Terralingua establishes a home at NAU’s Center for Sustainable Environments

The Terralingua Society, a group of scholars promoting partnerships to protect biological and linguistic diversity, has established its home office in the Northern Arizona University’s Center for Sustainable Environments (CSE). The office is located in the Bilby Research Center on NAU’s south campus.

Terralingua is less than four years old as a professional society, but has already had tremendous impact on activists and scholars through its meetings and its book, “On Biocultural Diversity,” edited by Luisa Maffi and published this April by the Smithsonian Institution Press. Maffi and her Terralingua co-founder David Harmon, Director of the George Wright Society, will be on hand at NAU’s Bilby Center form 4-5 p.m. on the 18th to inaugurate the office.

Dr. Patrick Pynes, coordinator of the new Laboratory for Ethnoecology and Indigenous Mapping at NAU, will manage the Terralingua office. The Laboratory has recently received grants from the Ford Foundation to support Terralingua’s next developmental phase. It has also recently received grants from the Laird-Norton Foundation and the Greenville Foundation to initiate mapping, sustainability assessments and possible certification of non-timber forest products derived from the Colorado Plateau’s indigenous communities.

Dr. Pynes is looking forward to working with a diverse group of people who share a passion and concern for language and the land. “NAU’s Terralingua office has tremendous potential to bring together people and ideas that are not usually thought of as having very much in common,” says Dr. Pynes. “It will create bridges between indigenous and non-indigenous scientists, linguists, land managers, anthropologists and community members. There is great potential for communication and cooperation across disciplinary and cultural boundaries. We have a real opportunity to heal divisions that have existed a long time, and to actually accomplish productive things on the ground.”

The invitation to Terralingua to locate at NAU came from CSE director Gary Nabhan, who has been associated with Terralingua since its founding in 1996. “Terralingua has fostered remarkable collaborations between native language teachers, ecological restorationists, and human rights activists to ensure that cultures, their languages and their habitats are safeguarded and not lost,” says Nabhan. “It is an honor for NAU to become this professional society’s hosting institution, so that the diverse tribes of our region can benefit from Terralingua’s pragmatic and far-reaching research.”

Now in its second year at NAU, the Center for Sustainable Environments brings together the talents and expertise of scientists, educators, independent scholars, business leaders, government agencies, students, community members, and other stakeholders to seek creative solutions to environmental problems through novel initiatives that safeguard natural and cultural values.

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