[ Developing Ideas Digest ][ IISDnet Contents ]

About Di Digest | Back Issues | Mailing List | Email DI | On Line Features 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
LitScan
Bellagio Principles

2.

Biocultural Diversity

Much has been said in recent years of biological and, more recently, cultural diversity. Now scholars have noted that the two often go together and coined a new term for the mix – 'biocultural diversity'. Consider Papua New Guinea – rich in rainforest species and possessing almost twice as many language groups as days in the year. Or the Oriente (the Western Amazon) where tribes like the Siona, Secoya, Aymara and Quechua live in an ecological basin that has served for millennia as a refuge for rare species during ice ages. What is the significance of these clusterings of diversity in biology and culture? This was a prominent question at a recent international conference at the University of California at Berkeley. The participants recognized that a strong case exists for 'ethnobiological endemism' – the coupling of unique languages and species in certain localities – which in turn creates a double defense for 'biocultural conservation' in certain areas. To be sure, correlation does not imply causation. It may take years before the cause-and-effect linkages are understood. Still, decision-makers might do well in the interests of sustainability to promote environments rich with a diversity of languages, cultures and species. This is not to say that cultural diversity has no thorns of its own – especially when mutual respect across cultures is lacking as in the war-torn former Yugoslavia. But on the whole, biocultural diversity promises to be a useful general indicator of environmental and social well-being. [biological-cum-cultural variability]

Grassroots Indicators
In Bhutan, herders know they must alternate the grazing of their yak and cattle between northern and southern pastures when a special local shrub flowers. All over the world, in fact, people use locally-developed 'grassroots indicators' to glean better insights into the environment. Long dismissed as the unscientific stuff of folk tales, such ancient indicators are gaining recognition because of the special validity of measures derived and field-tested over generations. In the Dutch town of Rijnmond, environmental monitoring specialists are experimenting with a central hotline number which citizens are asked to call if they see, hear or smell any evidence of air or noise pollution. The results are being compared with more conventional data and could provide the basis for an entirely more public approach to monitoring the environment.
Word Watch ethnobiological endemism n.geographically localized and unique species-language combinations, underscoring both the local nature of traditional knowledge (see DID Issue 4) and its associated vulnerability

grassroots indicators n.measures of environmental well-being unique to different systems of traditional knowledge

In Depth Norgaard, Richard B.Development Betrayed: the End of Progress and a Coevolutionary Revisioning of the Future. London: Routledge, 1994. 280p.

NOT HOT-

'Mental Monocultures'

The Indian writer and activist Vandana Shiva is warning against the social hegemony of a world with only one system of economic trade and one world view, both of them western. Biological hegemony, she says, is another threat – for instance, with complex, multi-species forest ecosystems being replaced with single-species eucalyptus, spruce or other plantations. Shiva traces both the social and biological forms of impoverishment to 'mental monocultures' – or absolutist thought systems lacking any tolerance for alternative cultural or natural realities. She says policy-makers should favour diversity instead wherever possible.


Virtual Ideas		 More background & Berkeley conference material