“Together the myriad of cultures makes up an intellectual and spiritual web of life that envelops the planet and is every bit as important to the well being of the planet as is the biological web of life that we know as the biosphere. You might think of this social web of life as an “ethnosphere,” a term perhaps 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. The ethnosphere is humanities greatest legacy. 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 inquisitive and astonishingly adaptive species, have created. And just as the biosphere, the biological matrix of life, is being severely eroded by the destruction of habitat and the resultant loss of plant and animal species, so too is the ethnosphere, only at a far greater rate. No biologist, for example, would suggest that 50 percent of all species are moribund. Yet this, the most apocalyptic scenario in the realm of biological diversity, scarcely approached what we know to the most optimistic scenario in the realm of cultural diversity. The key indicator, the canary in the coal mine, if you will, is language loss. A language, of course, is not merely a set of grammatical rules or a vocabulary. It is a flash of the human spirit, the vehicle by which the soul of each particular culture comes into the material world. Every language is an old growth forest, a watershed of thought, an ecosystem of spiritual possibilities. Of the 7,000 languages spoken today, fully half are not being taught to children. Effectively, ,unless something changes they will disappear in our lifetime. Taken from the book called “The Wayfinders” by Wade Davis.
Posted on: Mon, 16 Sep 2013 23:13:51 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015