Publication: Biocultural Diversity Conservation: A Global Sourcebook. Edited by Luisa Maffi and Ellen Woodley, Earthscan 2010. The material we present in this volume is the outcome of a project carried out over several years by Terralingua. In the course of this project, we conducted a worldwide survey to identify a representative sample of projects that take an integrative approach to sustaining cultures and biodiversity. The 45 projects we selected are ones that recognize the fundamental link between local languages, ecological knowledge, cultural practices, and biodiversity, and that apply this recognition to the design of sustainable solutions to environmental and social problems.
Article: Cultural Vitality. Resurgence Magazine 250: 10-11. Special Issue “Indigenous Intelligence: Diverse Solutions for the 21st Century”, September/October 2008. “This diversity of solutions itself offers the most poignant lesson to be learned from a biocultural perspective: that cultural diversity is not a matter of superficial, if aesthetically pleasing, exotic flavours; it is the deep reflection of human creativity and inventiveness put to the service of enduring issues of adaptation – and, increasingly, of pressing issues of planetary survival.”
Article: Talking Diversity, featured in IUCN’s World Conservation Magazine Issue 1, January 2008. By Luisa Maffi. Biodiversity and cultural diversity are intimately—some would say inextricably— related to each other. Humans have adapted to life in particular environments, while drawing resources from those environments to sustain themselves. In so doing, they have needed to acquire in-depth knowledge of species, their relationships, and ecosystem functions and to learn how to tailor their practices to suit their ecological niches. To a large extent, this has meant learning about stewardship and responsibility: how to use natural resources without depleting them, and often by enhancing them, to preserve options for the future—in a nutshell, the very principle of sustainable development.
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