From Biocultural Homogenization to Biocultural Conservation

To assess the social processes of globalization that are changing the way in which we co-inhabit the world today, this book invites the reader to essay the diversity of worldviews, with the diversity of ways to sustainably co-inhabit the planet. With a biocultural perspective that highlights planetary ecological and cultural heterogeneity, this book explores three interrelated terms. First (1), biocultural homogenization, a global, but little perceived, driver of biological and cultural diversity loss that frequently entail social and environmental injustices?. Second (2), biocultural ethics that considers -ontologically and axiologically- the complex interrelationships between habits, habitats, and co-inhabitants that shape their identity and well-being. In ethics, in ancient terms of Homer and Heraclitus, the habit was linked to habitats. These habits affect the co-inhabitants, human and other-than-human, and the diversity of inhabitants. The biocultural ethics aims to recover the early meaning of ethic, derived from ethos-or the den of an animal-that converges to native American and other traditional understandings of ethics? Third (3), biocultural conservation that seeks social and ecological well-being through the conservation of biological and cultural diversity and their interrelationships. ? Biocultural ethics investigates and evaluates the ecological and social causes and consequences of both biocultural homogenization and biocultural conservation. These three biocultural terms provide a conceptual framework and a methodological approach for interdisciplinary teamwork among ecologists, philosophers and other participants to investigate, and also to reorient, eco-social paths of environmental change towards a sustainability of life.