Biodiversity

As part of preparation and building momentum for the 2021 UN Food Systems Summit more than 900 Independent Dialogues have taken place around the world. These Summit Dialogues aim to offer a seat at the table to all interested stakeholders, giving them an opportunity to debate, collaborate, and provide input into deliberations on the future of food.  

This article explores the notion of the need to decolonize systems thinking and awareness. Taking a specifically Indigenous approach to both knowledge creation and knowledge sharing, the authors look at awareness based systems change via a Haudenosaunee (Mohawk) two row visual code. The authors explore the sacred space between Indigenous and non-Indigenous ways of thinking and knowing, to identify pathways for peaceful co-existence of epistemologies.

The Center for Biodiversity and Conservation hosts a biannual webinar series on Indicators of Well-being in, with, by, and for Indigenous Peoples and local communities. The webinars are intended to provide a virtual platform for learning and exchange among practitioners who are actively using, or have interest in using, place-based monitoring and reporting indicators on well-being or related metrics that bridge social and ecological dimensions, nature and culture, people and place.

Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, a mother, and a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings—asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass—offer us gifts and lessons, even if we’ve forgotten how to hear their voices. In a rich braid of reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living wo

From our Gulf of Maine Blue Marble Hub in Portland Maine, we have a Love Story about Nature. In today's world, the dominant worldview is one where humans have control over nature. What if our love for the abundance that nature provides can be translated as legal status as a living being, not a bundle of ecosystem services that we quantify and sell like a commodity? The Latin word anima (source of the word animal) is actually translated as spirit, breath, life.

With Michael Quinn Patton, Utilization-Focused Evaluation and Glenn G. Page, SustainaMetrix.

The Blue Marble refers to the view of Earth from space with no human-imposed boundaries. Blue Marble Evaluation watches for and interprets the implications of change efforts that are interconnected in the global system. Global Systems Change Evaluation includes attention to and analysis of the interconnection of top-down globalization processes and bottom-up processes that incorporate local knowledge and indigenous wisdom.

Transforming fisheries and coastal governance anywhere on the plant is a complex and long-term challenge as issues are inter-related, cross-scale, cross-sector and require a collaborative and adaptive approach.  This case study in the Western Region of Ghana illustrates different values, perspectives, and worldviews and adds to the growing evidence that meeting this challenge is aided by a Blue Marble approach to evaluation and adaptive learning.