Biodiversity: negotiating the border between nature and culture

Abstract

In a context of globalization, Article 8j. from the Convention on Biological Diversity recognizes the value of biodiversity and formalizes its mixed nature through its biological as well as cultural dimensions. This new definition raises questions more than it solves them. We demonstrate that national and international organizations, local communities, and even researchers from different disciplines (anthropology, botany or genetics) identify and evaluate biodiversity differently. The various stakeholder groups have developed an unavoidable social relation with multiple aspects of biodiversity that they relate to through their job or way of life. And therefore, they pursue various conservation purposes: the preservation of place’s memory through ancestral links, cultural diversity, phenotypic variability or evolutionary potential. Which disciplinary and ethical boundaries are these actors willing to compromise, in order to preserve biodiversity in the name of development? Which indicators should we choose to fulfil which goals? The contrasting examples of taro (a socially valued object, planted on taro pondfields inherited “from the ancestors”, linked to an important cultural diversity and to a narrow genetic-base) and coconut (a socially devalued object, cultivated in coconut plantations at the prompting of “the Whites” and genetically diverse despite few named types) demonstrate that same farmers from a village in Vanuatu (South Pacific) affirm traditional ecological knowledge though their management of taro, and still participate in a market economy by intensifying their crop of coconuts. Conservation and research programs should integrate ethical questions and political processes to reconcile systems of diversified values and representations.