The structures that Native peoples build on their lands are prime examples of how culture and environment interact to create the essential elements of a biocultural landscape. The structures must fit the lifestyle and express the cultural priorities of the people, and be appropriate for the climate and the other ecological elements of the place.

The structures of Indigenous life prioritize form and function. There are specific types of homes, meetinghouses, and sweat lodges, as well as irrigation and agriculture systems, granaries, smokehouses, fire pits, livestock pens and other types of infrastructure.

Indigenous peoples’ structures reflect their ways of life, such as whether they are farmers or hunters, agrarian or nomadic, communal or individualistic. Indigenous structures reflect the landscape, as they must be constructed of whatever materials are available, whether that is wood, grass, leaves, mud, stone, animal hides, or ice. These buildings can be permanent or temporary, enclosed or open to the elements, designed to allow smoke to escape or cool air to flow, elevated on stilts or built into hillsides. Importantly, the structures are appropriate for both the people’s culture and the landscape they inhabit.

Cultivating, cooking, and eating delicious foods are central methods by which Indigenous peoples commune with their environments, transmit their cultures, express their spiritual beliefs, and maintain their vibrancy. Traditional foods hold great power in Indigenous cultures; the foods most important to the cultural life of a community can be key markers of identity, belonging, and belief.

The foods Indigenous peoples enjoy are cultivated in integrated agricultural systems; fished from streams, rivers, lakes, and the ocean; hunted in forests, savannas, tundra, and deserts; and foraged in landscapes of all descriptions. The meat, milk, and other products of livestock are central to many Native diets, corresponding with the pastoral herding lifestyle common among diverse cultures throughout the world.

The world has Indigenous people to thank for most of the varieties of food that we enjoy daily, such as the fruits and nuts of Central Asia like walnut, apple, plum, pistachio, cherry, and almond. Other foods central to Indigenous life that have spread far and wide include the corn, squash, and bean varieties Native to the Americas. Some foods cherished by Native peoples are little known as food outside these cultures, such as the mesquite of the U.S. Southwest, the black palm weevil (insect) of Indonesia, or the goanna (lizard) of Australia.

Traditional Native foods vary around the world, but have in common that they are specifically suited to the cultural and ecological milieu in which they appear. Local cultures transform foods and the landscapes that nurture them over generations, while the foods shape the lifestyles of the Native communities. For example, Andean peoples have cultivated a wealth of potato varieties and have molded their diets and cultures around this crop, a co-evolution that reveals how important delicious foods are in shaping biocultural landscapes.

Native peoples live in and care for almost every primary forest area around the globe. Around 240 million people live in ecosystems dominated by forest cover, and some 200 million Indigenous people rely on forests for their wellbeing. These peoples often claim customary rights to these lands and their cultures are guided by traditional customs and knowledge that have evolved with the forest ecosystems over centuries.

For forests to survive and thrive over the long term, they must regenerate themselves continuously. This means new seeds or shoots growing into young trees that can eventually replace those that fall or burn. This process can take place naturally or be helped along, and often is accomplished through a combination of the two. Many Native peoples draw on ancestral knowledge and an intimate familiarity with the forest ecosystem to ensure that they counterbalance the impacts of their activities with sustainable management to ensure regeneration.

Indigenous groups often rely on forests for food, shelter, fuel, and non-timber products like rubber and medicinal plants. Strategies Native peoples may use for community-based forest management include dedicating conservation areas, and overseeing woodcutting and watershed management regimes.

Key to forest regeneration and sustainability is the continuation of endemic species, landraces, and diverse genetic material. This happens naturally through the evolution of the ecosystem, and can be encouraged through maintenance of the co-evolved culture and ecosystem health found in a biocultural landscape.

Native cultures around the world steward the incredible biological wealth of the landscapes in which they live, particularly the plant life crucial to their survival. Trees, shrubs, roots and vines of all descriptions provide a dizzying range of benefits, especially for fruit, fiber, and medicine. Important species grow wild while others have been domesticated in agro-forestry plots and home gardens.

