Conservation of biodiversity and cultural diversity are two sides of a coin: Xishuangbanna Dai’s ecological culture as an example

Though the global community, including China, has adopted multiple actions for biodiversity conservation, the goal of holding the current trend of rapid biodiversity loss before 2010 (the International Year of Biodiversity) promised by the leaders at the UN's 2002 Johannesburg "World Summit on Sustainable Development" has remained unfulfilled. One limitation in reaching this goal may be the ignorance of the important roles that cultural diversity, especially indigenous or ethnic ecological culture diversity, can play in biodiversity conservation. This paper approaches the important roles played by ethnic ecological culture in biodiversity conservation and its sustainable uses using the Xishuangbanna Dai's ecological culture of the southern Yunnan tropical rainforest as an example. This situation is like the two sides of a coin in that they supplement each other; one side cannot be present without the other.