Tag archives for biocultural diversity
Conservation Biology and Artistic Expression
Posted by IZILWANE on March 19, 2013 The decision to pursue conservation biology came after an incredible and intense 14 months of traveling through South America. There was no one moment or epiphany, no strike of clarity, just a slow and steady increase in awareness that I needed to work with the environment. The Andes, the Amazon, the deserts, the salt flats,…
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The remarkable variety of life’s interdependent phenomena and processes — what we call ‘diversity’ — is being eroded by the modern forces of homogenization. The rich tapestry — woven from a countless multitude of mutually reinforcing strands of biological, cultural and linguistic relationships — is wearing out. Our increasingly fatigued world is losing its…
Posted by By Kirsty Galloway McLean For indigenous peoples, resilience is rooted in traditional knowledge, as their capacity to adapt to environmental change is based first and foremost on in-depth understanding of the land. As climate change increasingly impacts indigenous landscapes, communities are responding and adapting in unique ways. In a recent statement to the Conference of…
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The planet is in peril, 3,000 scientists and other experts concluded at the recent Planet Under Pressure conference in London. Climate change, overuse of nitrogen and loss of biodiversity are just three of the perils threatening to make much of our home uninhabitable. World leaders will meet in Rio de Janeiro June 20-22 to address…
Climate change is the result of not behaving in the right way, according to the isolated Trio, an indigenous people living in Suriname’s Amazon forest near its border with Brazil. “They see climate change as big problem. They say their forests are changing, deteriorating,” said Gwendolyn Smith, a project director for the non-profit organization Amazon Conservation…
Many indigenous peoples are living examples of societies thriving with sustainable, low-carbon lifestyles. Successfully meeting the global climate change challenge requires that much of the world shift from high carbon-living to low. This shift is daunting. Current emissions for Australia and the United States average about 20 tonnes of carbon dioxide per person. In…
“REDD is the new beast in the forest,” said Patrick Anderson of the Forest Peoples Programme in Indonesia here at Climate Change Mitigation with Local Communities and Indigenous peoples workshop in Cairns, Australia. Deforestation gobbles up an area the size of Greece (13 million hectares) every year. As if that loss wasn’t bad enough, it…
Forests can not only suck climate-heating carbon out of the atmosphere, they are also an important source of food for many Indigenous peoples. “Western food is making our people sick. Our bodies are adapted to eating bush foods,” said Seith Fourmile of the Gimuy-Walubarra Yidinji Nation of Cairns. Australia’s Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander peoples…
“Planning is not part of our culture. You just get up in the morning and do what you need to do for the day,” said Marilyn Wallace of the Kuku Nyungka ‘mob’ (aboriginal nation) in northern Queensland, Australia. “Bama,” people caring for their local territory, is an important part of aboriginal culture and identity,…
We have the knowledge that can contribute to finding solutions to the crisis of climate change. But if you’re not prepared to listen, how can we communicate this to you? — Marcos Terena, Xané leader, Brazil. The precipitous rise in the world’s human population and humankind’s ever-increasing dependence on fossil fuel-based ways of living have…
Posted by Cecil Manuel, of the Cecil B. Manuel Inter-Tribal Dancers, shared his cultural and spiritual knowledge at the recent BioBlitz in Saguaro National Park. Among the dances he demonstrated was the Hoop Dance. “There are so many different stories that we tell about the dances. Different tribes have different versions of how they came about,” he…
Carving my Dreams into a Gourd: Mother Earth & Climate Change
Posted by Conversations With the Earth on September 21, 2011 Irma Luz Poma Canchumani (Quechua) is a traditional gourd-carver whose work is featured in the exhibition Conversations with the Earth : Indigenous Voices on Climate Change at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian (Washington, DC) from July 22, 2011 through January 2, 2012. Mrs. Canchumani also participates in the exhibition as a video producer.…
Hear the views of three young people with the perspective of indigenous nations — their hopes and aspirations to make a contribution to a world changing by a warming climate and the consequent economic development of the northernmost part of the planet.
In this video interview, Martin Lougheed, of the Inuit Quajisarvingat Knowledge Center, Ottawa, Canada, makes the case for blending Inuit traditional knowledge with Western science to help understand and find solutions to sweeping changes in the Arctic.
Salmon in all their varieties are a great resource for humanity. But for the Peoples of the North Pacific the iconic fish also represent a critical heritage that goes back thousands of years. Plagued by overfishing, industrial pollution, and contamination of rivers, salmon are in trouble across their ancient habitat.
In this video interview at the Seventh International Congress of Arctic Social Sciences (ICASS VII), held recently in Iceland, Sven Haakanson, executive director of the Alutiiq Museum, talks about how 7,500 years of history, language, and arts are being “repatriated” to Kodiak’s indigenous people.
In this video interview at the Seventh International Congress of Arctic Social Sciences (ICASS VII), held recently in Iceland, Alona Yefimenko explains her role as representative of the Indigenous Peoples’ Secretariat of the Arctic Council, and how Arctic indigenous peoples are participating in international forums to talk about not only their issues of concern, but also their language, culture, health, and traditional knowledge.
For millennia, Altai people herded their livestock across what is now known as the Golden Mountains of Altai UNESCO’s World Heritage Site, in Russia’s southern Siberia. They endured many obstacles–from Mongol hordes to Soviet oppression. Now they face a new challenge–climate change.
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The remaining hundred uncontacted tribes in the world capture the imagination of millions of “civilized” people. Yet they are the last cultures fully engaged with their natural environment. If they are stripped of their ancestral land, all of humankind will have lost the last people who truly understand our connections with the Earth.
”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, an international…
Forest set-asides are at the heart of the United Nations’ climate negotiations, but a Native American restoration specialist says it will get the wrong people out of the woods. As nearly 200 delegates gather at the Conference of the Parties in Cancun, Mexico, writer Dennis Martinez points out that Indigenous peoples and their advocates have no official…
As delegates from 192 governments gather at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP16) in Cancun, Mexico, over the next ten days, expectations are low to zero that the deliberations will yield any meaningful progress to a substantive international agreement to slow and prepare the world for warmer global temperatures. In April this year a…
It’s beginning to be the time of year when caribou, as reindeer are known in North America, show up on holiday cards and tree ornaments. But not all is well with this iconic species, which has been in retreat from humans for decades. Now new thinking about the conservation and restoration of North America’s wild herds of caribou combines…
A report released by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has warned that at least 34 Colombian tribes face extinction due to continuing violence on their lands, Survival International said this week. The report found that, “In spite of new efforts by the state…the risk of physical or cultural disappearance remains, and in some…
By Luisa Maffi Q.: Quick, what do a congress of the International Society of Ethnobiology, a meeting of International Funders for Indigenous Peoples, and an international conference co-organized by the UN Convention on Biological Diversity and UNESCO have in common? A.: Other than the fact that all three events took place in Canada over the…
