INDIGENOUS PEOPLES AND BIODIVERSITY

http://www.edtech.ku.edu/new/lessons/english/conservation/media/Indigenous_people_and_biodiversity.pdf

Victor M. Toledo

Indigenous people number over 300 million. They are inhabitants of
practically each main biome of the earth and especially of the least disturbed
terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems of the world. Based on an exhaustive
review of recently published data, this chapter stresses the strategic
importance of indigenous peoples in the maintenance and conservation of
world's biodiversity. Four main links between biodiversity and indigenous
peoples are examined: the correlation between biological richness and
cultural diversity on both geopolitical and biogeographic terms, the strategic
importance of indigenous peoples in the biomass appropriation; the
remarkable overlap between indigenous territories and world's remaining
areas of high biodiversity; and the importance of indigenous views,
knowledge and practices in biodiversity conservation. The chapter finishes
emphasizing the urgent need for recognizing a new bio-cultural axiom: that
world's biodiversity only will be effectively preserved by preserving
diversity of cultures and viceversa.

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The research accumulated in the three last decades by investigators belonging to the fields of
conservation biology, linguistic and anthropology of contemporary cultures, ethnobiology and
ethnoecology, have evolved convergently towards a shared principle: that world's biodiversity
only will be effectively preserved by preserving diversity of cultures and viceversa. This
common statement, which represents a new bio-cultural axiom, has been nourished by four
main sets of evidences: geographical overlap between biological richness and linguistic
diversity and between indigenous territories and biologically high-value regions (actual and
projected protected areas), recognized importance of indigenous peoples as main managers and
dwellers of well-preserved habitats, and certification of a conservationist-oriented behavior
among indigenous peoples derived from its pre-modem belief-knowledge-practices complex. 10
This bio-cultural axiom, called by B. Nietschmann the "concept of symbiotic conservation", in
which "biological and cultural diversity are mutually dependent and geographically coterminous",
constitutes a key principle for conservation theory and applications, and episthemologically is an
expression of the new, integrative, interdisciplinary research gaining recognition in contemporary
science.