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Interview: Wade Davis, National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence

Recommendations by Chris Doyle, Editor, AdventureTravelNews™
Photographs Courtesy, Wade Davis, National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence

In all my 20 years in the outdoor and adventure travel industries, few interviews have so profoundly affected me as much as the exchange between National Geographic Explorer-In-Residence Wade Davis and National Public Radio’s Alex Chadwick. It’s a “must read,” for all players in the adventure travel community. Access the interview at http://www.npr.org/programs/re/archivesdate/2003/may/mali/davisinterview.html.

Clearly bio-diverse regions and non-human species face grave threats. And yet, Davis argues, humans are in the midst of one the single most cataclysmic mass extinctions cultures and languages worldwide – and, it’s occurring right before our eyes and will be fully realized during our lifetimes. In my interview with Davis in late February 2006, he appeals to the good senses of all who are involved and who might be in a position to help heighten widespread awareness about this eventuality – and who can offer up solutions to stave off this unfortunate reality. Anticipate more in an exclusive Davis interview and the projects he’s spearheading in the May/June 2006 issue of AdventureTravelNews.

This "must read" ATN brief is the first of several articles -- topics relating to coverage carried in ATN’s Responsible Tourism column – that will address anthropologic topics essential to the adventure travel community. ATTA continues to develop relationships with individuals and organizations contributing to awareness building, education, and other special initiatives inextricable linked to the overarching travel experience (culture, people, languages, archaeology, anthropology, the sciences, etc.).

Here are opening excerpt’s from the May 2003 (Yes, the interview is “dated,” and yet is just as fresh and relevant today as it was the day is aired on the U.S.’s NPR.) interview on National Public Radio:

“NPR's Alex Chadwick: How long have you been working on the ethnosphere project as an idea?

Wade Davis: I coined the term ethnosphere in a recent book, Light at the Edge of the World. The thought was to come up with a concept that would suggest to people that just as there is a biosphere, a biological web of life, so too there is a cultural fabric that envelops the Earth, a cultural web of life. You might think of the ethnosphere as being the sum total of all thoughts and dreams, myths, intuitions and inspirations brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness. The ethnosphere is humanity's great legacy. It is the product of our dreams, the embodiment of our hopes, the symbol of all that we are and all that we have created as a wildly inquisitive and astonishingly adaptive species.

And just as the biosphere, the biological matrix of life, is today being severely compromised, so too is the ethnosphere. Only if anything at a far greater rate of loss. No biologist, for example, would dare suggest that 50 percent of all species of plant and animal are moribund or on the brink of extinction. Yet this, the most apocalyptic projection in the realm of biological diversity, scarcely approaches what we know to be the most optimistic scenario in the realm of cultural diversity. The key indicator is language loss. There are at present some 6,000 languages. But of these fully half are not being taught to children. Which means that effectively, unless something changes, these languages are already dead.

AC: Why is the loss of language so important?

WD: It's the canary in the coal mine, a concrete and extremely disturbing indicator of what is happening to cultures in general. And, of course, a language is not merely a body of vocabulary or a set of grammatical rules. It is a flash of the human spirit, the means by which the soul of each particular culture reaches into the material world. Every language is an old growth forest of the mind, a watershed of thought, an entire ecosystem of spiritual possibilities.

It's haunting to realize that half of the languages of the world are teetering on the brink of extinction. Just think about it. What could be more lonely than to be enveloped in silence, to be the last of your people to speak your native tongue, to have no way to pass on the wisdom of the elders, to anticipate the promise of the children. This tragic fate is indeed the plight of someone somewhere roughly every two weeks. For on average every fortnight a leader dies and carries with him or her into the grave the last syllables of an ancient tongue. What this really means is that within a generation or two, we are witnessing the loss of fully half of humanity's legacy. This is the hidden backdrop of our age.

There are those of course who quite innocently ask, "Wouldn't the world be a better place if we all spoke the same language? Wouldn't it be easier for us to get along?" My answer is always to say, "Terrific idea. Let's make that universal language Yoruba, or Lakota, or Cantonese." Suddenly people get a sense of what it would mean to be unable to speak your mother tongue. I cannot imagine a world in which I could not speak English, for not only is it a beautiful language, it's my language, the expression of whom I am. But at the same time I don't want it to sweep away the other voices, the other languages of the world, like some kind of cultural nerve gas.

It's very important that we understand the root causes of this collapse of cultural diversity. There is this misconception that these other cultures, quaint and colorful though they may be, are somehow destined to fade away as if by some natural law, as if they are failed attempts at modernity, failed attempts to be us, peoples incapable of change, destined for the dustbin of history. This is simply not true.

Change is no threat to culture. All cultures through all time have constantly been engaged in a dance with new possibilities for life. Change is the one constant in human history. Nor is technology in and of itself a threat to culture. The Sioux Indians did not stop being Sioux when they gave up the bow and arrow anymore than an American farmer ceased being an American when he put aside the horse and buggy in favor of the automobile. It is not change or technology that threatens culture; it is power, the crude face of domination.

The ultimate tragedy, in fact, is not that archaic societies are disappearing but rather that vibrant, dynamic, living cultures and languages are being forced out of existence. Now these external threats have many faces. They may be industrial as the case of the egregious forestry practices that have destroyed the subsistence base of the nomadic Penan in the rainforests of Sarawak in Borneo. In Nigeria the once fertile soils of the Ogoni in the Niger delta can no longer be farmed because of toxic effluents of the petrochemical industry. Elsewhere the calamity may be caused by epidemic disease as in the case of the Yanomami who have suffered dreadful mortality due to exotic pathogens brought into their lives by the gold miners who have recently invaded their lands. Or the agent of destruction may be ideology, as in the case of the crude domination of Tibet by the communist Chinese. But in every case these are cultures that are overwhelmed by powerful external forces beyond their capacity to adapt to. This observation is in fact a source of considerable optimism. For it implies that if humans are the agents of cultural destruction, we can also be facilitators of cultural survival.”