Some regions, such as the Amazon, are particularly lush in plant variety. Some 300 different species of trees can be found in a single hectare in the Peruvian Amazon. An example of a Native tree that serves as an important resource to local people there is the Astrocaryum, a palm that produces a type of oil similar to coconut oil. The fruits can be steamed and eaten or cracked open for their juice. The leaves can be woven into fiber to make hammocks, baskets, hats, and ropes.

Other plants commonly found in lush biocultural landscapes are those used for medicinal purposes. Traditional medicine is practiced widely throughout the world and has had a profound influence on Western medicine. Up to 80 percent of the population of Africa relies on traditional medicine for primary healthcare. A quarter of Western medicines are derived from plants that have been used traditionally for generations.

Traditional knowledge about the plants that have shaped Indigenous cultures for centuries is at risk of being lost, so efforts to protect and exchange the germplasm (genetic material, such as a seed or sprout) of these species’ are crucial for the maintenance of thriving biocultural landscapes.

Indigenous peoples around the world were the first to domesticate food crops and practice agriculture. For generations they have been saving seeds, actively breeding new species of food plants to cope with a wide range of conditions, and developing sophisticated solutions to agricultural challenges, such as irrigation and aquaculture systems.

Native peoples have always practiced a holistic form of agriculture that mixes diverse livestock and crop species into an integrated farming landscape. They use techniques such as growing cover crops, cultivating beneficial insects, and intermixing crops. They grow traditional foods well suited to their environments and shape their landscapes to enable farming in a wide range of conditions.

These sustainable and culturally appropriate methods create healthy agrobiodiversity, which in turn enhances resilience for Indigenous communities. The agrobiodiversity they have created has co-evolved with the environments in which they live, the diets they eat, and the lifestyles they practice.

Despite all of the knowledge and invaluable genetic diversity contained within these systems, Indigenous communities around the world are at risk of losing their agricultural heritage and food sovereignty. Loss of land—to development, erosion, and other stressors— dwindling of traditional knowledge and extinction of seed varieties contribute to the diminishment of traditional integrated agricultural practices. Fortunately, many researchers, farmers and advocates are making progress in reversing these trends.

Biocultural landscapes tend to be characterized by genetic diversity, biological richness, and healthy ecosystems. The co-evolution of culture and nature in these places mean that human caretakers have carefully stewarded the health of the landscape for generations, just as the landscape has nurtured its human inhabitants. That vital give-and-take is rooted in, and in turn maintains, the rich soils that invariably underpin these ecosystems.

While human communities have little control over what type of rocks and minerals make up their soils—and thus what type of soil they have—they can exert powerful influence over the sustained richness of that soil by careful stewardship of an ecosystem’s natural resources.

Over the ages, traditional cultures have developed targeting techniques for increasing soil’s richness, including irrigation systems, multi-use landscape management, intercropping and integrated animal husbandry.

Methods of sustainable farming, and responsible forest, watershed, and grassland stewardship create conditions for nutrient balance and cycling. High rates of organic matter, decomposition, and water retention increase soil fertility, leading to flourishing plant and animal life, which in turn enriches the soil. Healthy, organic soils retain more moisture and naturally improve crops’ drought resistance.

Maintaining biocultural diversity in Indigenous landscapes is an important defense against the effects of a changing climate. Such rich and multifaceted landscapes have high rates of carbon sequestration—in forests, rich soils, and grasslands. Standing forests, in particular, act like sponges for carbon dioxide. Accordingly, Indigenous lifestyles centered on conserving forest as a communal good are a vital piece of these landscapes’ contribution to mitigating climate change.

The small-scale agroecology often practiced by Indigenous communities also provides environmental benefits, including a positive effect on climate mitigation. This type of agriculture stores carbon in rich soils and fixes nitrogen in cover crops, avoids polluting fossil-fuel-based fertilizers and diesel-powered farm equipment, and increases efficiency by decentralizing food production and distribution.

