Are conflicts over natural resources really just about material concerns? To answer this question, I examined a conflict over natural-resource access and use in and near the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve, a United Nations Education, Science and Culture Organization (UNESCO) reserve in southern Mexico. Biosphere Reserves are socio-environmental reserves designated by UNESCO and the relevant host-country government in regions recognized for their exceptional biodiversity. Parties to the resource-use conflict came from a cross-section of society in the Calakmul region and represented one of three sectors: environmental and development policymakers (governmental and non-governmental), those working to implement policies (governmental and non-governmental), and those who must live with these policies (both small-scale entrepreneurs and primarily indigenous, subsistence farming families). My methodology entailed, in addition to participant observation, collecting and analyzing the discourse of parties to the resource-use conflict. To learn their respective points of view, I recorded, transcribed, and analyzed the personal histories, folklore, public speeches, workshops, and everyday conversations of people representing all three sectors in the conflict. A pattern emerged: when people talk about resource consumption, they articulate what their way of life is - or what they wish it could be. Conflicts over resource consumption, therefore, are not just about protecting material objects, they are about protecting a cherished metaphor, one's "way of life." In the case of the resource-use conflict in the Calakmul region, it is not simply a question of conservationists working to save trees from subsistence farmers who want to cut them down to grow corn (the material aspect of the conflict); it is also a case of both sides perceiving a threat to their respective ways of life (the metaphorical aspect of the conflict). I concluded that paying attention to how speakers talk about their own and others' resource consumption is central to understanding the genesis, continuation and/or mitigation, not only of the conflict in Calakmul, but of human conflict more generally. (Kristin Cahn von Seelen)