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Terralingua is in a race against time to change how we understand cultures, languages, and nature.

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The Leap From “Biodiversity” to “Biocultural Diversity”

So, you are at a party and the chit-chat is starting to wear you down. If only you could steer the conversation into a new and interesting direction! Sensing a break in the talk, you feel a sudden urge to take a bold leap. You turn to the people nearest to you and the question flies from your lips: “In our world of change and crises, what is the one thing you want to sustain above all others?”

Indeed, this is a question which more and more people are asking. And the answer is Terralingua’s entire raison d’être.

Only 30 years ago, the term “biocultural diversity” was entirely missing from the English language. Today, with our multiple planetary crises, it is fast becoming an essential term in the vocabulary of sustainability.

So, how did this change happen and what is biocultural diversity anyway?

What is the one thing you want to sustain above all others?

Simply put, biocultural diversity is the idea that language, nature, and culture are inextricably and mutually linked. How can such different things be interdependent and why is this important? The quick answer: they are all forms of diversity and so are key to the thriving of all life on Earth.

This will become clearer as you read on! Now, let’s touch on our worldwide biocultural diversity crisis so we can understand why societal change is Terralingua’s mission.

 

Why a Global Loss of Biocultural Diversity?

Biocultural diversity by any other name has likely existed for millennia as a core belief in Indigenous cultures. But the phrase “biocultural diversity” is not yet as common as that household term “biodiversity.” Clearly, English and the Western worldview are playing catch-up.

Yet we are not catching up fast enough. It was the West that invented a ruthless economic system based on a worldview that is completely at odds with biocultural diversity. In this worldview, we tend to see nature as a mere “resource” and cultural diversity as a nuisance. In other words, our now-globalized economic system forces homogenization.

How does homogenization work? First, it denies and erases worldviews that see people in reciprocal, respectful relationships with the natural world. Thus uprooted from their natural environment, place-based cultures, and languages, people all over the world begin to converge toward the same way of thinking and the same handful of “world” languages.

A ruthless economic system based on a worldview completely at odds with biocultural diversity.

If we are to bring our planet back from the brink and launch a new era of thriving for all life on earth, we must act now. And this is where Terralingua plays a crucial role.

This is the story of Terralingua’s race against time to seed and grow an urgently needed idea. But this is also the story of our intrepid Director, Luisa Maffi, whose life path led her to co-found Terralingua to help nurture nothing less than a cultural shift.

Luisa Maffi, co-founder and Director of Terralingua

 

WARNING: after reading this post, you may soon be tossing “biocultural diversity” into casual conversations!

 

Echoes in the Silos: Bridging the Divide

In the fateful year 1994, change was crackling in the air.

Luisa Maffi had just finished her PhD dissertation in linguistic anthropology and was facing a fork in the road. She remembers asking herself, “OK, now that I’m grown up, what am I going to do?” (As you will see, she has been asking herself that question throughout her adult life!)

Meanwhile, linguists were urgently talking about the world’s endangered languages and how to document them before they might disappear.

At the same time, in another “academic silo,” anthropologists were arguing about vanishing cultures. Everywhere, they saw acculturation (a culture’s loss of its distinctiveness due to contact with another, often colonial, culture), cultural genocide, and urgent threats to the diversity of the world’s cultures.

And in yet another separate tower of learning, biologists had been sounding the alarm about biodiversity loss. (A decade or so earlier, they had coined the term “biodiversity,” which we all use today. As Terralingua has shown, that term is insufficient.)

Luisa Maffi heard all these echoes, saw the gulf between these silos, and wondered how to bridge the divide.

An early PowerPoint slide created by Luisa Maffi to illustrate the inherent problem of “thinking within silos”, an entrenched tendency in academia and, more generally, in Western thought. Terralingua is racing to change this tendency.

 

From an Idea to Reality: Serendipity and Hard Work

A chorus of united voices was about to break into a song the world had never heard.

Suddenly, a light went on in Luisa’s mind: “Are not languages, cultures, and the natural world ALL different forms of the diversity of life?” What we had split up into isolated disciplines was in fact ONE subject of study!

