ABSTRACT
She occupies a voice, an odor, a silhouette, a set of movements: such is the oikos. She takes no one to court to safeguard her property. She doesn’t need a soil, a blood, or even an apartment; all she needs is to belong, oikeion}
Introduction
In the previous chapters the “grand narrative” of intellectual property law was examined, and its framing of traditional knowledge and conferral of “authenticity” problematised. Now turning to possible alternative or additional platforms for protection, the relationship between traditional knowledge and biodiversity seems to present important possibilities, particularly in the “location” of cultural diversity in the local enrichment of biodiversity. Chapter 2 considered the relationship between intellectual property and the management of risk in innovation, where knowledge is transformed as information commodities for potentially global consumption. In many ways, the globalisation of ecological risk, while motivating public concern and recognition of international obligations towards biodiversity,1 2 even if that recognition is not always undertaken,3 may at the same time marginalise community in the context of local biodiversity and ecological knowledge. John Scott, Secretariat of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues,4 describes this inconsistency between ecology as a global narrative, and traditional ecological knowledge:
I was working with an elder who was complaining that there was too much rainforest, because the area that they traditionally burnt off to create grassy slopes to bring in grass grazing animals had been taken over by the national parks, and none of it was being burnt off. There has been a direct loss of the biodiversity because of the mismanagement by the national parks. So the national parks said, “Aboriginal people used to bum off
1 Lyotard (1993b): 96. 2 Fiona Macmillan notes that it was increasing public concern that motivated the
development of the CBD, the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, and Agenda 21. Macmillan (2001): 119.
