Rolex Awards for Enterprise 2010 Young Laureates Programme

Marrakech, Morocco

The Rolex Awards for Enterprise announced the Jury today for the 2010 Young Laureates Programme, which “enables visionary young men and women to tackle the most pressing issues facing our world”. The Laureates receive financial support for two years and publicity through international media coverage to launch a new idea or scale up an existing project in one of five areas: science and health, applied technology, exploration, the environment and cultural preservation. The nearly 200 candidates, who are between 18 and 30 years old and come from around the world, were invited to submit proposals that outline the social or scientific benefits of their work.


I will join the other nine members of the jury in Geneva next March to select the five winners, who will be announced in April 2010. My fellow jury members come from Brazil, India, Mexico, Singapore, Spain, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom and United States.

A morning at Unesco

Paris, France

Beautiful spring days in Paris, which make me feel more like exploring gardens in bloom than spending time inside. I made an exception to visit colleagues at UNESCO, one of the institutions involved in creating the People and Plants Initiative (PPI) in 1992. I spent the better part of the years I lived in Paris, from 1988 – 1996, working as a field coordinator for PPI, a position that had me travelling to many parts of Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Pacific. My travels and interactions with colleagues and communities provided some of the inspiration for the creation of GDF in 2000.

At Unesco, I caught up with Meriem Bouamrane, a French-Algerian friend who draws on her training as an environmental economist in her role of programme specialist in the Division of Ecological and Earth Sciences and Man and the Biosphere (MAB) Programme. She focuses on promoting broad community participation in biosphere reserves, from their inception through their implementation and management. She is using a methodology that analyses how Actors, Resources, Dynamics and Interactions (ARDI) can be brought together in successful negotiations on protected areas. We may explore how this approach can be integrated into our efforts to ensure the participation of Dusun and other indigenous peoples in the nomination of Crocker Range Park is Sabah, Malaysia as a Biosphere Reserve.

Plants, Livelihoods and Community Conservation in the Kalahari

D’Kar, Botswana

I am camping in the Kalahari under one of the clearest, starriest skies I have seen in many years. We are in Dqae Qare Game Farm, which is owned by the D’Kar community. Covering more than 7500 hectares in the Ghanzi District given by the Dutch government and Netherlands Development Organisation to San Bushman people, it is a community run place that has a lodge, huts and a campsite. The aim of the game farm is to generate employment and income while preserving Ncoakhoe indigenous knowledge through tourism.

We are here to facilitate a workshop on ‘Plants, Livelihoods and Community Conservation in the Kalahari’. The 30 participants, converging from various parts of Botswana, Namibia and South Africa, have been arriving throughout the day and into the night. Over the next few days, we will be hearing about their experiences of working with plant resources – including harvesting of medicinal plants, mapping useful plants in conservancies, and cultivating domesticated and semi-domesticated plants in home gardens. Our goal is to reinforce these diverse ways of sustainably using plants by setting up a learning network that will allow representatives of community organisations to exchange ideas and knowledge. If all goes according to plan, we will engage in an extended dialogue on how to design and implement the network, culminating in a proposal to the UK Darwin Initiative and other funding agencies. If successful, we will launch the project in August 2010. This long timeline – which sometimes tests our patience and that of our collaborators – is necessary not only to line up funding but also to ensure that the entire process is fully participatory.

Is traditional medicine viable in a globalising world?

London, United Kingdom

How can we sustain traditional medicine, which is said to be the treatment of choice of more than 80% of the world’ population? As we are discovering in our work on herbal remedies in Morocco, the challenges are multiple. With growing demand driven by urban and international markets, the viability of wild plant resources is threatened. This can lead to substitution of scarcer species with more available ones, with unknown health consequences. The transmission of knowledge about medicinal plants is being disrupted as well, potentially affecting the competence of younger healers. For these reasons, medical professionals call into question the safety and efficacy of traditional medicine. These issues were on my mind today when I met with Michael Heinrich, Professor and Head of the Centre for Pharmacognosy and Phytotherapy at the University of London’ School of Pharmacy. We met in 1981, when I was on my way to Berkeley to begin my doctorate in Anthropology, and he was completing a masters degree in Anthropology in my home state of Michigan. Now nearly thirty years later, we hope to collaborate on some aspect of traditional medicine in Morocco, perhaps the safety of herbal medicines given to children.

Speaking of human evolution and cultural diversity...

Canterbury, United Kingdom

After participating in research cluster meetings at the University of Kent on ‘governance and conservation’ and ‘biocultural diversity’ I had the opportunity to listen to stimulating seminars from two very different colleagues. In the late afternoon Stephen Jones delivered the Darwin lecture on “Is Human Evolution Over?”. His message was quite similar to that of a dialogue at UNESCO in 1999 on “What Future for the Human Species” that featured the late Harvard University palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould and the French Sociologist Edgar Morin. They agreed that the physical evolution of humans would not change greatly, but that our cultural development was far from finished. Jones described how the analysis of the trio of evolutionary factors – mutation, natural selection and geographical isolation – reveals that people will not change physically to a great degree, contrary to popular conceptions and depictions in science fiction movies.

Our great cultural development, in the recent past and into the future, was evoked in an earlier Anthropology Department seminar given by Dario Novellino, an Italian anthropologist and ethnobiologist. In a lecture on “Stories of Plants, Politics and Social Life: from the Tropics to the Mediterranean’, Dario spoke of the indigenous people in Palawan, Philippines where he lived for many years, and of local shepards in Maranolo, a community in southern Italy near his native Naples. Under the pressure of various global processes that affect their lifestyles, these distinct communities are struggling to maintain knowledge and practices related to the environment. Even if our physical evolution is static, our cultural development remains dynamic.

Darwin Initiative funds GDF's Malaysia and Mexico projects

Marrakech, Morocco

We received the welcome news today that the UK Darwin Initiative will support our community conservation efforts in Oaxaca, Mexico and Sabah, Malaysia for the next three years. The Darwin Initiative began in 1992 as part of the UK’s effort to implement the Convention on Biological Diversity. The funds allow people from British institutions to assist colleagues in other countries (or in British Overseas Territories) to conserve and sustainably use biological diversity while ensuring that any benefits are equitably shared. In April we will begin a project to help Chinantec communities create management plans for the voluntary conservation areas that they have created in the Sierra Norte of Oaxaca. Then in August, we will launch a new phase of our work with Dusun communities, ensuring that their traditional rights to access and use natural resources are respected when Sabah’s Crocker Range Park is nominated as a Biosphere Reserve. I will be giving regular updates of these initiatives on the GDF website, eNewsletter and this blog.

Wild edible plants and local diets

Marrakech, Morocco

Spring comes early to Marrakech, at least in comparison to my home state of Michigan. With my son Edward, I was out harvesting wild asparagus in my garden this morning. The tender sprouts grow up through the spiny stems of the previous year, giving them good protection from grazing animals. My hands were poked and scraped as I cut away the old growth to harvest the wild vegetable for lunch. This ‘hidden harvest’ brings to mind the many species of wild edible plants that were an important part of local diets throughout the world until people transitioned to eating processed foods. Later in the day, I read that Harriet Kuhnlein, a colleague from McGill University, has put together IndigenousNutrition.org, an impressive website dedicated to promoting local foodways. It features a series of videos that portray indigenous peoples' culinary traditions and describes how they could contribute to better diets for millions of people who are malnourished or are suffering from lifestyle diseases such as cancer, diabetes and heart conditions.