Description
This session will facilitate transdisciplinary reflection and dialogue on the relationships between people and plants in the context of Mediterranean Cultural Landscapes. Lying at the intersection of vastly different cultures and biomes, the Mediterranean has long been a space characterised by movement and change. Here, people-plant relationships – and the landscapes in which they are embedded – are continuously being transformed by migrations, natural and cultural cross-pollinations, human and natural disasters and the innovations that blossom in this fertile ground. As these transformations accelerate in a context of rapid socioecological change, we are pressed to find new ways of coping with our precarious and indeterminate environmental futures.
The session brings the conservation sciences into dialogue with emerging social scientific concepts that ‘disrupt’ our binary perspective of nature as separate from culture. In doing so, it hopes to find new spaces for creative and joint reflection on how to conserve Mediterranean plants in rapidly changing landscapes. In particular, it will explore how we can harness the dynamic, active and reciprocal relationships that exist between people and plants in the Mediterranean to sustain existing community conservation initiatives and to build innovative plant conservation actions across the region.
The session will be composed of 10 Pecha Kucha talks followed by an interactive dialogue session.
Topics to address
- Changing relationships between people and plants
- Transformation, loss and maintenance of traditional plant knowledge
- Agrobiodiversity and seed conservation
- Community-based conservation initiatives and their diversity
- Innovative approaches to plant conservation, particularly in the context of rapid environmental change
Chair of the session
Emily Caruso (Global Diversity Foundation).
Co-Chair of the session
Ugo D’Ambrosio (GDF Mediterranean Ethnobiology Programme Director).