From there, it was a short leap to her next exciting thought: “Who else is making this connection?” And to the next: “This should be researched, explored, and followed by awareness-raising!”

A chorus of united voices was about to break into a song the world had never heard.

In 1995, at a conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico (US), entitled “Language Loss and Public Policy,” Luisa Maffi heard a speaker comparing the loss of languages with the loss of biodiversity. The speaker, she recalls, “showed a map of the overlapping distribution of the world’s biodiversity and the world’s languages and presented what he argued were the converging trends of the losses in both.” Stunned, she realized they were thinking along the same lines.

That speaker was Dave Harmon, a conservationist with the George Wright Society of Michigan (US), who had a keen interest in environmental history. Neither he nor Luisa suspected what would transpire next.

Map of the overlap of biological and cultural diversity, showing the distribution of endemic higher vertebrate species and languages. The map, presented by Dave Harmon at the 1995 “Language shift and Public Policy” symposium in Albuquerque, appeared in print in Harmon, D. 1996. Losing species, losing languages: Connections between biological and linguistic diversity. Southwest Journal of Linguistics 15:89-108.

 

The First Supper: A Gathering of Allies

Shortly after Dave Harmon’s talk, Luisa, Dave and a few other people who had heard his talk met over dinner. Quickly, they realized that academia was still divided into “silos,” separate disciplines that rarely integrated their knowledge. So, they floated the idea of an organization that might bridge these divides.

In the mid-90s, nowhere in academia was that kind of integrative work being done. Why? Simply, our universities and economies are ruled by specialization. In so doing, they (still) fail to promote interdisciplinary research. Neither do they disseminate the results of such research in a way that might raise global awareness.

Born running, on a budget of $800.

So, after literally writing notes on paper napkins during dinner, the group quickly set out to establish a nonprofit. Soon after, they launched a basic website and got people to donate a few dollars each. Then, they immediately started doing research and participating in meetings at the international level. There was no time to waste: this was a global issue.

Just like that, Terralingua (from the Italian terra “earth” and lingua “languages”) was born running. On a budget of $800!

 

Something Was in the Air

“It must have been an idea whose time had come,” Luisa recalls with amazement. “Something was in the air! Immediately, there was a lot of interest — if also a certain amount of skepticism.”

Initially, some scholars accused Terralingua of “equating languages and cultures with species,” which they were not. Others had misgivings about “depicting Indigenous Peoples as living in dots” on a map. Of course, on any large-scale global map, traditional territories cannot be shown in detail. Rather, Terralingua was mapping the approximate locations of the world’s languages and how they overlapped with biodiversity to show that Indigenous territories are the places with the highest biodiversity.

And with that, conservationists were put on notice. Henceforth, Terralingua argued, they would have to apply this new knowledge to their work. “You can’t take people out of the territories they have lived in and stewarded for generations,” explains Luisa.

You can’t take people out of the territories they have lived in and stewarded for generations.

“Biocultural Diversity” Goes International

Whether it was the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), or the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), or the Convention on Biodiversity (CBD), Terralingua’s ground-breaking research found receptive eyes and ears.

Fast forward 30 years or so, and the idea of biocultural diversity has taken hold to the point that many people, when asked, have no idea where it originated. Luisa Maffi sees this as a win: “That’s part of what makes an idea become mainstream.”

At first revolutionary, the term “biocultural diversity” is now almost taken for granted — almost. Someday, it will be so much a part of the landscape that it will seem natural. As Luisa muses, “People have an unconscious sense that these things are related somehow — they just don’t yet know how.”

What suddenly made it all coalesce and make sense was the dissemination of Terralingua’s findings. And what has made that possible is hard work, steadfast support, and serendipity.

A revolutionary map and a report that went around the world.

Collaborating with WWF: Putting Terralingua “On the Map”

Barely two years after Terralingua was born, “out of the blue, we were contacted by the World Wildlife Fund’s headquarters in Geneva,” recounts Luisa with a twinkle in her eye.

