- Both biological and linguistic diversity are greatest in tropical regions, and both are endangered by unprecedented rates of road expansion.
- Will current paradigms for language and species protection help to protect this wealth of diversity into the next century, a new op-ed asks.
- While a “no roads” approach is unlikely to work in areas of overlapping cultural and biological richness, a framework of “people with nature” that acknowledges issues of justice and social equity, recognizes that local people have a right to environmental self-determination, understands that people and other-than-human species are intrinsically intertwined, and that solutions must be inclusive, could work, this commentary argues.
- This article is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily Mongabay.
The tropics are celebrated as hotspots of biological diversity and renowned as supply houses for food, fiber and pharmacies. They also harbor linguistic diversity, a proxy for cultural diversity, critical to people’s health, well-being and identity.
Embedded in linguistic variation is a library of human knowledge, cosmologies and institutions. The correlation between biological and linguistic/cultural diversity may offer a “golden opportunity” to combine resources for success. Whether a win-win is realistic depends on how the threats to ecological and ethnolinguistic communities in the tropics are managed.
Will emerging conservation frameworks rise to the challenge?
A key — and troubling — similarity between biological and language diversity is that both are endangered globally. Experts estimate that about a third to a half of the world’s more than 7,000 languages are likely to “go dormant,” i.e., go extinct, this century. This translates to the loss of about one language per month before the year 2100, and around 120 languages between 2022 and 2032, UNESCO’s designated Indigenous Languages Decade.
On the biological front, extinctions of plant and animal species are ticking away at about 1,000 times faster than historical rates. And while the factors behind the diversification of languages, cultures and species are not yet clear, there is a common force driving both species extinctions and linguistic homogenization: roads.
Roads have a homogenizing and detrimental effect on natural ecosystems. As precursors to agricultural expansion, resource extraction and urbanization, roadways carve up forests into remnants that are edged with warmer, windier and drier conditions, and offer entry to predators, competitors and nonnative species. Even throughways in parks and protected areas cause disruptions like vehicular noise and pollution, not to mention wildlife deaths. Collectively termed “road effects,” these impacts can extend well beyond the immediate edge of the forest-road interface, possibly up to several kilometers into the forest. As specialized, forest-dwelling species are replaced by generalists — including human-tolerant, widespread, weedy or nonnative species — and as ecosystems are replaced by built environments and monocultures, biodiversity is pitched onto a slippery slope toward degradation.
Recent language endangerment studies point to road density as a principal determinant in the erosion of global language diversity as well. When roads slice through ethnolinguistic communities, they usher in the language of commerce with socioeconomic pressures that incentivize its adoption, particularly by young people. School systems are encouraged (and sometimes forced) to teach in the rising language, and young people are inculcated with the value of fluency and adaptation. Unless educational and cultural institutions, commerce and government protect language diversity, the local language will lose vitality.
More than 40 million km (25 million miles) of roads cover Earth’s surface area today, and are multiplying faster than ever before, particularly in developing nations, including biodiverse/cultural hotspots. Studies of road density in two such areas (tropical Asia-Pacific and the Brazilian Amazon) reveal that the extent of roadways are three to six times greater than global databases report, due to unmapped and often unpaved “ghost roads” built by agriculturalists, miners and loggers, among others. Almost inevitably, newly opened swaths lead to accelerating deforestation and permanent habitat loss, not because roads are driving agricultural expansion or resource extraction, but because they facilitate it. Deforestation is contagious, and ghost roads are the first vectors of spread.
A burgeoning scientific discipline, road ecology, seeks to understand and measure road impacts to guide mitigation efforts. Conservation biologists advocate strongly for roadless wilderness, especially in existing protected areas. More than 200 countries have signed onto the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, agreeing to protect 30% of global terrestrial and marine areas by 2030.
To reach these so-called 30×30 targets, some conservationists advocate expanding protection into remote terrestrial regions and essentially unoccupied areas to minimize trade-offs with economic development and urban settings. This may be viable for unpopulated places, but it is not an approach that will work where most of the world’s biodiversity and linguistic variation are found. For such areas, it is essential to reckon with roads and how to protect biocultural diversity when roads are inescapable.