A common feature of many Indigenous belief systems is a special relationship with the land; Native cultures usually approach land as a shared resource, a source of cultural and spiritual sustenance, and a marker of identity. This profound relationship with their territories means that many Indigenous people do not comprehend the idea of forests or land as a commodity that someone can own. As such, they tend to follow strong cultural codes of sustainable care and conservation of natural resources.

As the stewards of these important biocultural landscapes, Indigenous peoples play a key role in solving the current climate crisis. They must be able to represent their priorities and perspectives in global and national climate policy debates. These communities offer valuable knowledge and wisdom about climate monitoring and management. Their full participation and input in international decision-making on climate policy can enable sustainable management to sequester carbon in biocultural landscapes.

Study: Role of indigenous knowledge in land management for carbon sequestration & soil-based ecological services in Damot Sore (Wolyita), Southern Ethiopia.

The knowledge and wisdom of Indigenous groups has evolved over centuries in interdependence with their natural surroundings. Sometimes referred to as ‘Indigenous,’ ‘local,’ or ‘cultural’ knowledge, traditional knowledge is a rich understanding of the natural world, such as the properties of plants, behavior of animals, balance of ecosystems, and sources of food and medicine.

Native people’s cultural and linguistic lives reflect this robust ecological knowledge. Their stories, rituals, songs, art, and traditional practices express the depth of their understanding of their landscapes. Their languages contain words to describe the medicinal properties of plants or the tendencies of wild animals. Their habits and beliefs incorporate methods of sustainable resource management and reverence for maintaining order in the ecosystem. Their cultural traditions incorporate a historical knowledge of the landscape and practices for celebrating its continuing health. These immense bodies of knowledge have much to teach Western science, as many climate researchers are beginning to learn.

Traditional knowledge is critical for the resilience of biocultural systems. Efforts to revitalize, share, value, and apply this wisdom are important to protecting biodiversity, conserving cultural heritage, maintaining global ecological health, and mitigating climate change.

Healthy watersheds are essential to maintaining thriving landscapes and supporting community life. The rainwater and snow that drains into the waterways supply drinking water, support ecosystems, and nourish agriculture, silviculture, and aquaculture.

Indigenous cultures often have spiritual perspectives on water and water bodies. For many, water’s value goes beyond its utility to the life of humans or the landscape; the resource is seen to have intrinsic, spiritual value for which it deserves to be honored and even revered. Therefore, water is a fundamental element of biocultural landscapes for a reason more profound than its life-giving properties; it can be conceived of as a living essence of a vital landscape.

Indigenous land stewards often struggle to protect their watersheds for various reasons. Pollution, erosion and extractive and industrial activities sully watersheds. Indigenous communities are often not included in the policy planning processes that dictate watershed management. When they are, they may find a disconnect between their own culturally determined view of water’s value and the utilitarian understanding of water dominant in Western societies. Inclusion in these processes is essential because state authorities with control of Indigenous lands rarely recognize the customary rights to water that Indigenous people have.

These challenges grow increasingly urgent as Indigenous peoples feel the effects of climate change and face accelerating pollution from industries like mining. The protection of watersheds can be a life and death issue for communities and their cultures, not to mention the integrity of the biocultural landscapes they steward.

Colonial projects throughout the world have alienated many Indigenous peoples from their ancestral lands and resources and have undermined the languages, values, and governance systems that their forebears cultivated. In today’s world, these groups are disproportionately isolated, poverty-stricken, discriminated against, and disenfranchised.

The UN General Assembly began the process of rectifying this injustice in 2007, when it adopted the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) to set an international standard for the treatment of Indigenous peoples. The document sets out standards for treatment of many of the mainstays of biocultural diversity, such as land, food, cultural expression, and indigenous governance.

While the essential rights to their lands and resources are often violated by outsiders, Indigenous groups have great power to ensure that the resources they control are used and stewarded wisely. These communities have sophisticated methods of traditional resource management to ensure the sustainability of those resources and fair access to them, such as declaring certain areas off-limits to intervention or development, appointing custodians of certain resources, and controlling cultivation methods and patterns in conjunction with ecological cycles.

