Biological and Cultural Diversity

The developed world has much to learn from the third world about the preservation of biological diversity. This book demonstrates the intimate relationship between cultural and biological diversity, and how the practices of third world farmers have promoted cultivation with conservation. This book presents fifteen examples of practices from countries as diverse as Nepal and Nigeria, from home gardens in South India to water harvesting in the Sudan. In a reversal from scientific Western prescriptions, the contributors look at farmers' practices in the third world. What becomes clear is the intimate local environmental knowledge of indigenous farmers, the site-specific nature of their experiments, and the degree of concern for the preservation of diversity and the protection of wild plants.This is an important contribution to the debate about biological diversity.