By Paul Harris

Danger lurks at the intersection of ancient knowledge and the modern world in Colombia.

"You have to be very careful because there are guerrilla groups and paramilitaries there," Diana Pombo warns, "and if you go and say we are a communication institution and we are interested in water, nobody cares about you, but if you go and say we are working on the protection of traditional knowledge and the land and the rights of the people there, we will not be able to work there.''

This statement is just a small window onto the problems and complexities that Diana has faced in pushing environmental protection to the top of the agenda in both government and in rural communities.

Colombia is synonymous with drugs, corruption and guerrilla attacks, and this triple stigma causes outsiders to overlook the fact that the region is one of the most diverse, home to countless unique cultures and harbouring well over 25,000 species of plants and animals.

How the Teacher Teaches – and Learns

As she sinks slowly into a reclining armchair, dressed in a long yellow jersey, casual slacks and flat-soled shoes, Diana tells her story of how she has worked to protect this biodiversity (though she insists it is not her story, but the story of a struggle made possible by only the cooperation of many others).

She is still learning much from the interwoven Colombian realities, and the focus of her work changes as she learns. Diana is by profession a lawyer (and the daughter of lawyers) and an architect, trained in Colombia, France and Germany. She explains her journey form these professions to the protection of biological resources and the strengthening of indigenous cultures as a natural phenomenon.

"An architect usually goes and works as an urban planner, then as an urban planner it is not difficult to think that you can work as a regional planner, then it's normal, isn't it, as a regional planner to become involved in and work on environmental issues.''

Perhaps it is her architectural background that has given her the ability and patience to tackle environmental issues from the foundation upward, and for many years now she has been at the forefront of nudging, advising and attempting to codify laws in Colombia to protect biodiversity.

A Legislative Break-Through on Genetic Resources

In the early 1990's, Diana began working for the newly formed Colombian Ministry of Environment, working from within the system to create legal tools to further the rights of indigenous communities to protect community knowledge that was being threatened. In her time at the Ministry, she managed to push through legislation that codified access to genetic resources in Colombia. These laws effectively secured legal frameworks in which communities could negotiate on a more equal basis with corporations that sought to mine their land or extract traditional knowledge there. For the first time, the law gave local communities the tools to defend their traditional rights.

Then Diana and a growing band of international colleagues attempted to go regional, taking their proposals to the Andean Pact (Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia) to have similar laws ratified by all members. This resulted in a set-back (though perhaps it proved to be a step forward) when her activism lead the government to ask her to leave the Ministry.

In order to continue networking, Diana formed the Institute for Environmental Management (IGEA, from its initials in Spanish), an ad hoc group of NGOs in Colombia that has now spread to include others in Brazil, Venezuela and Ecuador. This permitted direct contact with the communities that she had been working so long and hard for. At first, IGEA was focused on trying to "prepare legal frameworks to protect biodiversity and traditional knowledge," but with consultations with other NGOs and communities, it widened its scope to educate and inform communities about how to use the law to defend their rights.

During the past year, IGEA has been broadened further to encompass not only inventories and registries of intellectual properties and legal education, but also workshops on water resources.

The communities involved in IGEA's projects lie on the southwestern Pacific coast, the Andean zone of North Cauca and the Vichada region, in the northeast. The communities were asked what issues were most important: water, protection of traditional knowledge, food security or access to genetic resources. All chose water and food security.

The workshops, both in the mostly black Pacific community and the Andean community, have recently been completed. The workshops with the indigenous community in the Vichada have still to begin; lack of transport and communication have made progress difficult.

The workshops in the Pacific and the Andean communities have focused on water. For Diana, food security stems from water and from traditional knowledge: "We link many things to the river," she says of the studies, which link the relationships that people have with the water and its effects on their culture.

In the Cauca region, all this research has to be undertaken with great sensitivity to the communities and wariness about guerrillas and paramilitaries that control the surrounding areas. A reminder of the need for delicacy: a bomb that went off on the first day of exploratory talks on the Cauca project.

Both projects dealt with similar issues, utilizing similar vehicles to deliver the message: to educate the communities about the interdependent aspects of culture, environment and production. When one disintegrates, all disintegrate.

Thus the bolstering of culture through communication, the teaching of environmental management and finally an increase and diversification of crops were all built on their direct relations to local cultures. The link between self-sufficiency and communication was also shown to be important in the preservation of traditional culture.

Diana claims modestly to have learned more from the communities than she herself passed on. Her face lights up and her arms beat out the rhythm of the remembered sound of the Pacific communities' drums, a sure indication that these workshops had a profound impact on her. "They sing a lot and make poems, they have an oral tradition, all comes down from generation to generation in song and poems. It was fantastic! We were in the workshop – boom, boom!" she laughs.

The workshops were not without problems. When attempting to use the same teaching techniques in the Andean Cauca, the team came to realize that different communities demand different approaches, and there was much improvisation.

The Road Is Long, but the Helpers Are Many

It has been a long road for Diana Pombo: from architect to lawyer; from adviser to national legislative committees that helped enact some of the most progressive environmental and intellectual-property legislation in Latin America to applying these laws to the people they were intended for. These recent actions have not gone unnoticed, and she has again been invited to work for the Ministry of Environment. She has accepted this position because for her, protection still involves legislation to protect the people she truly works for.

The work has garnered international interest, and she has worked with social innovators and NGOs from countries as far afield as Malaysia and India. Diana headed the team that wrote the policy on population and environment that was approved by the Colombian National Environmental Council. She was a Colombian adviser to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, and recently helped formulate Colombia's position for the fourth conference on biological diversity, which she herself presented in Bratislava, Slovakia.

When asked what her dreams are, Diana becomes very quiet and her expression grows serious. "I think every Colombian would say the same: we work now with water, not just because it is a strategic entrance to work with communities, but to make a contribution to peace. You can ask any Ashoka person in Colombia and they will say that they want to make a contribution to peace through their own fields – and water, at the moment for us, is our entrance to get to that point."

Colombia has much to offer the world. It is a complex country with many social and environmental problems. Perhaps now it is getting one step closer to resolution, but this resolution rests on support by and for people like Diana Pombo.

Asked what her biggest success to date has been, she said with a laugh, "The next one."