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ternational legal instruments of protection in order
to preserve the biological and cultural diversity (i.e.
the biocultural diversity) emerged.
“The inextricable link between biological and cul-
tural diversity” is for the first time spelled out in the
Declaration of Belem, which was adopted by the
First International Congress of Ethnobiology in 1988.
The discussion around this issue became even more
intense at the end of the last century. In 2001, UN-
ESCO unanimously adopted in Paris, during the 31st
Session of the General Conference, the Universal
Declaration on Cultural Diversity, which, in addition
to affirming the fundamental human rights in terms
of intellectual, moral and spiritual integration within
the concept of cultural diversity, gives some ideas
and concepts related to biological diversity.
In 200 5, for the first time, the Tokyo Declaration was
adopted with the aim of creating a link between cul-
tural diversity of religious or sacred sites protected by
UNESCO and the biological richness of those contexts.
In June 2010, in Montreal, many governments,
NGOs and associations participated in the Interna-
tional Conference on Cultural and Biological Diver-
sity for Development organized by UNESCO and the
CBD, and a Final Declaration was adopted which,
after recognizing the need to develop actions so as
to preserve biological diversity and cultural diver-
sity, established a ten-year work programme that
will,inter alia, create a link between the different
legal instruments. This declaration (which is actu-
ally much more than just a statement) was approved
at COP 10 of the Convention on Biological Diversity.- A new challenge for world legislators: preserving
the biocultural diversity
Speaking of biocultural diversity instead of biodi-
versity is not just a matter of terminology. It means,
in fact, being aware of the close correlation between
the loss of cultural and linguistic diversity and loss
of biological and genetic diversity, and vice versa
(Harmon, 2002). This implies, for anyone who wants
to develop a legal discourse, perhaps in order to in-
troduce measures to safeguard or enhance, learn-
ing to think in interdisciplinary terms.
This same approach should be used to define the con-
cept of biocultural diversity which includes “diversity of
life in all its forms: biological, cultural and linguistic
diversity, inter- (and probably co-evolved) within a
socio-ecological complex adaptive system”.
In order to safeguard the biocultural diversity it is
therefore necessary to integrate knowledge from
different fields: anthropology, linguistics, ethnobi-
ology, etnoecology, biology, agronomy, ecology and
many others (Maffi and Woodley, 2010). But we
must, above all, realize that “the diversity of life is
not constituted only by the diversity of plant and
animal species, habitats and ecosystems on the
planet, but also by the diversity of cultures and
human languages, these differences do not develop
in separate and parallel worlds, but are different
manifestations of a single whole and complex rela-
tionships between diversity have been developed
over time through the cumulative effects of global
mutual adaptation – probably coevolutionary nature- between human beings and the local environ-
ment” (Maffi, 2010, p. 298).
The starting point that the lawyer must consider is
that human beings do not live in an abstract and
isolated context but they always have a close rela-
tionship with the environment that surrounded
them. This environment has always been changed
in order to respond to the needs of the human
beings; at the same time, they become influenced
and shaped by the same environment (Posey, 1999):
“This implies that the organization, the vitality and
this resilience of human communities are closely
linked organization, the vitality and resilience of
ecosystems” (Maffi, 2010, p. 298).
In industrialized societies the perception of identity
linked to the bond between humans and their envi-
ronment is getting lost; in indigenous societies, by
contrast, the link between the languages, traditions,
land and ecosystem is still very strong (Blythe and
McKenna Brown, 2004).
Among others, linguistic diversity is, therefore, the
representative indicator of cultural diversity (Stepp