Why is the preservation of cultural diversity important in preserving biodiversity?

Question

Why is the preservation of cultural diversity important in preserving biodiversity?

Answer 1

Preserving cultural diversity preserves biodiversity in two ways that I can think of now.  

First, biomedicine/allopathic/Western medicine get many cures for diseases from herbal and folk remedies used by different cultures around the world.  It has been covered in my undergrad human rights in anthropology class because in some cases because pharmaceutical companies have been known to 'discover' a cure made by natives from a particular plant and then the company goes to the island and buys the land all the plants are on and fences it off so the natives can't get to the medicinal plants anymore and certainly can't afford the medicines the company makes out of them.  It's also covered in medical anthropology in discussing relations between biomedicine and folk healers.  We should all be concerned because there are diseases that Western medicine has never encountered and doesn't have a cure for but as we increasingly travel to formerly distant parts of the globe, we encounter these diseases.  For two examples, consider the 'Navajo flu' epidemic in the US or, more humorously, there's an episode of M*A*S*H where a Chinese spy pretends to be Major Winchester's servant and during that time, the soldiers come to the hospital with a terrible, itchy rash that the doctors can't diagnose or treat with anything they have.  They resist the Chinese man's insistence that he can brew a cure (even though they don't know he's a spy) until they've exhausted every other possibility and the patients are desperate for relief.  They try the cure, which is purportedly a traditional regional remedy for this particular rash, and it works perfectly.  That sort of culturally specific knowledge can very easily disappear but it is important to biodiversity in humans so that populations like the Navajo of the Four Corners Reservation aren't wiped out by epidemic waiting for Western medicine to rediscover a cure.

Second, livestock breeds raised in the Western world aren't nearly as diverse as they used to be.  Many other cultures raise different breeds of horses, cattle, goats, sheep, etc.  Through artificial insemination, overuse of selective breeding, and emphasis on production rather than health or longevity, Western livestock has deteriorated.  Diversity in crops has the same problem.  Carrots come naturally in many colors, but I bet you've only seen the orange ones.  I'm quite fond of the purple ones myself.  Wide use of such a small pool of crops and livestock to the exclusion of other varieties leaves us vulnerable to famine through various epidemics and blights.  This has led to the marginal resurgence in interest in what are called Heritage or Heirloom Breeds.  Many other cultures, however, maintain different varieties, different gene pools of livestock.  Western crops are making their way more quickly around the world, sometimes with human rights consequences (like the hawking of 'insect resistant' strains of crops in India where fertile/seed-bearing crops are actually better because the seed doesn't have to be purchased every year as it does with this particular bio-engineered corn strain).

Answer 2

It is not.  They have nothing to do with each other.