#ethnosphere

"I love French wine, like I love the French language. I have sampled every language, French is my favorite. Fantastic language. Especially to curse with. Nom de dieu de putain de bordel de merde de saloperie de connard d'enculé de ta mère. It's like wiping your arse with silk. I love it."

There's not a lot of room for either in the malarial swamps of the Asmat or in the chilling winds of Tibet, but they have, nevertheless, through time and ritual, forged a traditional mystique of the Earth that is based not on the idea of being self-consciously close to it, but on a far subtler intuition: the idea that the Earth itself can only exist because it is breathed into being by human consciousness.

Now, what does that mean? It means that a young kid from the Andes who's raised to believe that that mountain is an Apu spirit that will direct his or her destiny will be a profoundly different human being and have a different relationship to that resource or that place than a young kid from Montana raised to believe that a mountain is a pile of rock ready to be mined. Whether it's the abode of a spirit or a pile of ore is irrelevant.

What's interesting is the metaphor that defines the relationship between the individual and the natural world. I was raised in the forests of British Columbia to believe those forests existed to be cut. That made me a different human being than my friends amongst the Kwagiulth who believe that those forests were the abode of Huxwhukw and the Crooked Beak of Heaven and the cannibal spirits that dwelled at the north end of the world, spirits they would have to engage during their Hamatsa initiation...

...Now the problem is that even those of us sympathetic with the plight of indigenous people view them as quaint and colorful but somehow reduced to the margins of history as the real world, meaning our world, moves on.

Well, the truth is the 20th century, 300 years from now, is not going to be remembered for its wars or its technological innovations, but rather as the era in which we stood by and either actively endorsed or passively accepted the massive destruction of both biological and cultural diversity on the planet. Now, the problem isn't change. All cultures through all time have constantly been engaged in a dance with new possibilities of life.

And the problem is not technology itself. The Sioux Indians did not stop being Sioux when they gave up the bow and arrow any more than an American stopped being an American when he gave up the horse and buggy. It's not change or technology that threatens the integrity of the ethnosphere. It is power, the crude face of domination. Wherever you look around the world, you discover that these are not cultures destined to fade away; these are dynamic living peoples being driven out of existence by identifiable forces that are beyond their capacity to adapt to...

...And in the end, then, it really comes down to a choice: do we want to live in a monochromatic world of monotony or do we want to embrace a polychromatic world of diversity?

Mrgaret Mead, the great anthropologist, said, before she died, that her greatest fear was that as we drifted towards this blandly amorphous generic world view not only would we see the entire range of the human imagination reduced to a more narrow modality of thought, but that we would wake from a dream one day having forgotten there were even other possibilities."

"Now together, the myriad cultures of the world make up a web of spiritual life and cultural life that envelopes the planet and is as important to the well being of the planet as is indeed the biological web of life that you know as the biosphere. You might think of this cultural web of life as being an ethnosphere.

You might define the ethnosphere as being the sum total of all thoughts, dreams, myths, ideas, inspirations, intuitions brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness. The ethnosphere is humanity’s great legacy. It’s a symbol of all the we are and all that we can be as an astonishingly inquisitive species. And just as the biosphere is being severely eroded, so too is the ethnosphere – and if anything, at a far greater rate.

No biologist, for example, would dare suggest that 50% of all species are moribund or on the brink of extinction because it simply is not true. And yet that, the most apocalyptic scenario in the realm of biological diversity scarcely approaches what we know to be the most optimistic scenario in the realm of cultural diversity.

And the great indicator of that, of course, is language loss. When each of you in this room were born, there were 6,000 languages spoken on the planet.

Now a language is not just a body of vocabulary or a set of grammatical rules, a language is a flash of the human spirit, its a vehicle through which the soul of each particular culture comes into the material world. Every language is an old growth forest of the mind, a watershed of thought, an ecosystem of spiritual possibilities.

And of those 6,000 languages, as we sit here today in Monterray, fully half are no longer being whispered into the ears of children. They are no longer being taught to babies. Which means, effectively, unless something changes, they’re already dead.

What could be more lonely than to be enveloped in silence, to be the last of your people to speak your language, to have no way to pass on the wisdom of the ancestors, or anticipate the promise of the children?

And yet, that dreadful fate is indeed the plight of somebody somewhere on earth roughly every two weeks because every two weeks, some elder dies and carries with them into grave the last syllables of an ancient tongue.”

"How The Languages We Speak Shape the Ways We Think" (Lera Boroditsky)

This idea can never be understated or overemphasized.