Someone at WWF was keenly interested in Terralingua’s mapping work and proposed a collaborative project to map the world’s languages (80 to 85% of which are Indigenous) onto WWF’s map of the world’s ecoregions. This was to be followed by a report making the point that conservation cannot be done without Indigenous Peoples.

By 2000, Terralingua had produced the map. All of a sudden, a small NGO with an $800 budget (plus WWF funds) had a revolutionary map and a report that were going around the world, courtesy of WWF.

Terralingua itself was now firmly on the map!

Then along came the familiar question. In 2001, Luisa was finishing her post-doctoral fellowship at the Natural History Museum of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. And she started wondering again: “What will I do next?”

 

Terralingua Shifts into High Gear

One day, the phone rang in Luisa’s basement apartment in Washington, DC. “Someone claiming to be from the Ford Foundation wanted to talk to me,” she recalls. “I thought, ‘Yeah, right. Who’s pulling my leg here?’”

But nobody was pulling her leg. The caller was Ken Wilson, a program director at the Ford Foundation. In his research, he had come across Terralingua and thought, “These people really get it — and they have done so much already! I need to talk to them.”

Beside herself with excitement, Luisa frantically called Dave Harmon: “We have to submit a plan and a grant proposal!” In a blur, they put together a comprehensive plan for a biocultural diversity research, action, education, and dissemination program. And crossed their fingers.

 

Recognition and the Funding that Changed It All

As if by magic, in one fell swoop a humble three-figure budget had grown into a six-figure one.

Two weeks later, armed with Terralingua’s proposal, Luisa went to New York City to meet a very cordial Ken Wilson. It turned out to be a pure formality — she did not even need to make a pitch.

Ken Wilson was a visionary: he intuited that if he gave Terralingua the means, something good would come of it. “Luisa, here’s a two-year grant. Go do the work.” As if by magic, in one fell swoop a humble three-figure budget had grown into a six-figure one!

But serendipity wasn’t done with Terralingua — not yet.

Before the two years passed, Ken called Luisa again. He was taking the post of executive director of The Christensen Fund in California. Crucially, he had carte blanche to re-imagine the foundation’s mission, he told Luisa — and he intended to make biocultural diversity the central theme of the Fund. “And he wanted to know: what did I think of that?”

You can guess her reply!

 

Support, Support, Support

Indeed, Ken reinvented The Christensen Fund as a bioculturally focused foundation, the first of its kind. Not only did the Fund choose Terralingua as its first grantee for Biocultural diversity Research and Action, but it became its staunch supporter from 2003 to around 2016.

Gradually, other funders started embracing the idea of biocultural diversity. Among the first was the Swift Foundation, which also became a Terralingua supporter for over a decade. Several others followed, including current funders such as the Reva and David Logan Foundation, Lush Charity Pot, Synchronicity Earth, and more.

If you don’t get support for the work you’re trying to do, well, it ends there.

Looking back, Luisa sees how critical this kind of solid support has been for Terralingua’s mission to put the idea of biocultural diversity out there until it gets talked about, adopted, and used. “You can proselytize until you’re blue in the face! But if you don’t get support for the work you’re trying to do, well, it ends there.”

 

Interconnection in Our DNA?

One might say that interconnection is woven into Terralingua’s DNA. Indeed, interconnection drove much of Luisa’s formative years. Whenever she reached the end of a path, she picked up a thread leading to the next path. Unbeknownst to her, all those threads were forming the “tapestry” that is Terralingua today.

“Which is not to say, of course, that there aren’t major efforts involved!” she reminds us. Chief among these efforts has been keeping Terralingua’s work funded and ensuring its ability to grow in new directions.

Fortunately, Luisa has been instrumental in this work, as has her grasp of the importance of interconnection.

 

Luisa’s Growing “Hat Collection”

Once the term “biocultural diversity” had taken on a life of its own, Terralingua’s focus shifted. How to spread the idea more generally among a wider public?

Aside from constant fundraising, of course, Terralingua is all about communication. In its early years, a small newsletter went out about four times a year. One day, a very creative collaborator suggested that the newsletter was ready to evolve into a real magazine.

