If you’re interested in the relationship between nature and culture, you’ll want to check out the newly released Biocultural Diversity Conservation: A Global Sourcebook (Earthscan, 2010), compiled by the Canada-based NGO Terralingua with support from the Christensen Fund. Homelands’ Worlds of Difference series is one of the book’s 45 featured projects.
Worlds of Difference explored the responses of societies with strong local traditions to the pressures and opportunities of a globalizing world. The award-winning project produced 40 radio features from 27 countries between 2002 and 2005. Most aired on NPR news programs. We also created six hour-long documentary specials, narrated by María Hinojosa and distributed in the US by NPR. The specials dealt with issues such as language, religion, biodiversity and economy. The project website contains more than 60 pages of text and photos and more than 10 hours of streamable audio.
Founded in 1996, Terralingua “works to sustain the biocultural diversity of life—the world’s invaluable heritage of biological, cultural, and linguistic diversity.” The group has set up a web portal where interested people can discuss biocultural diversity and update each other on their efforts.