Abstract
Biodiversity and genetic resources have become the focal point of major national and international biological and political debates regarding control, ownership, access, and erosion of critical resources. While these issues are key to environmental sustainability and food security, biodiversity and genetic resources must be seen in the broader context of their inextricable relationship to cultural diversity and to humans' view of nature. Nature is assumed to be constituted socially through a wide variety of human processes described collectively as culture. Three significant cultural factors, technology, science, and capitalism, are largely responsible for the secularization and homogenization of food and agriculture and the remaking of nature. These processes and forces may simultaneously and unwittingly create the problems of declines in biodiversity, cultural diversity, and food equity. Indeed, it may well be that the only way to conserve cultural biodiversity in the field is to conserve cultural diversity among peoples. This reunification of biodiversity and cultural diversity and food and agriculture will require new paradigms and institutional mechanisms that allow us to show our care for each other through our reverence for nature.
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Additional information
Notes 1. This paper is based, in part, on the Presidential Address of the 1993 annual meeting of the Agriculture, Food, and Human Values Society and on work to appear in a forthcoming bookBiodiversity/Cultural Diversity: The Plant Germplasm Controversy in Cultural Context by L. Busch, W. Lacy, J. Burkhardt, D. Hemken, J. Moraga, J. de Souza Silva, and T. Koponen. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. The research has been supported, in part, by grants from the National Science Foundations' Ethics and Values Studies Program and the USDA Cooperative State Research Service.
William B. Lacy is Assistant Dean for Research and Professor of Rural Sociology at Penn State University. He was President of the Agriculture, Food, and Human Values Society during 1992/1993. His research focuses on science policy, agricultural research, biotechnology, and sustainable agriculture. He recently coauthored a book entitledPlants, Power and Profit: Social, Economic and Ethical Consequences of the New Biotechnologies and is currently coauthoring a forthcoming book entitledBiodiversity/Cultural Diversity: The Plant Germplasm Controversy in Cultural Context.
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Lacy, W.B. Biodiversity, cultural diversity, and food equity. Agric Hum Values 11, 3–9 (1994). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01534442
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01534442