Without hesitating for a moment, Luisa accepted the challenge! Over time, in addition to all her other duties at Terralingua — directing, fundraising, researching, writing — she ended up donning the hat of editor of what is today Langscape Magazine, Terralingua’s flagship publication. And as it turns out, she had added that hat to her collection very early in her life.

 

“You get 10 lira for every typo you spot!”

Early start. Luisa at age 9, looking proud of herself as she learns the art of copy-editing from her editor father in the printing house where his journal, Africa, was typeset. An unidentified typesetter looks over her shoulder, amused. Photo: unknown, 1961

Gradually, with its new magazine, Terralingua established a presence on social media. In time, its calls for stories started going out more widely. And soon, story submissions started pouring in from all over the world. But who was going to read, evaluate, select, and edit so many stories?

In another surprise twist to her life, Luisa was able to take on the work of editor by reaching back into her childhood. She was only six years of age when her editor father started taking her to the old-fashioned printing house where he did the layout of his journal. Presciently, he taught her to copy edit and gave her 10 Italian lira (something akin to 10 cents) for every typo she could spot.

Who was going to read, evaluate, select, and edit so many stories?

“I wouldn’t mind continuing my editing work as long as I can manage it!” confides Luisa, whose knack for changing hats is legendary at Terralingua.

Long after, she realized that her father was teaching her skills which would serve her well in the future. Also an accomplished translator, he taught her the art of translation, as well. And indeed, through the magic of interconnection that has driven so much of Terralingua’s evolution, translation became Luisa’s means of support through university. (Few know that she was the Italian translator for the world-famous novel Anne of Green Gables. Shh!)

 

No Future Without A Clear View of the Past

“When I think of the future, I think about ‘walking toward the future in the footsteps of our ancestors,’ as Indigenous Peoples would say,” explains Luisa. And since the story of Terralingua is really one of connection — connecting ideas, sentences, people, and movements — it’s impossible to talk of its origins without going back to Luisa’s own origins.

So, let’s rewind the reel way, way back — to Luisa’s childhood in a remarkable and multilingual family. As you will see, her family’s embrace of diversity proved to be fertile loam for a young inquiring mind.

 

A Childhood Steeped in Languages and Exchanges

Luisa’s maternal grandmother was born in Vienna of French parents and spoke French and German. Then she married an Italian and learned that language, too. Luisa’s mother herself spoke French, German, and Italian.

In turn, Luisa’s Italian father also spoke fluent English and French and worked at an institute in Rome that dealt with post-colonial relationships between Italy and African countries. As his colleagues from Africa would often visit with their children, young Luisa grew up swimming in a potent linguistic and cultural bath.

From the outset, Luisa’s identity was cosmopolitan. That is, she has always found herself at ease in many different places of the world. In addition to that, her outdoorsy parents cultivated in her a love of nature. To this day, she feels grounded and at home in the forests and hills of Salt Spring Island on Canada’s West Coast, where she resides and where Terralingua also lives.

 

A Family Crisis Opens a New Path

In 1971, after a long illness that he had successfully hidden from his children to protect them, Luisa’s father finally passed away just as she was finishing high school and starting university in Rome, with the idea of studying philosophy.

Plunged into crisis — and finding the way philosophy was being taught “mighty boring” — Luisa dropped out of university. Mostly, as young people often do, she hung out with friends.

Without knowing it, she had delved into the very fields that are crucial to understanding biocultural diversity.

After a couple of years of gadding about, however, she awoke one morning with the burning question, “What am I doing?” She was wasting her time! Without skipping a beat, the very next day Luisa re-enrolled at the University of Rome.

Once again driven by ideas, Luisa tackled languages and literature. From there, she went on to linguistics and then to anthropology, particularly linguistic anthropology. All the while, she maintained an interest in the philosophy of science and evolution.

Without knowing it, Luisa had delved into the very fields that are crucial to understanding biocultural diversity: linguistics, anthropology, and the science of evolution.

In 1978 came graduation — and that famous question: “What do I do next?”

Before long, an amazing opportunity came up. Some of Luisa’s professors were involved in a project in Somalia, East Africa. Their mission: to produce the first reference dictionary and grammar of the Somali language.