Such a reckoning is familiar terrain to social scientists, who have long reminded us of the colonial legacy of cultural homogenization resulting from trade expansion and globalization, most recently in tropical nations. But it is also worth remembering that roads potentially bring access to health care and education, employment opportunities, electricity, telecommunication technology, and beyond. Women of developing nations are especially benefited by road infrastructure in ways that include improved reproductive health, greater out-of-home mobility, lower rates of domestic violence, and a higher likelihood of educational achievement. The complexity of outcomes that roads bring makes them among the most vexing challenges that conservationists face.
The question for conservation practitioners is whether common approaches to protect environmental and cultural diversity are sufficiently robust to make headway, given ever-expanding human encroachment into remote areas. Historically, the management of nature and wild areas, at least for industrialized countries, was predicated on people and wilderness as separate entities, and that the goal of protection should be nature for nature’s sake.
This approach gradually gave way to ideas that link ecosystems to people, acknowledging our dependence upon nature to justify conservation efforts. Later, ideas that people not only receive benefits, but along with nature, form part of complex and dynamic social-ecological systems took shape. This interdependence was understood as indispensable for resilience and adaptation under rapid anthropogenic change.
While a shift in thinking about environmental protection is ongoing, it is possible to find examples of all frameworks in action today. The “no roads” banner raised by some environmentalists recalls the nature-for-itself paradigm. The popularity of this approach has waxed and waned, but there is indisputable evidence that it works for wildlife protection. Protected areas can be especially effective at keeping out roads and maintaining viable populations for target species, including the ecosystem services they provide humans.
However, the “no roads” approach is not likely to work in areas of overlapping cultural and biological richness, where there may be strong community interest in road infrastructure. Instead, an alternative approach is needed that acknowledges issues of justice and social equity, recognizes that local people have a right to environmental self-determination, understands that people and other-than-human species are intrinsically intertwined, and that solutions must be inclusive. Critically, the focus must be on both biological and cultural diversity.
The alternative may be found in an emerging framework labeled “people with nature.” In this view, there is no trade-off between people and nature; rather, the focus is on their relationship and inseparability. This view nudges conservation science away from metrics that are defined as conservation end points, such as minimum population size, or sustainable development targets like greenhouse gas emissions.
Rather, the view favors process-oriented approaches that account for learning, experimentation, participation and adaptability, favoring metrics that assess the process more than the end point. Because of the emphasis on the means rather than the ends, biocultural conservation will differ and produce unique results for each setting, depending on the socioeconomic contexts, cultural institutions, stakeholders and other contingencies. This has the potential to produce a rich topography of solutions for language and biological diversity across the tropics. The people-with-nature framework goes a long way toward the decolonization of environmentalism that’s critically important in tropical countries.
However, there is a real threat that without conservation and sustainable development targets as metrics of performance, the people-with-nature approach will fall short and even lead to the loss of populations and languages. The likelihood that a species will survive into the next century is strongly linked to population size, a metric not reflected in the number of stakeholders making management decisions, or similar process-based metrics. Likewise, the vitality of a language is proportional to the number of native speakers, and also whether the language is employed in government, taught in schools, and incentivized by cultural norms. Language vitality is not measured by whether the principles of participatory decision-making are upheld.
Thus, while the people-with-nature framework offers valuable orientation on ethical conservation practices, practitioners must not lose sight of what is at stake. If conservation targets such as the size of populations and protected areas and the vitality of languages are not included in a paradigm for biocultural conservation, good intentions may steer us down the wrong road.
Karen L. Masters is a tropical conservation biologist living and working in Costa Rica.
Banner image: A new road through forest in the Cardamom Mountains of Cambodia. Image by Gerald Flynn / Mongabay.
Related audio from Mongabay’s podcast: A conversation about endangered languages, life-ways and landscapes with author Jay Griffiths, listen here:
See related content:
Citations:
Myers, N., Mittermeier, R. A., Mittermeier, C. G., Da Fonseca, G. A., & Kent, J. (2000). Biodiversity hotspots for conservation priorities. Nature, 403(6772), 853-858.
