Extraordinary places thrive because of super-diversity: they are diverse in biological terms, but also culturally diverse—and the diversities are not just correlated, they actually drive each other. It isn’t too surprising to learn that biologically diverse landscapes such as the Himalayan mountains or the California central valley generate culturally diversity. Where multiple endangered or indigenous languages, alternative medical systems, or different ritual or religious traditions all overlap and intersect, we now know this diversity is a crucial—but fragile—driver for biological diversity. We call this entangled biological and cultural diversity biocultural diversity. Biocultural diversity as a label for this complex diversity was first proposed as a term by David Harmon and then developed by Maffi, Stepp and others. (There’s a bibliography at the bottom of the page).

The cultural diversity within biocultural diversity includes linguistic diversity but also diversity of world views, ontologies, understandings of health and personhood, and other radical conceptual and behavioural differences. Theorists of science such as Sandra Harding are now acknowledging that there is no single or unbiased perspective from which we investigate or understand our shared world. The laboratory culture, language, criteria for success and results of a California microbiology team differ profoundly from that of a Shanghai disease ecology team, or a team of Tlah-o-quiat fisheries economists, or a team of Tahitian astronomical navigators. All of them are scientists and their conversations are fruitful, but the underlying assumptions about who actually knows, and how they know, can differ in ways that overwhelm frameworks for management rooted in one particular worldview.

The challenge of biocultural diversity in extraordinary places, then, is that just where the diversity is greatest it is also more difficult to analyse and steward. Our specialism is handling multiple orders of diversity in a non-reductive, participatory and empowering way: good governance can be applied and funding programmes can meet their objectives.