Indonesia’s Dayak people, for example, designate a portion of their forest home as “Tana Olen,” or forbidden, to maintain a sustainable forest ecosystem. In Tajikistan’s “Mirob” and “Mirdju” institutions, water canal custodians elected by local communities hold certain rights and perform particular duties targeted at ensuring fair and equal water distribution. Coastal communities in Melanesia manage their coral reefs through a set of complex customary regulations, or ‘taboo’.

The value of Indigenous natural resource management techniques is starting to be recognized more widely, but Indigenous peoples must be active in advancing their own causes. Raising awareness of their ancestral claims to land and resources and promoting understanding of their native methods of resource management benefits not only their communities, but also global biocultural diversity.

Majestic mountains, sacred forests, Indigenous seeds, revered rivers: these things give life, renewal, inspiration and spiritual satisfaction. ‘The Source’ is much more than just an awesome physical feature, it also comprises those mystical elements in a biocultural landscape that are less tangible, particularly with English language. It is the sacred essence of a natural spring that make it part of a creation story and not just a watery hole in the ground. It is the vast genetic universe inside of a single locally-adapted seed, or the connection you feel when you enter a special landscape and something just feels right, like you belong.

A powerful natural energy emanates within a thriving biocultural landscape. To outsiders it might be overwhelming, or indiscernible, but to the stewards of that landscape it is as essential as the air, water and soil. The Source is sacred and sustenance combined, it is the invisible thread that binds together the biological and the cultural. Organizations like Aigine in Kyrgyzstan deploy this deep relationship with the Source, and with the traditional guardians of such places, in order to find the guidance and inspiration to achieve broad societal change in the Tien Shan landscape.

The biocultural landscape approach emphasizes that both the places and elements that characterize ‘the Source’ be valued for their tangible and intangible connections that impact what happens throughout the landscape, giving identity and a sense of purpose for the peoples who live there.

Today, much traditional knowledge is at risk as elders pass away and young people are drawn to modern culture and technology to the exclusion of their traditional practices. It is more important than ever to sustain these important sets of wisdom and know-how, considering how much traditional cultures have to teach the world about mitigating climate change and managing our landscapes sustainably.

Numerous programs exist around the world to help get Indigenous youth interested and involved in learning about their traditional ways. Biocultural education programs are reaching out to young people in various ways, such Terralingua’s efforts to revive Canadian Indigenous languages in school classrooms and Grand Canyon Trust’s Summer Solstice Immersion Camp aimed at bridging the gap between Native youths and elders.

Other projects are approaching youth on their own terms by taking advantage of technology as a powerful tool to transmit cultural knowledge. The Mulka Project, for example, is creating a digital archive of the knowledge of Australia’s Yolŋu Aboriginal culture, as well as training Native youth to create their own multimedia expressions of their culture.

Healthy riparian areas—lush, water-retaining zones next to watercourses—are important elements of thriving biocultural landscapes. These wetlands that abut streams, creeks, and rivers are high in biodiversity and are essential pieces of the larger ecosystem.

Riparian areas absorb, store, and filter water in their soils before it goes into the streams and rivers. A heavy thatch of vegetation protects the soil and keeps it porous enough for water filtration. Native water-loving plants are best suited to this job. Riparian areas provide excellent breeding grounds for birds and are particularly important for migrating birds that need safe places to rest.

The human communities that populate these biocultural landscapes depend on the healthy creeks, streams, and rivers for drinking and washing water, animal husbandry, agriculture, and other uses. Craftspeople in these communities rely on native grasses and reeds in riparian areas to make important baskets, clothing and ceremonial items. The ethnobotanical knowledge and skill required to make a single basket is mind-boggling. Sustainable watershed management practices common among Native peoples keep these fragile areas thriving, ensuring the continued health of the ecosystem and the communities’ ongoing use of the fresh water and plant resources that riparian areas support.

Bioculturally diverse landscapes incorporate an interrelated set of influences, including biological life, cultural lifeways, and linguistic expression. In these places, nature and culture are deeply connected, likely having evolved together within “a complex socio-ecological adaptive system.”

