This just in:
Hello,
I am Regis Lemberthe, student at the Design Academy Eindhoven, Netherlands. I am working, in the frame of my thesis in humanitarian design, on the issue of registering Traditional Knowledge of the Use of Plants as an answer to biopiracy.
I know that some organizations already lead such activities, and I would like to get involved in those in order to make my research more relevant. I want to address two issues that I consider primordial :
How to protect traditional knowledge, regarding the efficiency of registration, and how it could be improved – everything can be improved at some point.
How to promote traditional knowledge, regarding the opportunity to raise public awareness towards this issue in consuming societies.Of course I am aware that all the problematic doesn’t fit in those two points; challenging this simple vision I have is another reason I want to join practical registering activities.
I would like to know if there are such initiatives being planned on your side that I could join, either as an external observer or, ideally, as part of a working team. Of course I am able to pay for my own expenses.
I hope you will be interested in supporting my research, as I believe design activities – products but also communication or interfaces – can contribute to some extent to improve existing situations.
I remain at your disposition for further information about my project; you can already find some of my materials on the weblog.
For more information about my course, you can visit the website of the school, section “Master” then “Man and Humanity”.
Warm regards,
Regis Lemberthe
Sorry Regis. We can’t actually help directly, except by publishing this letter, because we don’t actually have any initiatives planned in the context of this blog. However, maybe someone else who is reading this can help. There certainly seem to be a lot of people out there who believe that registering traditional knowledge can protect against biopiracy.
The website looks interesting; let us know if anything happens.
Honey bee network, with whom I am associated, is an informal network of people committed to the protection of traditional knowledge and innovations at the grassroots level.
You may have a look at our websites http://www.honeybeenetwork.org or http://www.nif.org.in or http://www.sristi.org to know further about the activities undertaken by the Honey bee network in the past many years in this area. Hope it will help you.