Biological and Cultural Diversity: The Legacy of Darwin for Development

Karim-Aly S. Kassam: Biocultural Diversity and Indigenous Ways of Knowing: Human Ecology in the Arctic

The International Conference on Biological and Cultural Diversity held in Montreal on June 2010, produced the Declaration on Biocultural Diversity and the UNESCO-SCBD Joint Programme on the linkages between cultural and biological diversity. The first meeting for the implementation of the Joint Programme was held in Florence (Italy) in April 2014. The scientific and policy dimensions of the linkages between cultural and biological diversity are of utmost importance in Europe where policies are devoted to the conservation of biodiversity and cultural heritage, but rarely focused on the result of interactions between nature and culture expressed by the rural landscape. The Florence Conference gathered scientists from different disciplines considering biocultural diversity as a good example of a topic requiring a transdisciplinary approach not always supported by university and research. This not only for an effective understanding of the biodiversity associated with landscapes shaped by the man, but also for the further development of the Joint Programme in terms of research and political implementation. The meeting was organized into a scientific part and a workshop for the drafting of a declaration on biocultural diversity. The declaration states that the European rural landscape (about 80 % of the European Union territory) is predominantly a biocultural multifunctional landscape, while the current state of biological and cultural diversity in Europe results from the combination of historical and ongoing environmental and land-use processes and cultural heritage. This book shows the existence and the importance of biocultural diversity associated to European landscape. This heritage should be studied, preserved and valorized by public policies.

Original Nation Approaches to 'International' Law (Onail): Decoupling of the Nation and the State and the Search for New Legal Orders

There is an emerging recognition that the diversity of life comprises both biological and cultural diversity. In the past, however, it has been common to make divisions between nature and culture, arising partly out of a desire to control nature. The range of interconnections between biological and cultural diversity are reflected in the growing variety of environmental sub-disciplines that have emerged. In this article, we present ideas from a number of these sub-disciplines. We investigate four bridges linking both types of diversity (beliefs and worldviews, livelihoods and practices, knowledge bases and languages, and norms and institutions), seek to determine the common drivers of loss that exist, and suggest a novel and integrative path forwards. We recommend that future policy responses should target both biological and cultural diversity in a combined approach to conservation. The degree to which biological diversity is linked to cultural diversity is only beginning to be understood. But it is precisely as our knowledge is advancing that these complex systems are under threat. While conserving nature alongside human cultures presents unique challenges, we suggest that any hope for saving biological diversity is predicated on a concomitant effort to appreciate and protect cultural diversity.

Indigenous Zuni farming, including cultural values, ecological and biological diversity, and land distribution and tenure, appears to have been quite productive and sustainable for at least 2000 before United States influence began in the later half of the 18th century. United States Government Indian agriculture policy has been based on assimilation of Indians and taking of their resources, and continues in more subtle ways today. At Zuni this policy has resulted in the degradation and loss of natural resources for farming, reduction in the number of Zuni farmers and their control over farming resources, individualization of rights in farmland, consolidation of farm fields, and declining biological diversity in agriculture. The Zuni Sustainable Agriculture Project with the Zuni Irrigation Association and the Zuni community, are now working to revitalize sustainable Zuni farming, based on traditional values, knowledge, and technology, combined with modern knowledge and technology where appropriate. The United States government can support these efforts through appreciation of the need for Zuni control and the potential value of cultural and biological diversity.

Biological and cultural diversity in the context of botanic garden conservation strategies

With the convention on biological diversity (CBD) office in UNEP acting as global focal point for biodiversity, and UNESCO acting as global focal point for cultural diversity, the two institutions launched in 2010 the Joint Programme on the Links between Biological and Cultural Diversity (JP-BiCuD) to strengthen the linkages between biological and cultural diversity initiatives, and to enhance the synergies between interlinked provisions of conventions and programmes dealing with biological and cultural diversity at relevant scales. The first meeting for the implementation of the Joint Programme was held in Florence (Italy) in April 2014 and produced a declaration to promote the Joint Program in the European Continent. The scientific committee received 165 paper proposals. The selection operated by the Steering Committee accepted 63 papers considered highly relevant for the topic of the conference and also 11 posters, from 25 countries. The expert meeting for the drafting of the final declaration was attended by 42 experts from 14 countries and about 33 organizations, including FAO, ICOMOS, IUCN, and IUFRO among others. The Florence Declaration (UNESCO and SCBD 2014) was drafted taking into account the results of the conference works, and has not only produced political indications for the implementation on the Joint Programme, but also indicated some of the most important issues concerning research activities for the promotion of the concept of biocultural diversity:

The Polish rural cultural landscape is inherently linked to a special, centuries-old system that combines agricultural tradition and biodiversity. One of such environmentally, ecologically, agriculturally, historically, and culturally unique areas is the Kraków-Częstochowa Upland. Home to small agricultural holdings, this diversified mosaic is where agricultural, husbandry, craft, and local industry experience is handed down the generational chain. Developmental changes and progress are becoming the gravest threats to the area. The purpose of the paper is to assess traditional agricultural systems in the Lesser Poland part of the Kraków-Częstochowa Upland considering landscape features, agricultural biodiversity, food and livelihood security, traditional local knowledge systems, cultural values—in particular, systems of values—and social organisations that promote them. The research shows that biodiversity is entwined with cultural diversity. The vanishing of agricultural systems due to changed socio-economic conditions and environmental overprotection is a serious threat to the biological and cultural diversity in the upland. The authors employed a SWOT analysis—a tool that can investigate interactions and determine the best development strategy—to identify relationships between cultural and biological diversity.