Such landscapes are by their nature varied and ecologically dynamic; their land-use patterns are referred to as “mosaic” or “multifunctional” to describe the many interlocking pieces of these complex environments. They often combine agricultural, silvicultural, and pastoral areas, all of which are managed in an integrated, mutually beneficial manner. These practices can be especially useful in degraded environmental conditions or marginal landscapes, where such multifunctional, environmentally sustainable, and culturally grounded management can be restorative.

Mosaic landscapes are shaped by and serve the needs of communities with deep attachments to their lands. The communities involved gain a sense of belonging and identity from their territories, both the physical space and their methods of managing it. Therefore, they typically are extremely careful and thorough stewards of the natural resources and are possessed of a strong sense of belonging to the land.

Traditional mosaic landscapes are bounded by age-old understandings of territory and managed by inherited, Indigenous systems of governance. They can cut across official boundaries and are often not recognized by states, either politically or administratively. Their unofficial status and cross-cutting boundaries create a challenge for the formalization and scaling-up of traditional resource management practices that nurture biocultural diversity.

The biocultural landscape is a dynamic, living system that can be shaped by the smallest microbe. The soil that sustains biocultural landscapes is not only rich, but also alive. Bacteria, microbes, protozoa, fungi, nematodes, rhizomes, and arthropods represent an entire underground ecosystem without which the larger one up above would wither.

The living organisms in the dirt increase soil tilth, which is the ability of soil to support plant growth, especially in the context of gardening and farming. Soil with good tilth has large pore spaces, making it easy to till, open to air and water infiltration, and nurturing of seeds as they grow into plants and penetrate their roots into the soil. The versatile ecosystem of living soil organisms is also important in making sure plants have access to the nutrients they need to thrive.

The human cultures that are integral to biocultural landscapes need this soil life almost as much as the plants do; the dynamic, adaptable, and resilient nature of the soil allows for a particularly intimate and beneficial relationship between the landscape and its human inhabitants. Petrochemicals and insecticides, which kill life within the soil, are largely absent from thriving biocultural landscapes, which integrate natural methods to achieve soil fertility and management of pests. The soil’s composition and texture will then in turn shift the nutrient make-up of the plants and animals that the humans consume and influence farming methods, grazing practices, and other approaches to the land.

Native peoples live amongst, depend on, and steward an amazing amount of the world’s biodiversity. Indigenous peoples inhabit nearly 80 percent of the world’s most richly biodiverse terrestrial ecoregions, and about half of the globe’s Indigenous groups live in these places. Wildlife often benefits from Native people’s respectful and even reverent approach to natural resources, which combines conservative non-interference with targeted intervention to maintain ecosystem health.

Local human communities use wildlife for a wide variety of purposes and are inspired by it in many ways. Wildlife serves as a vital food source, from the whale meat that sustains Inuit cultures to the kangaroo that feeds Australian Aboriginals. Indigenous cultures tend to use every part of an animal, using meat for food, fur for warmth, tusks and teeth for tools and jewelry, and bones and hoofs for a variety of uses.

Wildlife also holds an important place in the ceremonies, stories and legends of many Indigenous cultures. Animals are seen as teachers, spirits, and sources of inspiration and beauty. Indigenous communities are stewards of the wildlife that is so important to their lives, and the relationship between them is a linchpin of biocultural landscapes around the world.

Whether people keep cows and pigs near villages or herd sheep, goats and yaks across mountain ranges, domesticated animals – bred over centuries by Indigenous peoples – are key inhabitants of a healthy biocultural system. Traditional husbandry systems are multi-purpose, with animals providing not only meat and milk, but draught power, transport, fiber, blood, and cultural values and relationship. Livestock enable communities to harvest biomass from areas too cold, dry, high or wet to sustain cropping, and can recycle crop residues and food waste right on site.

A landscape lens is essential to understanding indigenous livestock systems, as these animals often migrate through the landscape daily or seasonally; and/or have food-stocks brought to them from field, forest and riverine areas. Livestock do not only harvest plants but shape vegetation dynamics and the balance between woody plants, herbaceous plants, termites and other grazers, pests and diseases, and much more. Additionally, their manure concentrates nutrients from the wider landscape for farming and provides fuel in environments unable to support woody growth. Analyses by outsiders too often fail to capture the diverse value that livestock bring to these communities.

