The Forest is a Library

Biodiversity has often been described through an old colonial habit: wild things over here, culture over there. Conservation was imagined as the negotiated border between them. The framing is convenient, persistent, and increasingly inadequate.

Over the past few decades, however, that view has been changing. Conservation biology, historical ecology, ethnobotany, Indigenous scholarship, and biocultural diversity research all challenge the fantasy of a pristine nature separated from people. The sharper question is no longer whether humans belong within ecological stories. It is which relationships with nature have damaged ecosystems, and which have helped sustain and enrich them over time.

The Andes offer one of the clearest examples, though the concept must be named carefully. This is not biodiversity in the broadest sense of species diversity. It is agrobiodiversity: the extraordinary diversity of cultivated life shaped through human knowledge, selection, memory, and exchange.

The Andes are home to thousands of documented varieties of potato. Quechua-speaking communities have been cultivating, naming, exchanging, eating, storing, and protecting them for several thousand years. Each variety carries its own name, altitude, and role within meals, planting cycles, medicinal practices, or ceremonies. The diversity was not simply produced by the mountains and later discovered by humans. It was shaped through a long conversation between climate, altitude, soil, seed, taste, ritual, necessity, and culture.

The seed is the script. The community is the library.

This is not a romantic claim. It reflects the core premise of biocultural diversity research. Over decades, Luisa Maffi and her colleagues at Terralingua mapped biological hotspots alongside linguistic ones. The two maps are not identical in every detail, but they speak to one another with striking force. Where biological diversity is high, linguistic diversity is often high as well. Where languages are disappearing, ecological knowledge is often disappearing with them. The relationship is not decorative. It is structural.

Landscapes as Living Archives

Historical ecology has provided the deeper evidence for this view. Historical ecology studies long-term human-environment relationships. The field shows that landscapes are not static backdrops, but dynamic environments shaped by centuries of human presence. Scholars such as William Balée and Carole Crumley have helped demonstrate that humans have not only destroyed environments. In many places, they have also managed, cultivated, selected, burned, planted, protected, and transformed them in ways that increased ecological complexity.

This distinction matters. Biodiversity is millions of years older than human culture. Species came first. Ecosystems came first. Human societies arrived later and learned from the living worlds around them. Forests, rivers, mountains, soils, animals, plants, and seasons gave form to culture: to food, medicine, architecture, language, trade, ritual, and myth. But once cultures emerged within those ecosystems, they also began to shape them in return.

Some cultures have done this destructively. The great deforestations of Europe, accelerated through agriculture, empire, industry, and extraction, are one version of that story. Much of the modern world has treated nature as warehouse, frontier, or fuel. But in parts of the Amazon, the Andes, and other Indigenous territories, ancestral cultures developed more reciprocal systems of management, where use did not necessarily mean exhaustion, and knowledge carried obligations.

Brigitte Baptiste, the Colombian cultural landscape ecologist who led the Humboldt Institute for nearly a decade and now leads Universidad Ean in Bogotá, has been making this argument for years with a kind of impatient elegance. There is no pristine nature waiting to be saved from culture. The Amazon, the Andes, the cloud forests, the páramo, all of them have been read, walked, harvested, planted, named, burned, restored, sung, feared, and storied for generations. To imagine them as untouched is to erase the people who have lived with them, and that erasure is its own form of extinction.

The science has been catching up. Archaeologists and historical ecologists working across the Amazon basin have shown that parts of the rainforest hold unusually high concentrations of useful species, including Brazil nut, cacao, açaí, and peach palm, in patterns that look less like untouched wilderness and more like the living legacy of sophisticated pre-Columbian populations. Significant stretches of Amazonian soil, including the famously dark and fertile terra preta, are anthropogenic. They were created by people over generations through composting, burning, charcoal, organic waste, and pottery fragments. These soils remain fertile centuries later, demonstrating intentional landscape transformation at a massive scale.

