This book demonstrates the linkages between local languages, traditional knowledge, and biodiversity at the landscape level in Asia, providing a fresh approach to discussions on Asia’s biocultural diversity. The volume carries forward earlier analyses but importantly focuses on ‘traditional ecological calendars’, ‘folk medicine’ and ‘folk names’ in the context of the vital importance of maintaining biological, cultural and linguistic diversity. It does this by addressing a range of cases and issues in relation to Southeast Asia: Brunei Darussalam, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and the culturally connected area of North-East India. The several chapters demonstrate the ways in which the various forms of knowledge of the environment and its categorisations are important in such areas as landscape and resource management and conservation. They also demonstrate that environmental knowledge and the practical skills which accompany it are not necessarily widely shared. This booksends important messages to those who care about the sustainability of our environment, the maintenance of its biocultural diversity, or at least the maintenance of what remains of it because much has changed, and the impacts of culture-carrying human beings on nature. This interdisciplinary collection draws from a wide range of disciplines, and is of appeal to students and scholars in anthropology, geography, biodiversity and linguistics.

Dr. F. Merlin Franco is an ethnobiologist interested in the interrelationship between human culture, language, and biodiversity. He has been collaborating with various local communities in India, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei Darussalam on research projects that look into traditional ecological calendars, cultural landscapes, and folk classifications. Merlin believes that calendars and calendar-keeping are important instruments in the fight against loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services.

Dr. Magne Knudsen is a social anthropologist interested in how small-scale fishers and farmers in Southeast Asia make a living and respond to new pressures and opportunities. His Ph.D. work focused on the differential responses of fishing families in the Philippines to a declining resource base, coastal property and tourism developments, and government and NGO efforts to protect the environment.  More recently, he has expanded hisresearch to the southern Philippines, where he examines agrarian transition among settler farmers and indigenous groups in upland Mindanao, and to Brunei Darussalam, where he looks at human uses of the Temburong River.

Dr. Noor Hasharina Hassan is a human geographer interested in understanding the people’s relationship with their economic, social, and cultural (and, to some extent, environment) landscape. Primarily, her research focus examines consumption patterns and sustainable development in Southeast Asia. Her research on consumption found the existence of calendrical timing to people’s consumption with much of it related to cultural practices.