The Other Extinction Rebellion: Countering the Loss of Biocultural Diversity

Dr. Luisa Maffi will present her talk The Other Extinction Rebellion: Countering the Loss of Biocultural Diversity as part of theSpring 2021 Anthropology Colloquia Speaker Series on Friday, March 5 at 10 am.  You can access the talk here.  There is no passcode.

Between the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, and biodiversity loss, global existential crises have been front and center in people’s consciousness in recent years. Climate change, in particular, has inspired a worldwide “extinction rebellion” movement that calls for urgent action to address the root causes of this rapidly evolving threat. By contrast, the ongoing loss of the world’s biocultural diversity is not, as yet, widely recognized as another crisis with far-reaching consequences for humankind. Terralingua—an international nonprofit organization whose seeds were planted in Albuquerque in 1995—has been arguing for the past 25 years that the diversity of life on earth should be understood not just as biodiversity (diversity of species and ecosystems) but as biocultural diversity, including as well the diversity of human cultures and languages.

Hosted by the Department of Anthropology, the Alfonso Ortiz Center for Intercultural Studies, and the Latin American and Iberian Institute (LAII) the Department Colloquia Speaker Series will be held virtually via Zoom on Fridays at 10 am, and will be made available on our You Tube account following the event.  Upcoming speakers include (more details forthcoming):

March 12             Pilar File-Muriel (UNM) and Chelsey Dyer (Vanderbilt University)

March 26             Katherine Starkweather (University of Illinois, Chicago)

April 2                  Jonathan Dombrosky (UNM)

April 9                  Osbjorn Pearson (UNM)

April 16                Jada Benn Torres (Vanderbilt University)

April 23                Nicholas Emlen (University of Tübingen)

April 30                Suzanne Gaskins (Northeastern Illinois)

May 7                   Zwedi Tsegai (Max Planck Institute)