Biocultural Diversity in Monsoon Asia: The Mekong and the Forests

Deforestation and dam building together with climate change along the Lancang/Mekong have upended centuries and even millennia of biocultural management. The river and the rainforests in this part of monsoon Asia provide the livelihood for over 70 million people in Yunnan and SE Asia and are among the most important rainforest cover and carbon sinks in the world after the Amazon basin. It is a major biodiversity hotspot. The loss of local knowledge has contributed to greatly the loss of healthy ecosystems. The paper considers not only this loss but also the ways in which indigenous communities and civil society organizations are pushing back against the overpowering profit motive of the "epistemic engine" of the capitalist nation-state system.