Light at the Edge of the World. Wade Davis

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