Introduction to the papers

The global community has become increasingly concerned about the future of life on earth. Anthropologists have been among those who have seen the problems in remote places, but they have not been leading political actors among the many people and organizations that have worked to educate the public about the dangers to the environment. Following the United Nations conference in 1992 in Rio, Viacheslav Rudnev began his work to promote research papers on the contributions that the knowledge developed over generations among indigenous people has made, and could make, to sustainable development. He has worked to organize scholars in ethnology and in other disciplines who have done research that contributes to solving the problems of balancing the needs of humans, other living things, and nature so that we can develop sustainable ways to survive. He invited Dorothy Billings to join him as Co-Chair of the Commission on Indigenous Knowledge and Sustainable Development, a Commission which he successfully proposed to the International Union for Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES) in 1998, and which has regularly organized panels for international congresses since then. Dr Rudnev reports the history of this work in his introductory article for this Special Issue. Researcherswho have presented theirwork at IUAESmeetingswere invited to give their papers at the 117thAmericanAnthropological AssociationAnnualMeeting inWashington, DC inDecember 2014. It is those papers, as well as some papers that had been given at recent meetings of the IUAES, that we have gathered together in this Special Issue of Global Bioethics. Anthropologists have been focused on the ethnography of indigenous peoples: their cultures, their values, and their knowledge. Our sojourn with “development” has been more recent; with “sustainable development” more recent still. After World War II, colonial governments began to leave their colonies, having prepared, more or less, the local people to take over their own governments. Neo-colonialism, largely of economic enterprises, began everywhere: developers moved in to remove resources needed by the industrialized world, and newly formed local governments needed the economic foundations they provided. The authors here have looked at what these outside “developers” have done that profoundly affects the lives of indigenous peoples and their ability to sustain and develop themselves. Ethel Vesper reports her research in Micronesia, islands that have been colonized by various European governments for centuries and have, since World War II, lost much of their land base to occupation by the US military. She focuses on Guam and the island of Bikini, which is no longer habitable.