolution. This new perspective on cultural evolution was later named multilineal evolution. Both Boas and Steward believed that a researcher must use an emic standpoint and that cultural adaptation to an environment is not the same for each society. Furthermore, Steward's cultural ecology provides an important theoretical antecedent for ethnoecology. Another contributor to the framework of ethnoecology was anthropologist Leslie White. White emphasized the interpretation of cultures as systems and laid the foundations for interpreting the intersection of cultural systems with ecosystems as well as their integration into a coherent whole. Altogether, these anthropologists, established the foundations of ethnoecology we see today. Traditional ecological knowledge Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), also known as Indigenous Knowledge, "refers to the evolving knowledge acquired by indigenous and local peoples over hundreds or thousands of years through direct contact with the environment." It involves the accumulated knowledge, beliefs, and practices widely held by a specific community through their relationship with the environment. In this context, TEK consists of a community’s shared ideas when considering subjects such as the acceptable uses of plants and