Biocultural Diversity Key Asset for Century of Climate Impacts
Sanjay Khanna interviews Luisa Maffi for the Huffington Post.
Below is an excerpt from the article: Ten years before the U.N.
declaration, in 1996, Luisa Maffi, a linguist, anthropologist,
and ethnobiologist, co-founded Terralingua, an international NGO
that she leads to this day. Terralingua researches,
communicates, and seeks to ameliorate the loss of biological,
linguistic, and cultural diversity — “biocultural diversity” for
short — in part by communicating that nature and culture are
inescapably linked. Maffi says, “The existence of an
‘inextricable link’ between nature and culture was first
affirmed in 1988 in the Declaration of Belém, issued by the
International Society of Ethnobiology.” In 1993, Maffi developed
that idea into the now burgeoning field of biocultural
diversity, which asserts that biological, cultural and
linguistic diversity are intimately interrelated and
interdependent. Humanity’s cultures and languages, in other
words, ar