As with traditional crops, the world is experiencing a catastrophic decline in livestock diversity, and as with food crops the loss of breeds adapted to local landscapes and resilient to harsh and changing conditions is impacting food security. Not surprisingly, much of the remaining livestock diversity is in the hands of indigenous and tribal communities, who steward species such as yaks in Tibet, lamas and alpacas in the Andes, reindeer for the Sami, Bactrian camels in Mongolia and the heritage varieties of pigs of Southeast Asia.

In healthy biocultural landscapes, domesticated animals are extensions of human communities, a key piece of the co-evolved and continually reinforcing relationship between humans and the natural world.

Landscapes and ecosystems are fed by the hydrologic cycle, through which water moves above, on, and below the Earth’s surface. As the water moves among these spaces, it moves among states as well, transforming from liquid to vapor to solid and back. The water cycle changes the temperature of the environment and produces precipitation that plays a key role in maintaining agriculture and ecosystem health.

It is therefore critical to manage landscapes in a way that prioritizes the skilled stewardship of water resources in a way that recognizes ecological bounds and the rights of Indigenous peoples. This is precisely how water is treated within healthy biocultural landscapes; as a precious resource whose natural flows may be harnessed – not impeded – to enhance the productivity and vitality of all life within the ecosystem. As water scarcity increases around the planet, industrialized societies can learn from many Indigenous communities how to manage landscapes for food, forests, wildlife and water for the well-being of all.

The fabric of a biocultural landscape is made up of connections and relationships, between species and nutrients, water and rocks, generations and myths and pastoralists and springs. It is a rich adaptive interweave of people and place, culture and ecology. There are land-sea and urban-rural connections that shape the landscape as well as geopolitical forces and weather events. In parts of Africa, hunters are intimately connected to the honey guide in a human-bird symbiosis in which the two species collaborate to locate bees nests and to score delicious honey. Only through intergenerational knowledge transfer between elders and youth does this interspecies relationship live on.

The rich tapestry of biotic and abiotic connections comprise the fundamental building blocks of resilience. The more strong and positive interconnections that exist in a landscape, the better that landscape can withstand and recover from shocks and stresses from within and outside. Indigenous and holistic understandings of this connectedness is vital, and must be linked with Western scientific approaches in a way that values both ways of knowing.

To discover some of the interconnections in this illustrated biocultural landscape, click around below.

Landscapes must play by the rules of the biosphere if they are to maintain productivity and resilience. This means that key biophysical cycles involving carbon, phosphorus, nitrogen, water and oxygen must be kept in balance. When land and resources are viewed as patches to maximize productivity or utility, you run into great trouble at landscape scale. Too much nitrogen and phosphorous in a system caused by fertilizer overuse in fields, for example, can cause harmful algal blooms which can devastate aquatic ecosystems hundreds of kilometers away.

These biophysical cycles interact with ecological cycles, which thrive in a state of continual flux. At times we see regular cycles between, for example, an open grassland and a dense woodland, the cycle of succession driven by drought, fire or a caterpillar outbreak. At times we see more subtle shifts, but everywhere we are reminded that every species breeds, grows and dies on different time scales, and that there are cycles in everything from leaf litter to epidemic disease.

Biophysical and ecological cycles operate on the rhythm of days, of seasons, years, climate cycles, and in relation to major change events that may be millennial. So do species, people and societies.

Biocultural landscapes add cultural cycles to the interface of these biophysical and ecological cycles. Indeed indigenous knowledge and value systems are always rooted in the notion of cycles, as the work of Dennis Martinez and the Indigenous Peoples’ Restoration Network has long emphasized. Seven-generation thinking is not only long-term thinking, its cycle thinking.

For humanity and all other life to survive and thrive on this planet, landscapes and seascapes must be managed with the rhythms of nature, and at the scales and speed with which generational and cultural change happens in communities. Re-establishing a forest, or the valuing of trees in a culture, cannot be achieved any quicker than trees or people reach maturity, whatever the time frame given to such an effort by funding cycles and deadlines.

