WHY I WRITE

Cultural retention and environmental issues are my passion. Over the past three decades, my work with Native American, Hispanic, and rural communities brought home the need for cultural value-based planning and development. My books are practical guides with cross-cultural method for planning and development.

When Western-culture methods aimed at a path of continual economic growth are superimposed upon traditional communities, cultural loss and acculturative stress occurs. Cultural loss is now occurring at an alarming rate globally. Every two weeks, another of the 10,000 languages of the world becomes extinct. Language is the means of communicating world view and diverse ways of relating to the world.

The retention of a broad range of cultures globally is important for many reasons. Cultural identity fosters self-esteem and even, one might say, community esteem. Communities flourish within their own cultural systems. Cultural diversity carries a range of knowledge relating to diverse ecosystems and plant varieties. Preservation of this knowledge is a treasure to the global pool of expertise that will be necessary for the coming planetary challenges.

Resilience is characterized by the capacity to redirect. Culture, always adapting to change, balances the dilemmas of new innovation and preservation. Retaining time-honored traditions that work well and incorporating them into new technologies requires rethinking how we deal with change, culture by culture.

Sustainability, considered at the deepest level, is about cultural survival. We must be mindful with every step. Walking lighter upon the earth happens in a gradual accumulation of small, conscious actions.