Brandon, Katrina, Ecosystem Services from Tropical Forests: Review of Current Science. Center for Global Development Working Paper, (380). doi:10.2139/ssrn.2622749
Gorenflo, L. J., Romaine, S., Mittermeier, R. A., & Walker-Painemilla, K. (2012). Co-occurrence of linguistic and biological diversity in biodiversity hotspots and high biodiversity wilderness areas. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(21). doi: 10.1073/pnas.1117511109
Hua, X., Greenhill, S. J., Cardillo, M., Schneemann, H., & Bromham, L. (2019). The ecological drivers of variation in global language diversity. Nature Communications, 10(1). doi:10.1038/s41467-019-09842-2
Connolly, I., Beger, M., & Watson, J. C. (2023). Spatial co-occurrence of species and language in biodiverse regions: A golden opportunity for conservation. Language & Ecology, 1-35. Retrieved from https://www.ecoling.net/_files/ugd/ae088a_c92fd4c1bc134581bf7c0584802e71e5.pdf
Lee, N. H., Siew, C. S., & Ng, N. H. (2022). The network nature of language endangerment hotspots. Scientific Reports, 12(1). doi:10.1038/s41598-022-14479-1
Bromham, L., Dinnage, R., Skirgård, H., Ritchie, A., Cardillo, M., Meakins, F., … Hua, X. (2021). Global predictors of language endangerment and the future of linguistic diversity. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 6(2), 163-173. doi:10.1038/s41559-021-01604-y
Trombulak, S. C., & Frissell, C. A. (2000). Review of ecological effects of roads on terrestrial and aquatic communities. Conservation Biology, 14(1), 18-30. doi:10.1046/j.1523-1739.2000.99084.x
Laurance, W. F., Goosem, M., & Laurance, S. G. (2009). Impacts of roads and linear clearings on tropical forests. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 24(12), 659-669. doi:10.1016/j.tree.2009.06.009
Hidalgo, D., & Muñoz, J. C. (2014). A review of technological improvements in bus rapid transit (BRT) and buses with high level of service (BHLS). Public Transport, 6(3), 185-213. doi:10.1007/s12469-014-0089-9
Meijer, J. R., Huijbregts, M. A., Schotten, K. C., & Schipper, A. M. (2018). Global patterns of current and future road infrastructure. Environmental Research Letters, 13(6), 064006. doi:10.1088/1748-9326/aabd42
Engert, J. E., Campbell, M. J., Cinner, J. E., Ishida, Y., Sloan, S., Supriatna, J., … Laurance, W. F. (2024). Ghost roads and the destruction of Asia-Pacific tropical forests. Nature, 629(8011), 370-375. doi:10.1038/s41586-024-07303-5
Das Neves, P. B., Blanco, C. J., Montenegro Duarte, A. A., Das Neves, F. B., Das Neves, I. B., & De Paula dos Santos, M. H. (2021). Amazon rainforest deforestation influenced by clandestine and regular roadway network. Land Use Policy, 108, 105510. doi:10.1016/j.landusepol.2021.105510
Chen, S., Di Marco, M., Li, B. V., & Li, Y. (2024). Roadless areas as an effective strategy for protected area expansion: Evidence from China. One Earth, 7(8), 1456-1468. doi:10.1016/j.oneear.2024.07.005
Chaudhary, R. C., Kumar, R., Mishra, S. B., Sahani, A., & Srivastava, A. K. (2022). Improvement of local speciality rices as a boon to health, wealth and export diversity: Case of Kalanamak rice. Journal of Rice Research, 15 (Special Issue), 68-72. doi:10.58297/ieyo2582
Aggarwal, S. (2021). The long road to health: Healthcare utilization impacts of a road pavement policy in rural India. Journal of Development Economics, 151, 102667. doi:10.1016/j.jdeveco.2021.102667
Nandwani, B., & Roychowdhury, P. (2024). Road to empowerment: Rural roads programme and women’s outcomes. Ideas for India. Retrieved from https://www.ideasforindia.in/topics/social-identity/road-to-empowerment-rural-roads-programme-and-womens-outcomes.html
Mace, G. M. (2014). Whose conservation? Science, 345(6204), 1558-1560. doi:10.1126/science.1254704
Gurney, G. G., Adams, V. M., Álvarez-Romero, J. G., & Claudet, J. (2023). Area-based conservation: Taking stock and looking ahead. One Earth, 6(2), 98-104. doi:10.1016/j.oneear.2023.01.012
Lee, N. H., & Van Way, J. (2016). Assessing levels of endangerment in the Catalogue of Endangered Languages (ELCat) using the Language Endangerment Index (LEI). Language in Society, 45(2), 271-292. doi:10.1017/s0047404515000962
Reyers, B., & Bennett, E. M. (2025). Whose conservation, revisited: how a focus on people–nature relationships spotlights new directions for conservation science. Philosophical Transactions B, 380(1917), 20230320. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2023.0320
Credits
