Defend Difference. Difference is not dangerous, it is the destruction of difference that is heralding the end of too much that we have not even begun to appreciate. Natural and Cultural. The Biocultural.
A MUST READ.
Experts have long recognized the perils of biological and cultural extinctions. But they’ve only just begun to see them as different facets of the same phenomenon, and to tease out the myriad ways in which social and natural systems interact. Catalyzed in part by the urgency that climate change has brought to all matters environmental, two progressive movements, incubating already for decades, have recently emerged into fuller view. Joining natural and social scientists from a wide range of disciplines and policy arenas, these initiatives are today working to connect the dots between ethnosphere and biosphere in a way that is rapidly leaving behind old unilateral approaches to conservation. Efforts to staunch extinctions of linguistic, cultural, and biological life have yielded a “biocultural” perspective that integrates the three. Efforts to understand the value of diversity in a complex systems framework have matured into a science of “resilience.” On parallel paths, though with different emphases, different lexicons, and only slightly overlapping clouds of experts, these emergent paradigms have created space for a fresh struggle with the tough questions: What kinds of diversity must we consider, and how do we measure them on local, regional, and global scales? Can diversity be buffered against the streamlining pressures of economic growth? How much diversity is
enough? From a recent biocultural diversity symposium in New York City to the first ever global discussion of resilience in Stockholm, these burgeoning movements are joining biologist with anthropologist, scientist with storyteller, in building a new framework to describe how, why, and what to sustain.
The biological diversity crisis is often called the “Sixth Extinction” because an event of this magnitude has occurred only five times in the history of life on Earth. The last was at the end of the Cretaceous period, when the dinosaurs disappeared. In the past couple hundred years, humans have increased species extinction rates by as much as 10,000 times the background rates that have been typical over Earth’s history. This is a crash that, within the scientific community, is causing a slow panic and a wide belief that the dangers of biodiversity loss are woefully underestimated by most everyone outside of science.
Addressing the audience at the World Food Summit in May, Alexander Müller, assistant director-general of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, warned that most of the global food supply had narrowed to just a dozen crops and 14 animal species. According to the FAO, three-quarters of the world’s critically important food-crop varieties have disappeared during the 20th century, and hundreds of locally adapted livestock breeds are on the verge of doing so. “The erosion of biodiversity for food and agriculture severely compromises global food security,”
The tether between linguistic, cultural, and biological extinction is, however, far more complex than its common, top-down driver of globalization. Once set in motion, the extinctions themselves also become drivers, creating a dense network of positive feedback loops.
It’s not just species or languages that are vanishing from the world. The world is losing knowledge, too, of the most useful and precious kinds. If the world was losing local knowledge, what else was slipping away?
It is one thing, of course, to recognize on paper that culture and nature, language and landscape, are intimately connected. Discerning what those relationships are, in a rigorous manner, is infinitely more challenging, and it’s the sort of research that Maffi and others are just delving into. Some patterns, however, have already emerged — the most remarkable being a striking geographic overlap: Epicenters of global biodiversity, it turns out, tend to be situated in exactly the same places as the epicenters of high cultural, linguistic, and food-crop diversity. One of these so-called “megadiversity” hotspots sits on the borderlands of Burma, India, and China, in the tropical forests of the Eastern Himalayas. In just one small corner of the region, more than 30 Tibeto-Burman languages are spoken; in the gardens of just three small villages within one tribal district, more than 150 domesticated food-plant varieties are under cultivation.
That the Earth is becoming more homogeneous — less of a patchwork quilt and more of a melting pot — is only partly due to the extinction of regionally unique languages or life forms. The greater contributing factor is invasiveness. According to the 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment report, as rapidly as regionally unique species are dying out, rates of species introductions in most regions of the world actually far exceed current rates of extinction. Similarly, the spread of English, Spanish, and, to a lesser extent, Chinese, into all corners of the world easily dwarfs the rate of global language loss. This spread of opportunistic species and prodigal tongues thrives on today’s anthropogenic conduits of commerce and communications.
