Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, Malaysia
I left for Buayan, the Dusun community in Borneo where we have been working since 2004, under a threatening sky. After a quick drive to Donggongon with James Wong, GDF-Southeast Asia’s field coordinator, we waited for our fellow travellers to assemble for the bumpy 1 hour drive along logging roads and then 4 hour walk in mountainous terrain. I crossed paths with Jannie Lasimbang, who has resettled in Sabah after several years in Thailand, where she was coordinating the Asia Indigenous Peoples Programme (AIPP). This and other indigenous organisations are playing a leading role in making sure that communities are involved in negotiating and implementing international policy on indigenous peoples’ livelihoods, rights and self-determination.
About Me
- GJ Martin, GDF Director
- After receiving degrees in botany and anthropology in the early 1980s, I worked with indigenous communities in Mexico before co-founding People and Plants, an international initiative combining ethnobotany and the sustainable use of plants. In 1996, I received my doctorate in anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley and moved to Marrakech, Morocco. Three years later, I founded the Global Diversity Foundation (globaldiversity.org.uk) which helps indigenous people and local communities maintain their agricultural, biological and cultural heritage through an array of micro-projects encompassing research, training and social action. For the past decade I have been a Research Fellow and Lecturer at the School of Anthropology and Conservation at the University of Kent in Canterbury, United Kingdom. From 2010, I will be a fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environmental Studies in Munich. My academic and practical work focuses on the inextricable links between our social and ecological worlds, which are at the heart of the biocultural diversity that makes communities around the world productive and resilient.
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