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The Wonder of the Ethnosphere

ONE NIGHT ON A RIDGE IN BORNEO, CLOSE TO dusk, with thunder over the valley and the forest alive with the electrifying roar of black cicadas, I sat by a fire with Asik Nyelit, headman of the Ubong River Penan, one of the last nomadic peoples of Southeast Asia. The rains, which had pounded the forest all afternoon, had stopped, and the light of a partial moon filtered through the branches of the canopy. Earlier in the day, Asik had killed a barking deer. Its head lay roasting in the coals.

At one point, Asik looked up from the fire, took notice of the moon and quietly asked me if it was true that people had actually journeyed there, only to return with baskets full of dirt. If that was all they had found, why had they bothered to go? How long had it taken, and what kind of transport had they had?

It was difficult to explain to a man who kindled fire with flint—and whose total possessions amounted to a few ragged clothes, blowpipe and quiver of poisoned darts, rattan sleeping mat and carrying basket, knife, axe, parang blade, loincloth, plug of tobacco, three dogs and two monkeys—a space program that had consumed the energy of nations and, at a cost of nearly a trillion dollars, placed twelve men on the moon. Or the fact that over the course of six missions, they had travelled a billion and half miles (2.4 billion km) and, indeed, brought back nothing but rocks and lunar dust, 82 8 pounds (376 kg) altogether.

One small fragment of this precious cargo found its way to Washington, D.C., where it is today embedded in a swirl of blood-red crystal, the focal point of a beautiful stained-glass window in the National Cathedral, one of the largest and most dramatic Gothic churches in the world. When I first visited the cathedral and sat beneath its soaring vault, moved by the perfect harmony of its architecture and the shafts of light flooding the nave, I thought of Asik and his queries. The panel of glass known as the Space Window is dense with primary colours, circles of the deepest blues and reds representing the spheres of the heavens, with small crystals flaring on all sides. In the Gothic tradition, the light pouring through these windows is the Light Divine, a mystic revelation of the spirit of God. In contrast to this sacred luminosity, the tiny moon rock appears cold and lifeless, black, inert.

Here, perhaps, was an answer to Asik’s question. The true purpose of the space journeys, or at least their most profound and lasting consequence, lay not in wealth secured but in a vision realized, a shift in perspective that would change our lives forever. The seminal moment occurred on Christmas Day, 19 6 8 , a full six months before the first lunar landing, as the crew of Apollo 8 emerged from the dark side of the moon to see rising over its surface a small and fragile blue planet, floating, as one astronaut would recall, in the velvet void of space. For the first time in history, our world was revealed: a single interactive sphere of life, a living organism composed of air, water and soil. This transcendent vision, more than any amount of scientific data, taught us that the Earth is a finite place that can endure our neglect for only so long. Inspired by this new perspective, this new hope, we began to think in new ways, a profound shift in consciousness that in the end may well prove to be the salvation of a lonely planet.

Consider how far we have come. Forty years ago, the environmental movement was nascent. Highway beautification was a key initiative and just convincing motorists to stop throwing garbage out of car windows was considered a great victory. Writers such as Rachel Carson, who warned of far more dire scenarios, were lone voices in the wild. Gary Snyder, whose poetry touched that place of sensual memory reached later by the prophets of deep ecology, used to hitchhike across the United States simply to spend an evening with someone to whom he could relate. No one thought of the ozone layer, let alone of our capacity to destroy it and thus compromise the very conditions that make life possible. A mere decade ago, scientists who warned of the greenhouse effect were dismissed as radicals. Today, it is those who question the existence and significance of climate change who occupy the lunatic fringe. Twenty years ago, “biodiversity” and “biosphere” were exotic terms, familiar only to a small number of earth scientists and ecologists. Today, these are household words understood and appreciated by schoolchildren. The biodiversity crisis, marked by the extinction of over a million life forms in the past three decades alone, together with the associated loss of habitat, has emerged as one of the central issues of our times.

What stands out in this checkered history is not merely the pace of attitudinal change, but its dramatic scale and character. A single generation has witnessed a shift in perspective and awareness so fundamental that to look back is to recall a world of the blind. Evidence of the impending environmental crisis swirled all around us, but we took little notice. Fortunately, we have come to see, at least partially; and though solutions to the major environmental problems remain elusive, no nation or government can ignore or deny the magnitude of the threat or the urgency of the dilemma. This alone represents a reorientation of human priorities that is both historic in its significance and profoundly hopeful in its promise.

Acknowledging a problem, of course, is not the same as finding a solution. And having one veil lifted from our vision does not necessarily mean that we have fully recovered our sight. Even as we lament the collapse of biological diversity, we pay too little heed to a parallel process of loss, the demise of cultural diversity, the erosion of what might be termed the ethnosphere, the full complexity and complement of human potential as brought into being by culture and adaptation since the dawn of consciousness. As linguist Michael Krauss reminds us, the most pessimistic biologist would not dare suggest that half of all extant species are endangered or on the edge of extinction. Yet this, the most apocalyptic assessment of the future of biological diversity, scarcely approaches what is known to be the best conceivable scenario for the fate of the world’s languages and cultures.