Introduce English into a multidialect Alaskan community, and you will increase local linguistic diversity — you are, after all, just adding more to the mix. But gains in local diversity due to new introductions are likely to be short-lived. Just as languages often become overwhelmed by more dominant ones, invasive plants, animals, and microbes often eventually outcompete and replace native life. If even one native grass or one native dialect perishes as a result of these introductions — as is almost always the case — global biodiversity suffers. Thus, homogeneity, while not synonymous with extinction, reflects both extinctions in the past and ones likely to ensue.
But what, ultimately, is the value in diversity? What merits the colossal efforts required to preserve it? According to biologist E.O. Wilson’s often-cited “biophilia” hypothesis, humans have an innate attraction to other kinds of creatures and a desire to live in a world of diverse and abundant forms of life. Pose questions on the value of diversity to a group of people, and some will certainly emerge as biophiles, citing the intrinsic worth of other life forms and other ways of knowing, and therefore, their inherent right to exist. Others will take a more utilitarian tack, mentioning the carbon sink services of a forest or the role of local languages as records of human history. Still others will be hard-pressed to find any value at all. But amid the philosophical, the pragmatic, and the nonexistent, there’s a new paradigm emerging to describe the importance of diversity. For a small group of forward-thinking biologists, ecologists, physicists, and economists who assembled earlier this year in Stockholm, the answer is simple: It’s all about resilience.
Wilson estimates that humans have named only about 1.5 to 1.8 million species, among a total number that scientists put somewhere between 3.6 and 112 million. While no reliable data concerning the level of documentation of the world’s languages exists, a plausible estimate is that fewer than 10 percent are “well documented,” meaning that they have comprehensive grammars, extensive dictionaries, and abundant texts in a variety of genres and media. The remaining 90 percent are, to varying degrees, underdocumented, or, for all intents and purposes, not documented at all.
With organizations such as Conservation International and the World Wildlife Fund, Wilson has spent the past several years advocating for the urgent protection of 25 tracts of land that account for only 1.4 percent of the Earth’s terrestrial surface but house 44 percent of its plant species and more than one-third of all species of birds, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians. He estimates that the cost of this project would amount to around $25 billion — or roughly 5 percent of the US defense budget for 2008. Given the clear geographic overlap between biodiversity and language hotspots — and more crucially, what Maffi and others are identifying as the coevolution of language and ecology — that $25 billion could quite possibly be the best bargain on Earth.
For all that modern, industrialized civilization has produced — from more-abundant food and better medicines to near-instantaneous communications — it is built on what Jules Pretty calls a fundamental “deceit.” In a session on the opening day of the AMNH symposium, Pretty, who heads the biological sciences department at University of Essex, told the audience, “There is an underlying assumption in much of the literature that the world can be saved from these problems that we face — poverty, lack of food, environmental problems — if we bring consumption levels across the world up to the same levels [of] North America and Europe.” But this sort of convergence, says Pretty, would require the resources of six to eight planets. “How can we move from convergence to divergence, and hence diversity?”
Traditional environmentalism, with its tendency to erect impermeable theoretical barriers between nature and culture, between the functions of artificial and natural selection, hasn’t been able to accommodate the perspective necessary to see larger patterns at work. Its distinction — as the writer Lewis Lapham recently put it — “between what is ‘natural’ (the good, the true, the beautiful) and what is ‘artificial’ (wicked, man-made, false)” has obscured their profound interrelatedness. Whether expressed as biocultural diversity or as diverse social-ecological systems, the language of these new paradigms reframes the very concept of “environment.” Explicit in both terms is a core understanding that as human behavior shapes nature in every instant, nature shapes human behavior. Also explicit is that myth, legend, art, literature, and science are not only themselves reflections of the environment, passed through the filter of human cognition, but that they are indeed the very means we have for determining the road ahead.
http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/in_defense_of_difference/
