“Pro­tect­ing bio­cul­tural diver­sity – the true web of life.” Ter­ralin­gua n 1: the lan­guages of the Earth, the many voices of the world’s diverse peo­ples. 2: the lan­guage of the Earth, the voice of Mother Nature. 3: an inter­na­tional non-governmental orga­ni­za­tion (NGO) that works to sus­tain the bio­cul­tural diver­sity of life – a pre­cious her­itage to be cher­ished, pro­tected, and nur­tured for gen­er­a­tions to come. ¶ From Ital­ian terra ‘earth’ and lin­gua ‘language’.   Photo: David Rap­port, Sierra Ter­rahu­mara, Mexico

What is bio­cul­tural diversity? It’s the true web of life: diver­sity in both nature and cul­ture. It’s a liv­ing net­work made up of the mil­lions of species of plants and ani­mals that have evolved on Earth, and of the thou­sands of human cul­tures and lan­guages that have devel­oped over time. Lan­guages, cul­tures, and ecosys­tems are inter­de­pen­dent. They’re bound together through the myr­iad ways in which peo­ple have inter­acted with the nat­ural envi­ron­ment. Through a diver­sity of cul­tural tra­di­tions and prac­tices, in a great vari­ety of nat­ural envi­ron­ments, human com­mu­ni­ties have acquired invalu­able knowl­edge of how to achieve har­mony with nature. Bio­cul­tural diver­sity is both the source and the expres­sion of all the beauty and poten­tial of life on Earth. Read More »

Why does it matter? Both bio­log­i­cal diver­sity and cul­tural diver­sity are in steep decline. It’s a “con­verg­ing extinc­tion cri­sis” of the diver­sity of life in all its forms. We are los­ing the unique ways of life and iden­ti­ties of the world’s diverse peo­ples. We are los­ing both the rich bio­di­ver­sity that sup­ports human­ity and all other species, and the tra­di­tional knowl­edge that helps sus­tain bio­di­ver­sity. It’s a mat­ter of sur­vival. In a time of cri­sis, we not only des­per­ately need healthy ecosys­tems. We also des­per­ately need all the voices of the planet and the ances­tral wis­dom that they express. Los­ing bio­cul­tural diver­sity is like los­ing our life insur­ance when we need it most. Read More »

Ter­ralin­gua News

• Langscape, Vol­ume II, Issue 9

  The theme for this issue is our grow­ing “com­mu­nity of prac­tice” in bio­cul­tural diver­sity conservation–a move­ment that started with the pub­li­ca­tion of our book Bio­cul­tural Diver­sity Con­ser­va­tion: A Global Source­book in 2010, and has con­tin­ued since then through our ded­i­cated por­tal www.terralingua.org/bcdconservation, an online space that keeps the Source­book project vibrant, evolv­ing, and inter­ac­tive. Our edi­tor Ortixia Dilts has drawn from the amaz­ing global pool of ded­i­cated bio­cul­tural con­ser­va­tion­ists who have con­tributed to both the print and online ver­sions of the Source­book. This issue fea­tures arti­cles span­ning from South Africa to Italy to Costa Rica and describes the lat­est projects that we added to the portal.

• Terralingua’s Bio­cul­tural E-Magazine Focuses on Key Issues of Lin­guis­tic Diver­sity

  What is lin­guis­tic diver­sity, and why is it so impor­tant? The cur­rent issue of Terralingua’s E-Magazine ‚Langscape, “The Case for Lin­guis­tic Diver­sity”, sheds light on these ques­tions and illu­mi­nates them with new insights. This issue intro­duces our read­ers to one of Terralingua’s inno­v­a­tive projects, the Index of Lin­guis­tic Diver­sity (ILD), and pro­vides a com­pre­hen­sive com­pan­ion to the work of ILD devel­op­ers David Har­mon and Jonathan Loh. “If lin­guis­tic diver­sity is part and par­cel of the diver­sity of life in nature and cul­ture, then any loss in lin­guis­tic diver­sity is a loss in the vital­ity and resilience of the whole web of life.” Luisa Maffi, from Intro­duc­tion to Langscape 8.

• Intro­duc­ing New Ter­ralin­gua Project: Voices of the Earth

  Indige­nous Peo­ples the world over are seek­ing to hold on or recon­nect to their oral tra­di­tions, in order to main­tain or rebuild their iden­ti­ties, their sense of place, and their abil­ity to forge their own des­tiny and “walk to the future in the foot­prints of their ances­tors”. There is a lot every­one can learn, or re-learn, from the wis­dom of indige­nous oral tra­di­tions. That is why Ter­ralin­gua is at work to ensure that these tra­di­tions are not fur­ther depleted and that the liv­ing cho­rus of Voices of the Earth can still be heard loud and clear. In the ini­tial stages of the Voices of the Earth project, we are part­ner­ing with two Cana­dian First Nations, the Saanich (W̱SÁNEĆ) Peo­ple of Coastal British Colum­bia (BC) and the Chilcotin (Tsilhqot’in) Peo­ple of the BC Inte­rior. We are pro­vid­ing small start-up grants to enable them to develop their own oral lit­er­a­ture doc­u­men­ta­tion projects. The result­ing mate­ri­als will con­tribute to their lan­guage and cul­ture revi­tal­iza­tion pro­grams, edu­ca­tional cur­ricu­lum, recon­nec­tion to the land and ances­tral ways of life, and affir­ma­tion of their iden­tity and rights.

• Call for Sub­mis­sions: Ter­ralin­gua Langscape

  This is a call for sub­mis­sions for our next Issue of Langscape, Terralingua’s newslet­ter. We are seek­ing arti­cles, sto­ries, pho­tographs and news. Dead­line is April 15, 2012. The main theme: Indige­nous Oral Tra­di­tions. This issue will be based around Terralingua’s Project, Voices of the Earth. We are look­ing for case stud­ies, tra­di­tional sto­ries, and pho­tographs to sup­port the press­ing issue of indige­nous oral tra­di­tions and its rela­tion to bio­cul­tural diver­sity as a whole.

• Pol­icy for Bio­cul­tural Diver­sity: Where Are We Now?

  Arti­cle: Pol­icy Mat­ters, Issue 17. Pol­icy for Bio­cul­tural Diver­sity: Where are we now? by Luisa Maffi. A brief his­tory of the work that has been done to imple­ment BCD into pol­icy over the past 15 years. “It is arguably crit­i­cal for advo­cates of bio­cul­tural diver­sity to con­tinue to rise to the chal­lenge and strive for con­crete steps for­ward at the inter­na­tional and national lev­els that can, in turn, sup­port and be influ­enced by local ini­tia­tives for bio­cul­tural diver­sity conservation.”

• Terralingua’s Index of Lin­guis­tic Diver­sity on National Geo­graphic News Watch

  Lan­guage Diver­sity Index Tracks Global Loss of Mother Tongues. David Braun of National Geo­graphic News Watch inter­viewed Maffi, David Har­mon, and Jonathan Loh about the Index of Lin­guis­tic Diver­sity. “For the past sev­eral years, we had been hear­ing anec­do­tal reports about endan­gered languages–how we’re los­ing lan­guages by the day, how we may lose 50–90 per­cent of lan­guages before the end of the cen­tury. But nobody had any reli­able quan­ti­ta­tive data to cor­rob­o­rate these claims,” says Luisa Maffi, co-founder and direc­tor of Ter­ralin­gua. “But now a new Index of Lin­guis­tic Diver­sity (ILD), the first of its kind, shows quan­ti­ta­tively, for the first time, what’s really hap­pen­ing with the world’s languages.”