Worldwide, some 300 million people, roughly 5 per cent of the global population, still retain a strong identity as members of an indigenous culture, rooted in history and language, attached by myth and memory to a particular place on the planet. Though their populations are small, these cultures account for 60 per cent of the world’s languages and collectively represent over half of the intellectual legacy of humanity. Yet, increasingly, their voices are being silenced, their unique visions of life itself lost in a whirlwind of change and conflict.

There is no better measure of this crisis than the loss of languages. Throughout all of human history, something in the order of ten thousand languages have existed. Today, of the roughly six thousand still spoken, fully half are not being taught to children, meaning that, effectively, they are already dead, and only three hundred are spoken by more than a million people. Only six hundred languages are considered by linguists to be stable and secure. In another century, even this number may be dramatically reduced.

More than a cluster of words or a set of grammatical rules, a language is a flash of the human spirit, the filter through which the soul of each particular culture reaches into the material world. A language is as divine and mysterious as a living creature. The biological analogy is apropos. Extinction, when balanced by the birth of new species, is a normal phenomenon. But the current wave of species loss due to human activities is unprecedented. Languages, like species, have always evolved. Before Latin faded from the scene, it gave rise to a score of diverse but related languages. Today, by contrast, languages are being lost at such a rate, within a generation or two, that they have no chance to leave descendants. By the same token, cultures have come and gone through time, absorbed by other more powerful societies or eliminated altogether by violence and conquest, famines, or natural disasters. But the current wave of assimilation and acculturation, in which peoples all over the Earth are being drawn away from their past, has no precedent.

Of the more than two thousand languages in New Guinea, five hundred are each spoken by fewer than five hundred people. Of the 175 Native languages still alive in the United States, 55 are spoken by fewer than ten individuals. The words and phrases of only twenty are whispered by mothers to their babies. Of the eighty languages in California at the time of European contact, fifty remain, but not one is today spoken by a child. In Canada, there were once some sixty indigenous languages, but only four remain viable: Cree, Ojibwa, Dakota and Inuktitut. In all North America, only one Native language, Navajo, is spoken by more than a hundred thousand individuals.

What could possibly be more lonely than to be enveloped in silence, to be the last person alive capable of speaking your native tongue, to have no means of communicating and no chance of telling the world of the wonders you once knew, the wisdom and knowledge that had been passed down through generations, distilled in the sounds and words of the elders? Such is the fate, in fact, of many people; for every two weeks somewhere in the world, a language is lost. Even as you read these words, you can hear the last echoes of Kasabe in Cameroon, Pomo in California, Quinault in Washington State, Gosiutes in Utah, Ona in Patagonia and scores of other languages that in the West do not even have a name.

The vast majority of the world’s languages have yet even to be chronicled. In Papua New Guinea, only a dozen of the eight hundred languages have been studied in detail. Worldwide, perhaps as many as four thousand languages remain inadequately described. The cost of properly doing so has been estimated by linguists at $800 million, roughly the price of a single Aegis Class navy destroyer. In the United States, journalists devote columns of print to the fate of the spotted owl, but scarcely a word to the plight of the world’s languages. The United States government spends $1 million a year attempting to save a single species of wildlife, the Florida panther, but only $2 million a year for the protection of all the nation’s indigenous tongues, from the Arctic slope of Alaska to the pine barrens of Florida, from the deserts of the Navajo to the spruce forests of Maine. And yet, each language is, in itself, an entire ecosystem of ideas and intuitions, a watershed of thought, an old-growth forest of the mind. Each is a window into a world, a monument to the culture that gave it birth, and whose spirit it expresses. When we sacrifice a language, notes Ken Hale, a professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, we might as well drop a bomb on the Louvre.

The ultimate tragedy is not that archaic societies are disappearing but rather that vibrant, dynamic, living cultures and languages are being forced out of existence. At risk is a vast archive of knowledge and expertise, a catalogue of the imagination, an oral and written literature composed of the memories of countless elders and healers, warriors, farmers, fishermen, midwives, poets and saints. In short, the artistic, intellectual and spiritual expression of the full complexity and diversity of the human experience.

To place a value on what is being lost is impossible. The ecological and botanical knowledge of traditional peoples, to cite but one example, has obvious importance. Less than one per cent of the world’s flora has been thoroughly studied by science. Much of the fauna remains unknown. Yet a people such as the Haunóo, forest dwellers from the island of Mindoro in the Philippines, recognize more than 450 animals and distinguish 1500 plants, 400 more than are recognized by Western botanists working in the same forests. In their gardens grow 430 different cultigens. From the wild, they harvest a thousand species. Their taxonomy is as complex as that of the modern botanist, and the precision with which they observe their natural environment is, if anything, more acute.

