Release announcement: Langscape: Vol. 4:1, Summer 2015, The People's Issue - Part One: Flows and Bridges

Terralingua's magazine Langscape is a unique voice for biocultural diversity—the interlinked diversity of life in nature and culture. It aims to bring biocultural diversity to the general public through thought pieces, reports from the field, personal accounts, stories, photo essays, and artwork.

This issue focuses on a theme of “Flows and Bridges”. Flows: the flow of life in nature and culture, in space and time; the flow of water; the flow of memory; the flow of communication and understanding across cultures; the flow of art, dance, and beauty. And Bridges: bridges across often troubled waters, linking traditional and scientific knowledge, traditional solutions and contemporary innovations, traditional informal education and western formal education, local situations and global awareness and action; bridges of solidarity among individuals and communities; bridges over our gaps in knowledge and understanding, opening new paths and new hopes for sustaining the biocultural diversity of life.

You can view the Editorial and the Table of Contents  on the Langscape website, where you can also find out how to receive the magazine as well as access web-only content.

‘Participatory data’ and the formulation of Tourism Development Area Management Plans in Samoa

Developing agriculture to better serve tourism markets in the Pacific is knowledge intensive. The first step is to determine the tourism market’s demands for agricultural produce and then to match this with what is available from local production. But much of this information is not currently readily available.

Bridging this information gap was a key objective of the recent Agribusiness Forum: Linking the agrifood sector to the tourism-related markets coordinated by CTA and the Pacific Islands Private Sector Organisation (PIPSO) with support from the Secretariat of the Pacific Community (SPC), the Pacific Agriculture Policy Programme (PAPP) and the intra-ACP Agricultural Policy Programme (Intra-ACP APP). This event, held in Fiji from 1 to 3 July 2015, brought together experts from government agencies, farmers’ organisations, community-based organisations, remote sensing and research bodies to identify the data gaps and discuss how to go forward.

Giving a community perspective, Amia Luatua from the Samoa Tourism Authority, shared Samoa’s work on tourism planning, showing how communities have used participatory 3D modelling (P3DM) to collect data that have been used to inform tourism developments.

Weaponizing Maps: Indigenous Peoples and Counterinsurgency in the Americas

Maps play an indispensable role in indigenous peoples’ efforts to secure land rights in the Americas and beyond. Yet indigenous peoples did not invent participatory mapping techniques on their own; they appropriated them from techniques developed for colonial rule and counterinsurgency campaigns, and refined by anthropologists and geographers.

Through a series of historical and contemporary examples from Nicaragua, Canada, and Mexico, this book explores the tension between military applications of participatory mapping and its use for political mobilization and advocacy.

The authors analyze the emergence of indigenous territories as spaces defined by a collective way of life--and as a particular kind of battleground.

Weaponizing Maps: Indigenous Peoples and Counterinsurgency in the Americas
Paperback – March 5, 2015
by Joe Bryan PhD (Author), Denis Wood PhD (Author)