Luisa Maffi, «Terralilngua», USA

www.terralingua.org/overview-bcd

Biocultural Diversity

What do you think of if you hear about the “web of life”? More likely than not, you think of the natural world: the millions of species of plants and animals that have evolved on Earth, interconnected with one another and with the ecosystems in which they live.

But now think again. For millennia, people have been part of nature and have coevolved with it. Over time, we have adapted to the natural environment, while drawing material and spiritual sustenance from it. By interacting closely with one another and with nature, we have developed thousands of different cultures and languages—distinctive ways of seeing, knowing, doing, and speaking. For millennia, local cultures and languages have been intimately, some say inextricably, linked with the landscapes in which people have lived generation after generation.

This is the “true” web of life: the interlinked diversity of nature and culture. We call it “biocultural diversity”—the multi-faceted expression of the beauty and potential of life. Diversity in both nature and culture confers vitality and resilience to this planet, our home, for present and future generations.

Biocultural diversity is a precious gift to cherish and protect—yet, we are squandering this irreplaceable gift. Global economic, political, and social forces are rapidly eroding the health of the world’s ecosystems and cultures, and silencing the voices of the world’s languages. It is a “converging extinction crisis” of diversity in all its forms. The very fabric of life in nature and culture is coming unraveled, leaving our biocultural world increasingly fragile and the outlook for humans and all other species increasingly uncertain. We are foolishly cutting the grass under our own feet.

Indigenous peoples and local communities are affected most directly by the loss of biocultural diversity, but nobody is immune. The effort to restore and sustain the diversity of life in nature and culture is a cause that we all share, no matter who we are and where and how we live. Life is not expendable.

What are the links between biological and cultural diversity?

Since the dawn of human history, everywhere on Earth people have interacted closely with the natural environment as the source of all sustenance: the source of air, water, food, medicine, clothing, shelter, and all other material needs, as well as of physical, psychological, and spiritual well-being.

Through this vital dependence on the environment, over time human societies have developed detailed local knowledge of plants, animals, and ecological processes. They have also developed cultural values and practices that stress respect for and reciprocity with nature—taking care of the natural environment that sustains us.

This diversity of local knowledge, values, and practices is expressed and transmitted in the thousands of different languages spoken on our planet—7000 different languages, to be more exact, the vast majority of them spoken by small indigenous and local communities.

Over half the world population speaks only one or another of a handful of languages. The rest of the population is divided between the estimated remaining 6975 languages.

This is how language, knowledge, and the environment are intimately, in fact inextricably, interrelated: in each place, the local environment sustains people; in turn, people sustain the local environment through the traditional wisdom and practices embedded in their cultures and their languages.

This interrelationship is still especially apparent in indigenous and local societies that maintain close material and spiritual ties with their environments. Traditional ecological knowledge and practices, accumulated over generations, often make indigenous peoples and local communities highly skilled and respectful stewards of the ecosystems in which they live. Indigenous and local languages store and transmit this knowledge and the related social behaviors, practices, and innovations.

The local interdependence of language, knowledge, and the environment translates into strong correlations at the global level, between the total diversity of human cultures and languages (that is, cultural and linguistic diversity) and the total diversity of nature (that is, biodiversity). Maps produced by Terralingua and others show that there is a strong overlap in the geographic distribution of biodiversity and linguistic diversity worldwide.

Areas of high biodiversity also abound in linguistic diversity. Wherever one finds richness in biodiversity, it is possible to predict that one will also find a great variety of distinct languages (and, by implication, a great variety of distinct cultures).

This is what we mean by “the true web of life”: you can’t think of people as separate from nature, and you can’t think of the global biosphere as separate from the global network of languages and cultures that interact so deeply with the environment. It’s our fundamental unity in biocultural diversity.

What’s happening with biocultural diversity?

No doubt you’ve heard that there’s a big problem with the loss of biodiversity—a loss in the amazing variety of Earth’s plant and animal species and in the health of the ecosystems that sustain them. Biologists believe that we’re in the midst of the 6th mass extinction of life on Earth—the previous one being the episode that led to the extinction of dinosaurs, about 65 million years ago. Researchers also point out that this current extinction crisis is the first one to be entirely of our own making: it’s the mounting pressures caused by human activities that are leading to the collapse of ecosystems and the disappearance of thousands and thousands of living species, every single day.

But do you know that there is another mass extinction going on at the same time? Just as with species, the world is now undergoing a massive extinction crisis of human languages and cultures. For the past several decades, anthropologists and linguists have been warning us about the tragedy of vanishing cultures and endangered languages, swept away by the rise of a global monoculture and dominant languages like English, Spanish, Chinese and Portuguese.

Up until very recently, though, we didn’t have any systematic information about the extent of this crisis. Researchers were relying on educated guesses, based on scattered reports in the literature telling us about this or that language on the brink as the last speakers pass away, or this or that indigenous culture under threat of assimilation.