That does not mean “humans made the Amazon.” The forest is older, larger, and more complex than any human intervention. But it does mean that what many outsiders have called wilderness is, in many places, also an archive of human intelligence.

In Peru, the cultural reading of biodiversity has quietly become one of the country’s defining contributions to the global conversation. At the heart of this effort is Central, the world-renowned restaurant in Lima led by chef Virgilio Martínez, together with his sister Malena Martínez and partner Pía León. Central has earned global acclaim not merely for inventive cuisine, but for treating the plate as a map of Peru’s ecosystems. Its tasting menus move across altitudes, from the Pacific coast to the high Andes to the Amazon, presenting ingredients in their ecological and cultural context.

Mater Iniciativa, the nonprofit research arm founded by the Martínez siblings and closely tied to Central, has spent more than a decade mapping the country’s ingredients by altitude and ecosystem, from sea level to above four thousand metres. Working with Indigenous communities, scientists, anthropologists, and local knowledge holders, Mater collects, documents, tastes, names, and credits the sources. The argument underneath is not that culture invents biodiversity from nothing. It is that biodiversity becomes legible, usable, protectable, and meaningful through knowledge systems rooted in place.

The Parque de la Papa, the Quechua-run conservation territory near Cusco, has been doing related work from the other direction for years: protecting more than a thousand varieties of native potato in active cultivation, in the hands of the families who selected and sustained them in the first place. This is agrobiodiversity not as museum specimen, but as living practice.

Rosa Vásquez Espinoza, the Peruvian chemical biologist who founded Amazon Research Internacional, makes a third version of the case from the laboratory side. Her work on Amazonian microbes treats the rainforest as a chemistry library, one that has been writing itself for millions of years and that local communities have learned to read through medicine, fermentation, food, and daily life. None of these projects read the Amazon as backdrop. All of them treat biodiversity as a form of literacy, not merely a stockpile.

The Amazon as Cultural Memory

Loreto is the same argument in a different register. The Indigenous languages spoken across this region carry the names of plants, the seasons of fish, the codes for what to harvest and what to leave, the stories that explain why a particular tree should not be cut. When linguists call a language endangered, ecologists should be in the room. Every lost language is not only a cultural tragedy. It is also a collapse of ecological memory.

The aguaje climbed by trained harvesters in the peatlands, the medicinal honey of native stingless bees, the manioc varieties of the chacra gardens, the knowledge of fish migrations, flood pulses, medicinal barks, edible fruits, and dangerous spirits, none of these are accidents of nature alone. They are the long, patient result of cultures that learned to live by paying attention.

Historical ecology reinforces this truth: what we call nature in many regions is often also the enduring legacy of sophisticated, place-based management systems. Human agency has not always diminished ecological complexity. Under certain cultural systems, it has helped maintain and even enhance it.

Conservation Beyond Preservation

The United Nations theme for this year’s Biodiversity Day, Acting locally for global impact, sounds like a slogan, and it is. But underneath it lies a more demanding argument. Local action is not local in the small sense, charming and gestural. Rather, it is cultural, linguistic, ecological, and political.

Listening to the people who have worked with a place long before the existence of protected areas becomes essential. In many cases, the language spoken within a community forms part of the ecosystem’s memory rather than a footnote to it.

The harder version of conservation requires something deeper: paying the people who hold the knowledge, crediting the practices that sustained biodiversity, protecting land rights, supporting intergenerational transmission, and resisting the urge to flatten living relationships into lists of endangered species.

Biodiversity, in the end, is not what remains when culture withdraws. Nor is it something culture simply creates. It is older than us, and larger than us. But in many places, biodiversity and culture have shaped each other for so long that trying to protect one while ignoring the other is a category error.

The forest is a library. The species are its living texts. The languages are its catalogue. The communities are among its readers, keepers, and translators.

May 22 is a useful date for remembering that conservation cannot be only about protecting life from people. It must also be about protecting the cultures that know how to live with life, without destroying the conditions that make it possible.