ABSTRACT
Over the last decades, children are interacting less and less with biodiversity. This ongoing alienation of humans from nature, the so called “extinction of experience,” is having negative consequences on environmental care and conservation. Possible drivers of this shift not only produce a loss of engagement with local biodiversity; they can also trigger a cycle of detachment of children from the biocultural memory of their territories. Elders fill a special role in communities-of-practice by linking individuals to the broader community, connecting the past with the future, and thus acting as foundations of biocultural memory. This chapter describes an initiative and proposes a transdisciplinary methodology to nurture biocultural memory, based on the processes of participation and reification, in local communities-of-practice. We present the project “Listening to Elders” which aimed to facilitate intergenerational dialogues between children and elders in three rural Mapuche Indigenous schools (∼90 children), southern Andes of Chile. “Listening to Elders” used birds and forests as bases of local narratives about long-term and large-scale changes in the territory over generations. We collaboratively co-created a 5-step cycle to nurture biocultural memory.
