Awaiting One's Fate

Like the Great Auk, I await my fate standing on my own personal Tierra del Fuego. Last year, scientists alerted the world that people born red-haired with freckles were rapidly going extinct. The red hair and freckles are genetic markers from the time today's Homo Sapiens interbred with neanderthals before they liquidated them. Children born with red hair and freckles were allowed to live because they were thought to possess magical and divine powers. Pity the neanderthal women who could not breed such children. The time of this fusion came about the time of the Great Cave paintings in Europe. Which raises a disturbing question--do the origins of art come from genocide? While there are many explanations for the meaning and intent of the Cave paintings, one overwhelming consensus emerges that they demonstrate the moment Homo Sapiens was aware he was distinct from animals. And of course, unlike animals we decide to kill either our own or things that are different--hence the genocidal urge generated by this grand awareness. With all the talk about same sex, no one considers the lonely fate of the red-haired and freckled people who go through life never having same species sex. This factor probably leads to the frequency of depression in the red-haired and freckled population--we've lived with our loneliness too long. You will miss us when we're gone!

But never fear--the same fate awaits you. Read the latest edition of Rolling Stone. The story "Planet Earth 911" by Jeff Goodell and Tim Dickinson discusses the lobbying campaign by Big Oil and Big Coal to block any progress on global warming. As a bonus they profile the 17 polluters and deniers in the United States who are trying to derail all efforts to curb the climate catastrophe. Also, included is an excerpt from Patti Smith's new book about living and working with Robert Mapplethorpe.

If your life ever depended on the traditional wisdom of ancient peoples, Wade Davis' The Wayfinders:Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World is for you--or at least for me. I would have starved to death in Angola if an old traditional tribesman didn't hunt everyday and find beehives of honey to feed me. In the Western Sahara,I would have been marooned on the sand dunes in the middle of nowhere if the bedouin driver hadn't known how to navigate by the stars.

Wade Davis is the National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence , who splits his time between Washington,D.C. and Northern British Columbia where he lives with the Haida people.Davis reminds us that we are rapidly losing our biodiversity--20% of all mammals, 11% of birds, 5% of all fish are threatened by the environmental degradation of the planet and biologists antipate a loss of 10% of what they term "floristic diversity". Davis calls the myriad of cultures that make up the intellectual and spiritual life that envelops the planet the "ethnosphere" which he claims is just as important as the biological web of life we call the biosphere. The ethnosphere is best defined as the sum total of all thoughts and intuitions, myths and beliefs,ideas and inspirations brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness. He says,"It is the product of our dreams, the embodiment of our hopes,the symbol of all we are and all that we, as a wildly inquisitve and astonishingly adaptive species, have created.

The ethnosphere is actually being threatened at a higher rate than the biosphere. The key indicator for the threats to cultural diversity is language loss. Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind, a watershed of thought and an ecosystem of spiritual possibilities. Of the 7,000 languages spoken today , fully half are not being taught to children. Unless something changes,these will disappear in our lifetime. Half the languages on planet earth are facing extinction. On the average every two weeks an elder dies and carries away the last syllable of an ancient language. This means that within a generation or two we will be witnessing the loss of fully half humanity's social, cultural and intellectual legacy.

In our digital age and global economy, why should any of this matter? Whole peoples will lose their cultural identities but more importantly we may lose the keys to our survival as a species as Davis explains in his many chapters of what these secrets these cultures contain that have relevance to our day.

Among native Americans, which includes tribes in Canada and the Artic, the loss of language has deprived successive generations of access to their thousands of year old culture. Franz Boas always claimed to much derision that the Haida in British Colombia and Alaska possessed a culture higher than ancient Greeks. They were prosperous and lived in a world teeming with marine and animal life which they used in extremely sophisticated ways. 90% of the population was wiped out by the late 1890s by a wave of diseases brought by the pioneers. The oral history of this decimation is horrible to read and as a traditional culture tried to used ancient medicine to stave off small pox and the like, only making things worse. But a student of Boas was sent to the Haida to record their myths and legends. John Swanton met and took dictation in Haida from a blind poet named Ghandl of the Qayahl LLaanas in 1900.

The notes from these meetings with the last of the Haida master poets lay at the Smithsonian until the late 1990s, when the revival of the Haida culture stimulated a search for records of their history and myths. Robert Bringhurst translated the Haida texts in Nine Visits to the Mythworld (Nebraska Press, 2000), as well as two other volumes. The first American poet to have realized the richness of Haida oral literature was Gary Snyder. And once anthropologists and literary scholars started examing this work--they realized that Boas had been right all along. Ghandl and his kind were the equivalent of Homer and their oral literature dated back thousands of years. Other artists like Canada's Bill Reid in previous decades launched a revival of Haida art and architecture, including those great icons the Totem Poles.

But what if Boas hadn't send his student to record the oral literature of these people and what if no one kept the notes at the Smithsonian or could find them? A great world culture would not have been known or discovered. The enviromental record of British Colombia could only be pieced together through scientific data and the history of human's migration from Asia would be lacking. This is not just a loss of the past but a loss of keys to human adaptability over thousands of years.

Wade Davis examines our oldest culture, the San or the bushmen in the Kalahari. In everyday English we use 31 sounds. The San language has 141, a cacophony of cadence and clicks, which many believe is the birth of language. Through DNA research, the San lack any genetic markers that showed they ever moved. By all accounts, there are the first people in the family of man and probably the first culture in the world. Through them, one gains insight in the linguistic and physical adaptation to drought and food deprivation. Encoded in their language is the knowledge of survival in one of the most unforgiving environments.

By walking us through the great Polynesian culture, the Amazon and Tibet, Wade Davis makes the urgent case that the knowledge we need to survive enviromental cataclysm is already with us but it too is vanishing at an even more rapid rate. So be nice to freckled people--we are the shamans of old.