We will not – for long – live outside and beyond the planet’s cycles.  Intact biocultural landscapes can therefore serve as a model for cycle-rooted thinking and the human footprint.

Click around to learn more about how cycles play into a biocultural landscape.

Inhabitants of all shapes and sizes are found in a healthy biocultural landscape. From the depths of the soil to the mountain peaks and above into the sky, populations here rely on one another and form a vivid tapestry of life. An unseen underground community of microorganisms – bacteria, fungi, protozoa – work in concert with nematodes, arthropods and other organisms to form a living soil ecosystem for the growth of plants and people. Animals, wild and domesticated, can both thrive in a biocultural landscape as can humans, those currently living and those who exist as spirits. In fact, a healthy biocultural landscape often contains spirit guardians that help govern traditional resource management and maintain taboo regimes.

Discover some of the inhabitants in this illustrated biocultural landscape by clicking in the image or on the buttons below.

When a biocultural landscape is intact, a bounty of biomass and cultural riches thrives as inhabitants, cycles and ecological pieces move together in a dynamic dance. Instead of economistic meaures of productivity and development, we look at bounty to understand what natural systems give rather than merely what humans extract; to appreciate the on-going yield from nature’s cycles. Bounty can also mean abundance, in high rates of biodiversity as well as the visceral sense that there is plenty to go around, for all creatures, while resilience is maintained. As such we honor the essential fact that peoples’ relationship with the earth has to include sustenance and livelihood, but is not limited to that end.

The bio-bounty in a landscape begets a richness of culture as humans prosper and weave and cultivate, sing and make art and ritual celebrating their landscape and the abundance that it provides. Click around below and in the illustrated landscape to explore the bountiful connections.

In healthy landscapes, it is not only the charismatic mega-fauna that serve as keystone species; many others beings – large and tiny –  provide essential services to the functioning of the larger system. When a landscape is homogenized by mono-cultural food systems, however, the species that connect them together or use them as stopping points on migrations typically lose out. Biocultural landscapes, on the other hand, with their multifaceted land-use patterns, stewarded watersheds and diverse agro-ecological systems, continue to allow diverse connections and provide important models for how to maintain robust populations of migratory and pollinator species.

Pollinators are essential for maintaining the world’s food supply and ensuring crop health and diversity. One-third of the world’s food production depends on the work of pollinators such as bees, beetles, birds, flies and butterflies; services being further unraveled at landscape scale by pesticide use in fields and gardens. The solutions for sustaining pollination services depend upon maintaining diversity within landscapes and integrating a wide variety of different plants and crops into farm lands and their boundaries, ecologically.

In recognition of how important Indigenous knowledge is to preserving the pollinators essential to our food supply, the Rome-based organization Indigenous Partnership for Agrobiodiversity and Food Sovereignty (IPAFS) created the Indigenous Pollinators Network to join a variety of organizations from around the globe in the project of linking traditional and modern scientific knowledge in service of preserving pollinators.

The Arbore, in Ethiopia, connect passionately with the birds that migrate through their lands, welcoming the storks with a dance that reflects their clicking beaks. In NE Turkey, Cagan Sekercioglu of Kuzeydoga has worked hard to protect the otherwise nondescript little lake, Kuyucuk, where up to 40,000 birds per day of 200+ species pass through, including the critically endangered white-headed duck.

The long-standing practices of indigenous communities to maintain sacred woodland groves and community-conserved woodlands has proven an effective way to maintain bird diversity in landscapes with multiple benefits for people, agriculture and wider biodiversity. Birds can even serve as allies in the procurement of calories, connecting people and the forests, such as in the remarkable partnership between the Dorobo peoples of Northern Kenya and the greater honeyguide.

Sacred sites are ecologically and spiritually potent places in a landscape that the local people revere and protect. These can be sources of water, special groves or forests, ancestral burial grounds, animal nurseries, mythical mountains, rock formations, or any other landscape feature that figures into a Native people’s territory, history and mythology.