Would Luisa be interested in joining the team?

 

Of Camels and Warfare

Thanks to her studies and familiarity with Africa through her father’s work, Luisa knew the offer was a natural fit. For the next seven years, she spent a part of every year in Somalia with the dictionary team, and the rest of the time in Rome writing up dictionary entries.

Words and phrases say volumes about a culture.

It may seem obvious to some, but it’s worth repeating here: words and phrases say volumes about a culture. At the time, the Somali being mostly pastoralists, their cultural focus was on camels and cattle. Indeed, Somali poetry made lofty comparisons between the beauty of a woman and the beauty of a camel (the long eyelashes! the gait! the long neck!).

Somali pastoralists in Somalia’s Mudug region walk 30 to 40 km with their camels in search of water. Photo: Abdirizack Abdullahi / Wikimedia Commons, 2021

 

Not surprisingly, this work allowed Luisa to observe the natural world through Somali eyes and work in deep collaboration with Somali colleagues. This experience, she feels, “was a very important component of learning to work with people from different cultures.”

The Somali research project hummed along nicely until 1985. Then, all of a sudden, all hell broke loose. Somali clans rebelled against dictator Mohammed Siad Barre, and Somalia was plunged into turmoil. So, in 1985, the Somali Language Project team wisely regrouped in Rome to finish their work. And once again, Luisa found herself confronted with her familiar old question: “Now what?”

Serendipitously, as always, the answer arrived right on time.

 

Go West, Young Woman!

Through her linguistic anthropology professor at the University of Rome, Luisa met Brent Berlin, a famous linguistic anthropologist from the University of California at Berkeley. He and his colleague, Paul Kay, had done ground-breaking work on how different languages name colors. “Coincidentally,” Luisa had done her own modest study of Somali color categorization. Having read and liked Luisa’s paper, Brent Berlin invited her to Berkeley.

So, in the fall of 1985, Luisa applied to Berkeley and was accepted. The year after, she started her PhD in linguistic anthropology and ethnobiology. Working under Brent Berlin in Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost state, Luisa plunged into research with the Tzeltal, a Mayan people. With characteristic gusto, she first tackled Spanish and Tzeltal Maya. Then, armed with two new languages, she started her own research on the language of health and illness. That is, she studied how people think of and talk about the signs and symptoms of illnesses in their language.

The fruit of this research? A 500-page thesis! And with that, Luisa had entered biocultural territory.

 

Ethnobotany: Locally Evolved Plant Knowledge

The Tzeltal Maya and their linguistic cousins and neighbors, the Tzotzil Maya, lived in the same biome (a distinctive group of plants and animals). Yet each group had a completely distinct knowledge of hundreds of medicinal plants and animals, even “medicinal dirt.” However, this traditional medicinal knowledge was not being passed on.

How did Luisa know this?

Intergenerational transmission of knowledge was being cut down at the root.

One day, in a line-up of Tzeltal Maya people outside a Chiapas field clinic, she met a young father carrying his three-year-old daughter in his arms, who looked very sick. When asked, he said she had bloody diarrhea. Luisa immediately recalled a plant that she had just learned was used traditionally to treat this condition.

Sadly, the young father did not know how to identify it, let alone how to use it. In fact, as Luisa later learned, local people were often pulling this precious medicinal plant out of their milpas (corn fields) as a weed! For her, this was the aha! moment when she realized the impact of acculturation. She knew that Indigenous Maya children attended mandatory public school, where their teachers often told them that traditional botanical knowledge is “mumbo jumbo.”

Unsurprisingly, with that kind of brainwashing, those children never inherited their Elders’ plant knowledge. Thus, intergenerational transmission of knowledge was cut down at the root.

In a traditional ceremony, a Tzeltal Maya woman from the community of Tenejapa (Chiapas state, Mexico) blows incense smoke onto an altar decorated with pine boughs. Photo: Petul Hernández Guzmán

 

Social Change is Difficult and Slow Until It Picks up Speed!