Now for the first time the work of Terralingua has provided quantitative evidence of what’s really happening. Our Index of Linguistic Diversity (ILD) shows that since 1970 there has been a 20% decline in global linguistic diversity, as measured in terms of changes in the numbers of native speakers of each of the world’s languages. That is to say that more and more people are switching from the small languages to the more dominant ones, and that more and more of the small languages are not being transmitted to the younger generations.

What’s more, the trend in the loss of global linguistic diversity revealed by the ILD closely mirrors the trend in the loss of global biodiversity for the same period of time, as measured by WWF’s Living Planet Index. This is another indication that what happens with diversity in nature goes hand in hand with what happens in diversity in culture.

And along with the erosion of linguistic diversity comes the erosion of the traditional environmental knowledge (TEK) encoded in the languages. For this reason, we also created our Vitality Index of Traditional Environmental Knowledge (VITEK), which tracks changes in the transmission of TEK over time. The VITEK also helps identify the factors that account for the loss of TEK, such as the presence of language shift, formal education, habitat degradation, displacement, and so forth.

Loss of biodiversity. Loss of ecosystem health. Climate change. We are rapidly losing our critical life-support systems. And now we are also losing the precious pool of human knowledge and languages that can tell us so much about how to live sustainably on this planet—the only home we have. As traditional cultures and languages decline and natural environments become degraded, our collective “survival kit” is becoming depleted. It’s a “converging extinction crisis” of the diversity of life in all its forms.

Why are we losing biocultural diversity?

As with biological species, human languages and cultures are not static. They naturally change and evolve over time. All human cultures are capable of adapting to new circumstances and creating solutions to new problems. And all human languages are capable of developing to accommodate new communication needs.

The  point is that, as with biological species, human languages and cultures need time to change and evolve organically. Normally, this process happens slowly, often almost imperceptibly, from one generation to the next, as people find new ways of responding to new challenges and opportunities, and new ways of talking about what’s new.

But increasingly, things are not happening this way anymore. The pace and scale of change have grown exponentially, and so has the intensity of the pressures that global economic, political, and social forces are placing on the “true web of life”. These forces, and the changes they are imposing the world over, are far outpacing the natural ability of natural and cultural systems to adapt. By promoting a dominant way of life that is entirely unsustainable, these forces are eroding the vitality and resilience of the world’s diverse ecosystems, languages, and cultures.

Sweeping global change is dispossessing indigenous peoples and local communities of their lands, resources, and lifestyles; forcing them to subsist in highly degraded environments; crushing their cultural traditions or hampering their ability to maintain them; and forcing them into linguistic assimilation and abandonment of their ancestral languages.

People who lose their linguistic and cultural identity lose an essential element in a social process that commonly teaches understanding of and respect for nature. The consequences are profound for both the well-being of people and the health of the natural environment. Forcing cultural and linguistic conversion on indigenous peoples and local communities not only violates human rights; it also undermines the goals of nature conservation.

“Monocultures of the mind” have the same end result as monocultures in nature: they make our planet more fragile and vulnerable to both natural disasters and human-made crises. But the dominant ideology today ignores this reality, and seeks easy-to-control uniformity instead of organic unity in diversity. It’s the global “steamroller effect”.

Why does it matter that we’re losing biocultural diversity?

There are many vital reasons why we should care.

First, we are losing the unique ways of life, languages, and identities of the world’s diverse peoples. It’s a matter of human rights. For each one of these peoples, it’s their right to choose their own path for development while maintaining continuity with their own past. It’s their right to “walk toward the future in the footsteps of their ancestors”.

For humanity at large, the loss of cultural and linguistic diversity represents a drastic reduction of our collective human heritage: a profound diminishment of our understanding of what it means to be human—of the thousands of different ways in which we can say, “I am human”. Our horizon as a species becomes all the narrower for that.

Second, we are losing both the rich biodiversity that supports humanity and all other species, and the wealth of 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 about living sustainably on Earth.

More than half of humanity now lives in urban environments, largely cut off from direct contact with the natural environment and from awareness of our continued, inescapable interdependence with it. That’s why so many of us don’t seem to care. We cannot care for what we are not intimately involved with, what we don’t intimately know. Some talk of this as the “extinction of experience” of the natural environment. Others suggest that many city dwellers, and especially children, are suffering from “nature deficit disorder”.

That’s why we need biocultural diversity. We need to be reminded that we’ve become disconnected, and out of balance with the natural environment. We need to be reminded that there are other ways of being human that are more harmonious with nature. We need to hear the lessons of the many voices of humanity.

Losing biocultural diversity means a major weakening of the whole fabric of life—the web of interdependence that is absolutely vital to our common future. It means losing our options for life on Earth. It’s like losing our life insurance when we need it most.

It’s a self-destructive path. And we’re ALL affected, no matter where and how we live. But it’s not too late!