~Part One in an Ongoing Series~
“Nexus Points--Exploring Environment and Culture”
~What is Biocultural Diversity?~

We all know that it is important to preserve biological diversity; that is the multitude of flowing, growing, rooting, shooting, squirming, jumping and swimming species of plants and animals that make up the planet Earth's ecosystem or biosphere. However, scholars, intellectuals and scientists have only recently realized that it is also equally important to preserve cultural diversity.  Cultural diversity is the amalgamation of languages, customs, food, art, dress, spiritual and religious systems, beliefs, human works, etc. that are embedded within a particular population of people and a particular geographic region.  The combination of cultural and biological diversity is what we would call biocultural diversity.

The study of biocultural diversity is the study of the linkages between biological and cultural diversity.  For example, someone studying biocultural diversity may study how a particular landscape has shaped a particular language and how the details of that landscape are embedded within that language.  Inuit eskimos have over 20 words for snow alone...When indigenous languages are lost so is the intimate knowledge of the ecosystem from which they evolved with and were nourished by. This is, sadly, often knowledge that is only contained in the minds of members of that particular culture. This knowledge is a veritable treasure box of information and wisdom that goes extinct along with the language, culture and elders.  This is wisdom that could contain the keys to a startling scientific discovery or ecological insight.

We now know that where there is greater biological diversity there tends to be a corresponding amount of cultural diversity.  The knowledge inherent within indigenous cosmologies is often a working cohesive framework built upon an intimate relationship to the natural that has allowed for profound ecological observation.  For example, there are tribesmen of the Yanamami tribe in the Amazon basin in South America who can, without formal Western training and without a guidebook, identify hundreds of plants species, some of which Western botanists have not even yet discovered.

 It is time we look at the preservation of biocultural diversity as an integral part of the sustainability movement.  This will require re-examining the potential of globalization to be a positive force rather than a negative homogenizing force. A force that enables indigenous and endangered languages, cultures and traditions to find technological and monetary means to preserve their traditional knowledge and in turn biocultural diversity...

More to come on related topics soon...

To look more at biocultural diversity and related topics see the following:
www.arbec.com.my/indigenous.htm
www.terralingua.org