Editorial Introduction to Volume I 5and Pretty show that changing the balance back to country-based activities would
address both the primary causes of the crisis and improve the health and well-being
of the Innu. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews with Innu older peo-
ple (Tshenut), empirical data on nutrition and activity, and comparative data from
the experiences of other indigenous peoples, they identify biological and environ-
mental transitions of significance to the current plight of the Innu.
They also show that nutrition and physical activity transitions have had major
negative impacts on individual and community health. However, hunting and its
associated social and cultural forms is still a viable option as part of a mixed liveli-
hood and economy in the environmentally significant boreal forests and tundra of
northern Labrador. Cultural continuity through Innu hunting activities is a means
to decelerate, and possibly reverse, their decline. Finally, four new policy areas to
help restore country-based activities are suggested: (i) a food policy for country
food; (ii) an outpost programme; (iii) ecotourism; and (iv) an amended school
calendar.
In the final paper of this section, Luisa Maffi analyses the concept of biocul-
tural diversity and how it relates to current concerns about both ecological and
cultural sustainability. Biocultural diversity draws on anthropological, ethnobio-
logical and ethnoecological insights about the relationships between human lan-
guage, knowledge and practices with the environment. Evidence now indicates
that the idea of the existence of pristine environments unaffected by humans is
erroneous. Humans have maintained, enhanced and even created biodiversity
through culturally diverse practices over many thousands of generations. There are
some suggestions that biodiversity and cultural diversity in the form of linguistic
differences are associated, though at the local level these relationships do not always
stand up to scrutiny. But the role of language is nonetheless critical as a vehicle for
communicating and transmitting cultural values, traditional knowledges and prac-
tices, and thus for mediating human–environment interactions.
Landscapes can be networks of knowledge and wisdom, conveyed by the lan-
guage of local people. But the problem is that many languages are under threat.
There are some 5000–7000 languages spoken today, of which 32 per cent are in
Asia, 30 per cent in Africa, 19 per cent in the Pacific, 15 per cent in the Americas,
and 3 per cent in Europe. Yet only half of these languages are each spoken by more
than 10,000 speakers. Some 90 per cent of all the world’s languages may disappear
in the course of this century – yet these very languages are tied to the creation,
transmission and perpetuation of local knowledge and cultural behaviour. As lan-
guage disappears, so does people’s ability to understand and talk about their worlds.
Natural and cultural continuity are thus connected. The phenomenon of loss has
been called the extinction of experience – and the loss of traditional languages and
cultures may be hastened by environmental degradation.
Yet in many parts of the world, both in developing and industrialized coun-
tries, such traditional ecological knowledge is declining and under threat of extinc-
tion. As humans coevolved with their local environments, and have now come to
be disconnected, so knowledges that coded stories, binding people to place, have