From local to global this article belongs toAmbio’s 50th Anniversary Collection. Theme: BiodiversityConservationMadhav Gadgil, Fikret Berkes, Carl FolkeWhen the three of us (Gadgil, Berkes, and Folke) started working together in 1992 in Stockholm at the BeijerInstitute of Ecological Economics, we discovered a common interest in the relevance of indigenous knowledge for biodiversity conservation. At the time, there were publications related to traditional ecological knowledge inhuman ecology, cultural anthropology, and ethnobiology. But no literature existed on biodiversity conservation and indigenous peoples with a global perspective. We sought to address that gap with a short paper inAmbioon biodiversity: ‘‘enhancement activities of indigenous peoples, the knowledge base underlying it, as well as linkages to practices dealing with ecosystems and related belief systems’’.