Again, Luisa was likely primed by all her experiences to be a generalist looking for a bigger picture. She frankly avers that, already before Terralingua, she “felt awful” whenever she interviewed for academic jobs!

In retrospect, Luisa sees that she embarked long ago on “the path of ideas.” Instead of pursuing a specific career, she was pursuing ideas. And one idea naturally led to another, then to new opportunities, or serendipities, as she calls them. This, too, is how change happens on a societal level.

Clearly, the fact that “biocultural diversity” is more common a term and a concept now means that Terralingua is on the right path. In fact, the idea of biocultural diversity increasingly informs research and action around the world.

Yet despite Terralingua’s inroads at the international policy and academic levels, “biocultural diversity” is still poorly known and understood in mainstream thinking. What is causing this lag in change?

 

What Terralingua Is up Against

Aside from the fact that many conservation organizations still promote the conservation of nature only and ignore the interdependence of humans and nature, Terralingua must contend with a host of conflicting messages in a media-saturated world that grooms ever-shorter attention spans. Chief among these opposing messages are those that promote the satisfaction of material needs and wants and of individual rights over the pursuit of collective social and environmental responsibilities

curandera

A Mayan curandera (healer) in the community of Señor in Guatemala explains the medicinal qualities of a vine. A number of projects are promoting the revival of traditional ecological knowledge and transfer to younger generations in communities. Photo: Jessica Brown

So, why does Terralingua prioritize biocultural diversity over the many other urgent causes out there, such as fighting domestic abuse and poverty, or improving mental health? Surely these causes are all worthy of attention, discussion, and funding?

A world in which ALL life can flourish is also a world in which social and environmental justice, too, can thrive.

Ecologist David Rapport, Luisa’s long-time partner in life and work, provides an elegant answer to those questions:

“What is to be ‘sustained’ in this rapidly changing world? The answer is simply yet profoundly ‘life itself’ — life in its richness, diversity, vitality, and resilience in both nature and culture.”

In fact, far from denying the impact of strictly social or strictly biological problems, Terralingua realizes that they are all rooted in a worldview that poses a global threat to biocultural diversity. Quite simply, a world in which ALL life can flourish is also a world in which social and environmental justice, too, can thrive.

In other words, societal harmony, a sufficient living standard for all, and resilient mental health are all the fruits of biocultural diversity. If the latter fails, they all fail.

 

What Drives Luisa’s Convictions — and Terralingua’s Work?

“Passion, for sure. I do see the self-destructive state of the world. At the same time, the work that we do at Terralingua puts me in touch with another reality, one which keeps pushing to emerge!”

Instead of despairing at weak-footed democratic governments (and authoritarian ones that work against everything we at Terralingua stand for), Luisa takes heart in the countless people “who are putting up the good fight. These are the people all over the world who are not waiting for hand-outs but taking action and affirming themselves.”

Among these encouraging counter-trends are the many examples of successful language revitalization. “Early on in the era of ‘rescuing endangered languages,’ I wrote a paper titled Saving Languages or Helping People Keep Them Alive?” recalls Luisa. “At that point, we decided that Terralingua would focus on what it takes to maintain or revitalize biocultural diversity.”

People all over the world are not waiting for hand-outs but taking action and affirming themselves.

Granted, Terralingua is in a race against time to change society.

But guided by Luisa’s lifelong embrace of the vital and resilient connections between people, languages, and ecosystems and strengthened by the crucial support of like-minded individuals and organizations — and the occasional dash of serendipity — Terralingua continues to put up that good fight.


For a Deeper Read:

We invite you to discover, support, and spread Terralingua’s message and work by reading more here:

Delve into powerful stories about biocultural resurgence and resilience from around the world, published in Langscape Magazine, and consider purchasing our beautifully designed print edition.

Explore our growing repository of engaging stories by Indigenous youths from all over the world who have been published in our Indigenous Youth Storytellers Circle.

Read David Harmon’s and Ken Wilson’s essays that appeared first in Langscape Magazine Volumes 5:1 and 5:2, respectively, for their own versions of Terralingua’s “origins.”

Explore Terralingua’s “Our History” page for more information about our organization’s research findings and their impact.