229natural resources. In addition, since 2010 , the
Cilento is one of the four communities identified by
the nomination of the Mediterranean diet Intangible
Heritage of Humanity: UNESCO has recognized
Cilento has handed down traditions and expressions,
ancient food practices, cultural diversity, unique and
preserved over the centuries. Cilento, thus, repre-
sents a unique identification of the concept of biocul-
tural diversity: in this context, in fact, the original
characteristics of ecosystems and the knowledge and
traditions of local people and their artefacts, are the
witnesses of the inextricable link between culture and
nature, that go together here, in a close co-evolution.
- For a new awareness: it is useless to protect bio-
diversity without preserving cultural diversity
From this picture it is clear that the challenge that
the legislators all over the world are facing is to in-
troduce mechanisms to protect, preserve and en-
hance the set of biological and cultural diversity
represented in a community. Unique approaches to
this subject will, in the long term, avoid a further
loss of biodiversity. In the world, where the beating
of a butterfly in China produces an economic
tsunami in the United States, it is no longer possi-
ble to think and act locally and compartmentalized.
We could also start from a fact: in the last 20 years
the world has lost so much of its richness in genetic,
biological and cultural that if we do not do some-
thing to counter this loss in a coordinated and com-
prehensive way, in another two decades we will be
happily doomed to extinction (UNEP, 2010). For ex-
ample: in 2100 will disappear about 80 percent of
the languages spoken today.
But then, who “governs” biocultural diversity? Who
has the authority to act to redress the loss in a maybe
too much polycentric institutional context too?
The challenge to counter the loss of biocultural di-
versity collides with the increasingly federal structure
of the states, so that we can draw a curve that shows
how more fragmented institutional contexts (or “ex-
ploded” or “polycentric”), the lower capacity for ac-
tion to tackle environmental and cultural damage.
The real challenge of the legislative branch is pri-
marily a challenge to themselves, to challenge
themsleves and deal with different sciences, trying
to find a common language. It is a legal challenge to
the traditional object of study, because now lawyers
should try to analyse it in a diachronic and interdis-
ciplinary way individual rules and then put them in
a different context.References
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