Rosemary Coombe, "PROTECTING TRADITIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL KNOWLEDGE ... "

PROTECTING TRADITIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL KNOWLEDGE AND
NEW SOCIAL MOVEMENTS IN THE AMERICAS: INTELLECTUAL
PROPERTY, A HUMAN RIGHT, OR CLAIMS TO AN ALTERNATIVE FORM
OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT?
Rosemary J. Coombe
The protection of traditional environmental knowledge is a complex area of emerging
law that has attracted a great deal of academic attention and controversy over the past
five years. I will limit my remarks to the Americas and focus primarily on the empirical
reasons that have been established for asserting such rights, the limits of the intellectual
property model often proposed to accommodate them, the nature of the social
movements in which they are asserted, and the larger difficulty of placing these rights
within a human rights framework. Ultimately I will suggest that we understand claims
to traditional environmental knowledge (TEK) in the Americas within a context
informed by the social movements in which they are most forcefully expressed, where
they draw upon human rights vocabularies and rhetorical forms but express much wider
social and political aspirations that have emerged in response to conditions of neoliberal
globalization.