In the context of recent appeals for the adoption of historical perspectives emerging in environmental and conservation studies, ‘biodiversification processes’ would be considered as specific historical and historiographical topics. However, as highlighted in this paper, a broader discussion of the biodiversification processes as historical processes is needed. This paper discusses some consequences that are presented during the study of biodiversification processes when focusing on the links between cultural and biological diversity at the individual landscape level rather than on an overview of the current literature on the subject. In this discussion, we briefly underline dissimilarities in the methods adopted in historical ecology to those in the conventional historical approach nurtured in global environmental history where biodiversification processes, as subjects of historical study, are largely ignored or subsumed into general observations concerning global change or embedded in presumed ahistorical ‘traditional’ economies and practice systems. Such a broad reassessment is required before multi- or inter-disciplinary applications seek to answer ‘common questions’ (Szabo, Environ Conserv 37:380–387, 2010) in the field of environmental and cultural conservation studies. This paper comments on field and documentary evidence collected during multidisciplinary historical ecology approaches to research in the Northern Apennines (Italy) and Pyrenees (Franco-Spanish) sites. These site-level investigations suggest that medieval and post-medieval changes in local practices and systems of environmental resource production and activation appear to have been key drivers in co-related variations observed in the past biodiversity dynamics of the sites. In order to corroborate the sedimentary evidence (or traces of evidence) concerning taxonomic and habitat changes, historical ecology has proposed the adoption of a local approach in which a specific historical analysis and use of documentary and archival sources—as well as the archaeological and sedimentary evidence—has posed a number of new questions to the traditional use of archival and textual sources by professional historians. In doing so, it becomes clear that when observed at a local, topographical site-scale or on an individual landscape-scale, the links between biological and cultural diversity appear more clearly as historical products, rather than broad co-evolutionary issues relating to the ‘co-evolution of nature and culture’. These historically produced links between biological and cultural diversity—identified as biodiversification processes that can be uncovered and explored through the adoption of approaches from historical ecology—are the driving forces that ‘generate’ processes of circulation in local ecological knowledge and its related practices.

Social–ecological heritage and the conservation of Mediterranean landscapes under global change. A case study in Olzinelles (Catalonia)

Questions concerning cultural and biological diversity, cultural homogeneity versus heterogeneity, and biological homogeneity versus heterogeneity are critical to both cultures and biological species. Of the 8 million biological species found on earth, it is hypothesized that 1 million species will become extinct before the year 2000 A.D. Different societies also face a similar threat of cultural extinction. With increasing international, national, regional, and state demands for the preservation of existing habitats in the form of protected reserves, indigenous peoples surrounding or in parks, such as the Navajo at Canyon de Chelly National Monument, are often confronted with rapid change. A conflict exists between the preservation of cultural diversity on the one hand and biological diversity on the other. At Canyon de Chelly National Monument, cultural diversity over time, inclusive of the Anasazi, Navajo, Ute, Spanish, and U.S. cultures, is explored. The management of Canyon de Chelly Nationa...

Diversité culturelle à l'OMC et l'UNESCO à l'exemple du cinéma

Most of Eriksen's research over the years has somehow or other dealt with the local implications of globalization. He has looked at ethnic dynamics, the challenges of forging national identities, creolization and cosmopolitanism, the legacies of plantation societies and, more recently, climate change in the era of 'accelerated acceleration'. Here we want to talk not just about cultural diversity and not just look at biological diversity, but both, because he believes that there are some important pattern resemblances between biological and cultural diversity. And many

As the world grows less biologically diverse, it is becoming less linguistically and culturally diverse as well. Biologists estimate annual loss of species at 1,000 times or more greater than historic rates, and linguists predict that 50-90% of the world's languages will disappear by the end of this century. Prior studies indicate similarities in the geographic arrangement of biological and linguistic diversity, although conclusions have often been constrained by use of data with limited spatial precision. Here we use greatly improved datasets to explore the co-occurrence of linguistic and biological diversity in regions containing many of the Earth's remaining species: biodiversity hotspots and high biodiversity wilderness areas. Results indicate that these regions often contain considerable linguistic diversity, accounting for 70% of all languages on Earth. Moreover, the languages involved are frequently unique (endemic) to particular regions, with many facing extinction. Likely reasons for co-occurrence of linguistic and biological diversity are complex and appear to vary among localities, although strong geographic concordance between biological and linguistic diversity in many areas argues for some form of functional connection. Languages in high biodiversity regions also often co-occur with one or more specific conservation priorities, here defined as endangered species and protected areas, marking particular localities important for maintaining both forms of diversity. The results reported in this article provide a starting point for focused research exploring the relationship between biological and linguistic-cultural diversity, and for developing integrated strategies designed to conserve species and languages in regions rich in both.

Chapter 15 - Religion and Cultural Impacts on Snow Leopard Conservation