At the end of the last century, the term Biodiversity was installed to concentrate the definition of the diversity of life on the planet, a term that the famous North American entomologist Edward Oswald Wilson imposed, however, when you have the opportunity to meet people who are not Westerners. Our paradigms are tested, growing our understanding of what we believe we are. Thus, for us there is a synonym for biodiversity that is Living Community, which makes us interpret what we learned from the philosophy of the Kággaba in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, where unlike humans and biodiversity, there is only one Living Community.
Mund or kággaba
The path of the tapir or tapir in the Sierra Nevada of Santa Marta Colombia made us discover for ourselves The kággaba who share territory with the Perissodactyls. Time passes and a friendship has naturally been built between the natives who have to do with the presence of the last tapirs or tapirs in the Caribbean massif and the native foundation that is interested in helping to protect them. Little by little, the original logic of this culture can begin to be understood clearly without having to resort to the mystical, because the fascinating thing is that it is a pragmatic knowledge that makes our scientist think, to a point that based on his relationship with Nature has accumulated intellect to resist time. We clarify that we are not specialists nor do we pretend to be, we just want to share a particular perspective that provokes something in the thoughts of those interested in this original world.
This stone massif, as present as it is ancient, has been the protagonist from the beginning as it is the oldest mountain in Colombia and the highest on the planet by the sea, which knows how far it has risen. It is in the snowless peaks where the existence of Los kággaba begins, the indigenous community that has not yet broken the thread of its history and with its existence faithful to its understanding of what they are, offer the exceptional opportunity to understand that Western globalization is still imperfect.
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The multiplicity of life that inhabits these heights has a significant proportion of endemic species, to the point of this Sierra Nevada being considered the "continental Galapagos." After Humboldt's visit to the New World, when he presented his work in Europe, many eager scientists decided to come and some came to the Sierra to begin determining the plant and animal species, through a method of classifying them. living beings created in 1731 by the Swede Carlos Linnaeus and which continues to be used. This great detail confirms the need to name the different living forms so that they are taken into account as the natural capital of humans with Western thinking and in this way dominate them as the superior species that they are. In the Sierra all forms of life also have names, but not to dominate them but to know them as entities with the same equivalence that share territory, configuring the Living Community, where each member is part of the vital fabric that sustains everything.
Perpetual snow in the Caribbean is a climatic paradox that causes concern in times of warming. In any case, for the kággaba to understand, this glacial is the next abode for the souls that surpass this earthly plane, another place where we are all equal, children of the same mother. The Palomino and Rioancho rivers are born in the ice and die in the sea, they connect the entire ancient world of this Sierra. The inhabitants of these hydrographic basins are evidence of a very particular and powerful knowledge. The rooms on these heights belong to the wise.
Discovering the existence of a world where people prefer to live following their original successful idea, created by themselves where enigmas do not exist, is a privilege of humanity, it is an exceptional opportunity for understanding .
of what we are. The impact of this existence, among all that it can produce, is to allow one to be transported in time to imagine the encounter between the law of origin and violent Western pettiness, to experience the astonishing resistance of the Kággaba to conquest, colony, evangelization and modernity. for more than five centuries and counting.
In this exceptional place of cultural resistance, the perfection of the ancient jungle can still be found and, most importantly, the people who have been able to understand it to coexist with it, with their own codes of wealth and poverty, very different from these same codes of the context. urban and rural of the civilized world.