150 Before Agriculture
conservation: as a matter of ‘keeping options alive’ and of presenting ‘monocul-
tures of the mind’.^16 It has been argued that convergence toward majority cultural
models increases the likelihood that more and more people will encounter the
same ‘cultural blind spots’ – undetected instances in which the prevailing cultural
model fails to provide adequate solutions to societal problems. Instead, ‘[i]t is by
pooling the resources of many understandings that more reliable knowledge can
arise’; and ‘access to these perspectives is best gained through a diversity of lan-
guages’. Or simply stated: ‘Ecology shows that a variety of forms is a prerequisite
for biological survival. Monocultures are vulnerable and easily destroyed. Plurality
in human ecology functions in the same way.’^17
Supporting Linguistic, Cultural and Biological Diversity:
the Role of Scientists
Benefit for the many or for the few?
Pronouncements on the importance of diversity often conclude on some univer-
salistic note. Yet it is time to go beyond these general (and generic) statements, true
as they may be. That we need diversity – cultural, linguistic, biological – for the
benefit of humanity is undoubtedly true. But far too often, as local peoples are the
first to know, the hailed ‘benefit for humanity’ has actually meant the benefit (and
specifically the economic benefit) of a very small, privileged subset of said human-
ity, one that does not include that vast majority of humans in which most of this
diversity resides. Ethnoscientists have realized to their dismay that they may have
been even too successful in affirming the validity of traditional ethnobiological
and ethnomedical knowledge – thus unwittingly attracting droves of unscrupulous
bioprospectors (‘biopirates’) to the lands of the indigenous peoples whose knowl-
edge they have painstakingly documented. Supporters of cultural diversity baulk at
the thought that someone may now be earning large sums of money selling multi-
cultural T-shirts in the places where cultural diversity least abounds. And if we are
good enough at explicating and advocating for the role of language in the diversity
equation, the time may not be far away when someone will begin to devise ways to
make a business out of linguistic diversity – and not to the advantage of those who
hold most of it.
Terralingua
As we work for the maintenance of cultural, linguistic and biological diversity, we
must be constantly aware of these risks. And this is why research, applied work,
and advocacy must go hand in hand today. This is not to say that basic research is
no longer needed, but it is to say that it can no longer proceed in a vacuum, and that
scientists need to educate themselves and others as to the nature and implications of