“Sacred” as it applies to sites important to Indigenous peoples may not necessarily mean “sacrosanct” or “holy” so much as it means a place that is spiritually vital, essential to cultural identity, or worthy of special consideration and protection. Sacred sites are not always distinct and bounded; the spirit residing there may also inhabit the surrounding landscape as well. And several key sites may be connected into a network or web of meaning, encompassing an entire territory.

Sacred sites help maintain biocultural diversity around the world. They contribute to the health of ecosystems, the integrity of landscapes, and the cultural identity of local people. These places often hold profound meaning and represent nodes of immense power in Indigenous belief systems. As such, Native peoples find it essential to conserve the natural heritage of these sites. They might feel that their cultural, spiritual, and emotional wellbeing, and the cohesion and peace of their communities depend on it.

Those who protect sacred places—often called “custodians”—are essential caretakers of the world’s natural and cultural heritage. Increasingly, some governments and the conservation community are understanding the value of these sites and entrusting Indigenous groups to protect their sacred sites to maintain biodiversity. Some countries have enacted legislation defining these sites and calling for their preservation, and many are calling for international agreement on the definition and importance of sacred sites.

The people who live on and steward the bounty of the land are of course central to biocultural landscapes. Their cultural practices, resource management methods, and beliefs are as important to the form of the immediate environment as are the ecological processes that shape the landscape. In many cases, the cultures and languages of these traditional stewards have co-evolved with the land itself.

Indigenous peoples, also sometimes called tribal, Native, Aboriginal or first peoples, are recognized as the primary stewards of Earth’s most sensitive and important natural resources. The territories that they live in and care for comprise some 22 percent of global land surface and hold about 80 percent of the world’s biodiversity. This large concentration of the world’s natural wealth falls in Indigenous lands, despite Indigenous peoples constituting under 5% of the world’s population.

While the definition of “Indigenous” can be contentious, these peoples tend to have small populations and speak (or used to speak) their own languages. They have (or had) their own lands or territories, to which they are connected in various ways. They also tend to self-identify as “Indigenous.”

There are about 370 million Indigenous people living in around 70 countries. There are at least 5,000 Native groups on earth in Indigenous habitats that range from the Amazon forest to the Arctic to the Australian outback. They shape these environments just as these environments shape them.

The artful, bustling contours of a terraced agroforestry system teeming with birds; a strong yak grazing in a high mountain pasture; colorful, ancestral patterns woven into a flowing garment; clear water streaming from a snow-capped sacred mountain: this type of beauty abounds when culture and nature thrive together.

Tragically, in the notion of progress that sustains the dominant system, beauty is discounted and forgotten, relegated to ‘intangible value’ in economic decisions. But beauty is a key barometer of landscape health, it manifests in cultural expressions that sprout from the earth and flourishes in nature, which is unruly and messy as well as beautiful. Like a celebratory dance based on the movements of fellow animals, a biocultural landscape is a lively and evolving work of art comprised of complimentary and opposing forces. Dancers fall out of balance and swoon, regain their footing and shout in joy. Beauty is celebrated and inscribed by the inhabitants of a biocultural landscape, which is itself a beautiful venue for a wild and never-ending dance.

Click around in the boxes below to discover some biocultural beauty.

By its very nature a biocultural landscape is shaped by – and shapes – human culture. Over the course of time, how people work out the distribution of water and nutrients through an agroecosystem, for example, from a mountain top down to the valley, is a biocultural phenomenon that can result in an artful mosaic on the land. Deploying physical interventions like canals alongside ritual and social practices to ensure fair water distribution ingrains cultural identity in the land and waters, and shapes biodiversity in defined ways. As agrarian cultures shape and decorate the land, many pastoralist cultures may decorate and shape their own bodies in a reflection of the bounty of their landscapes. These adaptive interactions between nature and culture lead to coevolution as systems and species tango together.

Language, of course, is a central part of culture, and there is a direct correlation between high rates of biodiversity and linguistic diversity in landscapes. To learn more about how culture springs from and shapes the land, click around on the items below.