http://www.commondreams.org/views/122800-101.htm
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.
Copyright © 2000
Globe Interactive
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