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Published on Thursday, December 28, 2000 in the Toronto Globe & Mail

A Dead End for Humanity

With the Loss of Other Cultures, We Risk Being Imprisoned in Our Own, Never Knowing What Might Have Been

by Wade Davis

A hundred years from now, the 20th century will be remembered not for wars or technological innovations but as an era when people supported -- or passively endorsed -- the massive destruction of biological and cultural diversity. In the past 25 years alone, as many as one million species will have been driven to extinction. Yet, even as we mourn the loss of biological life, we ignore a parallel process of loss -- the erosion of the ethnosphere, which might be defined as the sum of all thoughts, dreams, myths and insights brought into being by human imagination since the dawn of consciousness.
Of the 6,000 languages spoken today, fully half are not being taught to children. Effectively, they are already dead. By the end of the 21st century linguisitic diversity may be reduced to as few as 500 languages.

A language, of course, is not simply vocabulary and grammar; it's a flash of the human spirit, the vehicle by which the soul of a culture comes into the material realm. Each language represents a unique intellectual and spiritual achievement. Although many of the languages at risk are those spoken by small indigenous societies, their loss would be as great as that of any other language.

Even the most pessimistic biologist would not claim that 50 per cent of the world's biological diversity is currently at risk. And yet this represents the most optimistic cultural scenario. When we lose a language, as MIT linguistics professor Ken Hale says, it's like dropping a bomb on the Louvre.

Yet, even among those sympathetic to the plight of indigenous societies, there is a mood of resignation -- as if these cultures, quaint and colourful though they may be, are somehow fated to fade away, reduced to the margins of history as the modern technological world moves inexorably forward.

To embrace this view, however, is to ignore the central revelation of anthropology -- the idea that our own society is not absolute. Rather, it is just one model of reality, the consequence of one particular set of choices that our ancestors made generations ago. Whether it is the nomadic Penan in the forests of Borneo, Vodoun acolytes in Haiti or Yak herders in Tibet, all of these people teach us that there are other ways of being and thinking and relating to the natural world.

I spent some time among the Penan of Borneo, one of the last nomadic peoples of Southeast Asia. For most of human history, we were all nomads, wanderers on a pristine planet. It was only 10,000 years ago, with the neolithic revolution and the rise of agriculture, that many of us succumbed to the cult of the seed. Among nomadic societies we see an image of what we once were.

In nomadic societies there is no incentive to accumulate possessions, because everything must be carried on your back. The wealth of a community is the strength of the relationships among its people. Sharing is an involuntary reflex; one never knows who will be the next to secure the food.

Different ways of life create different human beings, and there are profound lessons to be drawn from different world views. Today, in Canada, you might pass a homeless person on the street, and understand him to be the regrettable but perhaps inevitable consequence of the economic system. A Penan is raised to believe that a poor man shames us all.

I'm not suggesting a Rousseau view of indigenous people as noble savage conservationists; to suggest that is to deny indigenous people their legitimate place in the brutal struggle for survival. Life in the malarial swamps of New Guinea leaves little room for sentiment. Nostalgia is not a trait commonly associated with the Inuit. Nomadic hunters and gatherers in the Amazon have no consciousness sense of stewardship.

What these cultures have, however, is a traditional relationship with the Earth, forged through time and ritual, and based not only on deep attachment to the land but on a far more subtle intuition -- the idea that the land itself is breathed into being by human consciousness. Mountains, rivers and forests are not perceived as mere props on a stage on which the drama of humanity unfolds. For these societies the land is alive, a dynamic force to be embraced and transformed by the human imagination.

A Kwakiut boy raised to revere the salmon forests of the Pacific Northwest as the abode of Huxwhukw and the Crooked beak of Heaven, cannibal spirits living at the North of the world, will be a different person than a Canadian child taught that such forests exist to be cut. A child raised in the Andes to believe that a mountain is the realm of a protective spirit will behave differently than a youth brought up to believe that it is an inert pile of rock ready to be mined.

Every view of the world that fades away, every culture that disappears, diminishes the possibilities of human life. We lose not only knowledge of the natural world but also intuitions about the meaning of the cosmos. We reduce the human repertoire of adaptive responses to the common problems that confront all humanity.

An anthropologist from another planet visiting contemporary North America would note wonders here, but would also perhaps be puzzled to see our environmental problems, or the fact that 20 per cent of our people control 80 per cent of the wealth, more than half of our marriages end in divorce, and that more than 90 per cent of our elders don't live with relatives. As we lose other models of living, we lose a vast archive of knowledge and expertise, the memories of countless elders, healers, farmers, midwives, poets and saints.

How are we to value what is being lost? That we are losing the botanical knowledge of other cultures is obvious -- and less than 1 per cent of the world's flora has been thoroughly studied by Western science. But how do we value less concrete contributions of other cultures? What is the worth of family bonds that mitigate poverty and insulate the individual from loneliness? Of diverse intuitions about the spirit realm? What is the economic measure of ritual practices that result in the protection of a forest?

Before she died, anthropologist Margaret Mead spoke of her singular concern that as we drifted toward a more homogeneous world we were laying the foundations of a bland and generic modern culture that in the end would have no rivals.

The entire imagination of humanity, she feared, might become imprisoned within the limits of a single intellectual and spiritual modality. Her nightmare was the possibility that we might wake up one day and not even remember what had been lost.

One night, on a ridge in Sarawak, I sat by a fire with Asik Nyelit, headman of the Ubong River Penan. It was dusk and the light of a partial moon filtered through the branches of the canopy. Asik looked up at the moon and casually asked me if it was true that people had journeyed there, only to return with baskets of dirt. "If true," he asked, "why did they bother to go?"

It was difficult to explain a $1-trillion space program to a man who kindled fire with a flint. The proper answer to Asik's query was that we did not go into space to secure new wealth but to experience a new vision of life itself.

The perspective of Earth we gained from space made us begin to understand the fragility of our biosphere. Now we must understand that there is an ethnosphere, and it too is fragile -- and irreplaceable.

Vancouver-born Wade Davis is Explorer in Residence with the National Geographic Society in Washington. His 1996 book, One River, was nominated for a Governor-General's Award. His latest book The Light at the Edge of the World will be published in the new year.

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