Winona LaDuke is a Native American activist, environmentalist, and writer, with books including The Militarization of Indian Country (2011), Recovering the Sacred: the Power of Naming and Claiming (2005), All our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life (1999), and a novel – Last Standing Woman (1997). K. David Harrison is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Linguistics at Swarthmore University and author of The Last Speakers: The Quest to Save the World’s Most Endangered Languages. Linguist, anthropologist, and ethnobiologist Luisa Maffi is cofounder and director of Terralingua, an international non-governmental organization founded in 1996 by a group of committed individuals from different backgrounds who shared a fundamental set of beliefs in biocultural diversity. The panel was chaired by Mary Hermes, Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Minnesota.. Part of the University Symposium on Abundance & Scarcity.
Should we care about biological and cultural diversity even if its decline does not affect us? Martin Eiermann talked with the anthropologist and linguist Luisa Maffi about the value of diversity, ecological resilience and an environmentalist’s commitment to humanism.
New article by Jamie Alissa Beck on Terralingua’s Biocultural Diversity Conservation Blog. “It is a natural assumption that international development programs lead to direct improvements in lives around the world. Decreasing rates of under-five mortality from malaria? Absolutely. Improving lives in the wake of unimaginable destruction from natural disasters? Without question. It was under these obvious assumptions that I worked for years on various development programs as part of a large government agency. However, I quickly realized that this dominant model of development – one that often takes a Western approach to what progress looks like and applies it to people in all parts of the world regardless of their own values – does not fare so well in empowering cultures, languages or local solutions. With time I saw clearly that in addition to building health clinics, schools, and green revolutions, I was in some cases unknowingly contributing to the creation of a Western monoculture and the destruction of beautifully diverse cultures and languages that hold immeasurable value.” [...]
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