Biodigenous Consulting Ltd.
What does Biodigenous do?
At Biodigenous, our goal is to:
Support projects that aim to protect biocultural diversity;
Encourage a national and global culture of sustaining the land that sustains us; and
Learn how to bring Indigenous Knowledge and Western Science together to create effective and culturally sensitive solutions to species-at-risk and ecosystem management.
What is Biocultural Diversity?
“Biocultural Diversity comprises the diversity of life in all of its manifestations – biological, cultural, and linguistic. The diversity of life is made up not only of the diversity of plants and animal species, habitats and ecosystems found on the planet, but also of the diversity of human cultures and languages.”
- Luisa Maffi, co-founder and director of Terralingua
In Canada, and throughout the world, we have been losing biodiversity, cultures, and languages at an alarming rate. These aspects of
biocultural diversity
are
irreplaceable.
Once they are gone, we cannot get them back, and therefore, protection is crucial and cannot be compromised or bargained on.
ABOUT ME
Carmen Chelick, M.Sc., R.P.Bio.
Carmen Chelick is the founder of Biodigenous Consulting Ltd. She is a professional biologist trained in Western Science and a woman of mixed European and Cree-Métis ancestry. She obtained her Master of Science degree in Biology from UBC-Okanagan, completing a thesis titled “Predicting taxonomic, functional and phylogenetic diversity of plant assemblages in the Okanagan Ecoregion”. Carmen’s research interests include botany, birds, species-at-risk in British Columbia, ecosystem mapping, Indigenous language revitalization, and learning about cultural uses of plants and animals.