Such perspicacity is typical of indigenous peoples. Native memory and observation can also describe the long-term effects of ecological change, geological transformations, even the complex signs of imminent ecosystem collapse. Aborigine legends record that once it was possible to walk to the islands of the Coral Sea, to reach Tasmania by land, facts confirmed by what we now know about sea level fluctuations during the Ice Age. In the high Arctic, I once listened as a monolingual Inuit man lamented the shifts in climate that had caused the weather to become wilder and the sun hotter each year, so that for the first time the Inuit suffered from skin ailments caused, as he put it, by the sky. What he described were the symptoms and consequences of ozone depletion and global warming.

Elsewhere in Canada, in the homeland of the Micmac, trees are named for the sound the prevailing winds make as they blow through the branches in the fall, an hour after sunset during those weeks when the weather comes always from a certain direction. Through time, the names can change, as the sounds change as the tree itself grows or decays, taking on different forms. Thus, the nomenclature of a forest over the years becomes a marker of its ecological health and can be read as a measure of environmental trends. A stand of trees that bore one name a century ago may be known today by another, a transformation that may allow ecologists, for example, to measure the impact of acid rain on the hardwood forests.

Some botanists suggest that as many as forty thousand species of plants may have medicinal or nutritional properties, a potential that in many instances has already been realized by indigenous healers. When the Chinese denounced Tibetan medicine as feudal superstition, the number of practitioners of this ancient herb-based discipline shrank from many thousands to a mere five hundred. The cost to humanity is obvious. But how do you evaluate less concrete contributions? What is the worth of family bonds that mitigate poverty and insulate individuals from loneliness? What is the value of diverse intuitions about the cosmos, the realms of the spirit, the meaning and practice of faith? What is the economic measure of a ritual practice that results in the protection of a river or a forest?

Answers to these questions are elusive, impossible to quantify; and as a result, too few recognize the full significance and meaning of what is being lost. Even among those sympathetic to the plight of small indigenous societies, there is a mood of resignation, as if these cultures are fated to slip away, reduced by circumstance to the sidelines of history, removed from the inexorable progression of modern life.

Though flawed, such reasoning is perhaps to be expected, for we are all acolytes of our own realities, prisoners of our perceptions, so blindly loyal to the patterns and habits of our lives we forget that, like all human beings, we too are enveloped by the constraints and protection of culture. It is no accident that the names of so many indigenous societies—the Waorani in the forests of the Northwest Amazon, the Inuit of the Arctic, the Yanomami in the serpentine reaches of the upper Orinoco—translate simply as “the people,” the implication being that all other humans by default are non-people, savages and cannibals dwelling at the outskirts of the known world. The word “barbarian” is derived from the Greek barbarus, meaning “one who babbles,” and in the ancient world, it was applied to anyone who could not speak the language of the Greeks. Similarly, the Aztec considered all those incapable of understanding Nahuatl to be mute. Every culture is ethnocentric, fiercely loyal to its own interpretation of reality. Without such fidelity, the human imagination would run wild, and the consequences would be madness and anarchy.

But now, equipped with a fresh perspective, inspired in part by this lens brought to us from the far expanses of space, we are empowered to think in new ways, to reach beyond prosaic restraint and thus attain new insight. To dismiss indigenous peoples as trivial, to view their societies as marginal, is to ignore and deny the central revelation of anthropology.

In Haiti, a Vodoun priestess responds to the rhythm of drums and, taken by the spirit, handles burning embers with impunity. In the Amazonian lowlands, a Waorani hunter detects the scent of animal urine at forty paces and identifies the species that deposited it in the rain forest. In Mexico, a Mazatec farmer communicates in whistles, mimicking the intonation of his language to send complex messages across the broad valleys of his mountain homeland. It is a vocabulary based on the wind. In the deserts of northern Kenya, Rendille nomads draw blood from the faces of their camels and survive on a diet of milk and wild herbs gathered in the shade of frail acacia trees. In Borneo, children of the nomadic Penan watch for omens in the flight of crested hornbills. On an open escarpment in the high Arctic, Inuit elders fuse myth with landscape, interpreting the past in the shadow of clouds cast upon ice.

Just to know that such cultures exist is to remember that the human imagination is vast, fluid, infinite in its capacity for social and spiritual invention. Our way of life, with its stunning technological wizardry, its cities dense with intrigue, is but one alternative rooted in a particular intellectual lineage. The Polynesian seafarers who sense the presence of distant atolls in the echo of waves, the Naxi shaman of Yunnan who carve mystical tales into rock, the Juwasi Bushmen who for generations lived in open truce with the lions of the Kalahari, reveal that there are other options, other means of interpreting existence, other ways of being.

Every view of the world that fades away, every culture that disappears, diminishes a possibility of life and reduces the human repertoire of adaptive responses to the common problems that confront us all. Knowledge is lost, not only of the natural world but of realms of the spirit, intuitions about the meaning of the cosmos, insights into the very nature of existence.