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  | Published on Sunday, March 26, 2006 by the lndependent/UK |
Global SOS: Save Our Sacred Sites
That's the message of a new campaign as some of our rarest speciescan be found on land and water revered by tribes the world over
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by Geffrey Lean |
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Environmentalists are to campaign for the protection of the ancient sacred sites of tribal religions, as a way of saving endangered wildlife. The "skull caves" in Kenya, a Mexican desert where it is believed the sun was born, a "spiritual park" in the Peruvian Andes and West African islands where sex isbanned are among sites being fought for at a giant intergovernmental conservation conference in Brazil this week.
CONSERVING BIODIVERSITY BECOMES SACRED QUEST
A lake in the mountains (Cayambe-Coca/Ecuador). (Rainer Heubeck / Still Pictures) |
The million-pound Conservation of Biodiversity-Rich Sacred Natural Sites campaign springs from a recognition that many of the mountains, forests,islands, lakes and groves revered by indigenous peoples contain rare that are threatened elsewhere.This is no accident. Ancient traditions and taboos surrounding the sites have often commanded respect for nature, prohibited hunting, or simply kept people away.Rigoberta Menchu, the Guatemalan Indian leader and 1992 Nobel Peace Prize winner who is backing the campaign, said: "Where indigenous peoples liveis also where the greatest diversity of nature exists. The values on which we have built our complex systems are founded in the ethical, spiritual and sacred nature that links our peoples with the whole work of creation."Many of the sites are now under threat as the old religions fade and pressures from development and tourism increase.The campaign, which will be launched when the 188 members ofthe UN Convention on Biological Diversity meet in Curitiba, Brazil, will make a handful of sites its priority.These include Kenya's last remaining tropical rainforest, Kakamega, and the site of the skull caves of the Taita people, which is threatened by loggers. Wirikuta, in Mexico's wildlife-rich Chihuahuan desert, is sacred to the Huichol people but is under pressure from agriculture andhunting, while Peru's glacier-rich Vilcanota Spiritual Park is increasingly visited by tourists, and the Boloma-Bijagos archipelago off Guinea-Bissau is endangered by overfishing."There is clear and growing evidence of a link between reverence for the land and a breadth of unique and special plants and animals," said Klaus Toepfer, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme, which isbacking the campaign. "Sadly, sacred sites are also under threat, and there is an urgent need to help local, indigenous and traditional peoples safeguard their heritage. This can do much to conserve the biological and genetic diversity upon which we all depend."A similar alliance between religion and conservation safeguards churchyards and other sacred sites in Britain, and the new project buildson this. Conservationists and religious leaders have been working together for 20 years since the Duke of Edinburgh - then international president of WWF - proposed a combined strategy in 1986. That meeting, in Assisi, Italy, resulted in the Alliance of Religions and Conservation which, among other campaigns, conserves sacred areas in Britain.Its Living Churchyards project has persuaded 6,000churches to conserve their graveyards for wildlife, banning pesticides, by mowing them only once a year and ensuring that birds, reptiles, insects and bats thrive in an increasingly urbanised landscape. These practices are now spreading to municipal cemeteries and those of non-Christian faiths.British churchyards also contain several hundred yews old enough to have been alive at the time of Christ,...