The question" Is local knowledge determined by nature" is as clear as mud; what is local knowledge, what is nature and so forth. One might as well ask the Cartesian question and reply cogito ergo sum and decide that experience is an existential affair. Knowledge is knowledge and people know what they know so far as they can be certain of the veracity of their own knowledge. If they travel some distance more than they can walk they have knowledge about that distant region.
I often lived in a forest more than 30 years and know it fairly well, yet I travel too and know the desert etc. I flew over Iceland a couple of times and looked at it from 30,000 feet. It seemed like a nice place with a lot of clouds around. Yet people in cities or even a few miles away have a completely different experience of life, and nature, because they live indoors in a heated and cooled thermostatically determined world. One should not underestimate the power of artificial heating and cooling, running water, baths and electricity on the way people think and how they tend to lack common sense about 'nature' and its relationship to mankind. People can be content with parks instead of the wild and its health and destroy it without thought since they don't live in it carefully.
One might wonder if knowledge is comparable to a Redwood tree rooted in a local forest or like that of a seagull flying hundreds or thousands of miles. Bar-tailed godwits fly 7500 miles each year between Alaska and New Zealand. One shouldn't overlook special relativity in considering the meaning of locality and knowledge. The philosopher C.D. Broad actually wrote a book a long time ago titled 'The Mind and Its Place in Nature'. People have wondered about knowledge and mind quiote a long time.
The planetary ecosphere is a continuum with humanity existing within the ecospheric bubble they clumsily try to break like bulls in a China shop economically speaking in regard to methods and practices. 'Primitive' people live existentially too and have serialized praxis concerning behavior. The difference between primitives and advanced societies are in externalities and manufactures. Each has an ensemble or tool kit that is more complex actually in nature than in the simplified artificial world of stick frame homes, steel girder structure or whatever produces indoor comfort and security for dwellings. People naturally separate themselves from nature in order to make life less painful for-themselves. Apes may groom other apes and pick off fleas and bugs of various kinds as part of nature; humans like to do a little better than that even going so far as to be unhappy when contracting various illnesses that cause pain and death;therefore humans manufactured or evolved surgical and pharmacopoeia remedies over time, so far as they could. Even primitives happily become moderns where they can afford to.
Knowledge is a result of the grace of God, reasoning and occurs within nature. Nature includes Universal thermodynamics and the intake of energy and mass to sustain personal healthy mass and thought. Thermodynamics is the correction to original sin perpetrated by beings beyond the four dimensions of space-time. Willful disobedience to God is the inherited problem for the human race. Only though the saving grace of Jesus Christ can a soul be saved and liberated from eternal separation from God. Letting nature be healthful would require intelligent humanity and it is corrupted by original sin and systems that reinforce worldly, corrupt values, hedonism and consumerism. It is worth trying to change. Yet in my opinion it is possible that putting a price on nature and natural services will not solve or fix the primary environmental question of sustaining its existence in a healthy way. Human values Adam Smith's capitalism wouldn't generate an invisible hand that would guide the market of ecosystem services to the best possible condition as if the market was intelligent and benevolent. Even the atmosphere would be considered an externality to most people and air would have no value perhaps in some ecosystem service systems. Who needs to breathe is more than an existential question in my opinion.
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