Ethnocide

"The problem isn't change. All cultures, through time have constantly been engaged with a dance of new possibilities about life. Its not change or technology that threatens the integrity of the ethnosphere. It is power. The crude face of political domination...Genocide, the physical extinction of a people, is universally condemned, but ethnocide, the destruction of a people's way of life, is not only not condemned, but it is universally, in many quarters, celebrated as part of a development strategy. You cannot understand the pain of Tibet unless you move across it, at ground level...

In the end, it 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?"

-Wade Davis

The Worth of Tradition?

"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?"

-Wade Davis, The Light at the Edge of the World


The idea of tradition gets trampled like a leaf under the foot of an elephant in the modern discourse of development. China is seen as the model for the rest of the world; the lifting of 600 million out of poverty in 30 years, surely a remarkable feat, deserving of emulation and praise; however, one might ask, what is the price that has been paid by the Chinese people in their drive for economic prosperity? What has been the cost to family bonds, to the traditional culture and languages that have held this most ancient of cultures together over the many centuries? What has been the cost to the thousand year old traditions of the Tibetans, no longer able to practice traditional culture and religion in the land of their birth? What is the cost of the relentless drive for development, for material prosperity? Can we tell a hunter in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, sustained by the land, nourished by family, that he is impoverished? Is he any poorer than a banker working 80 hour weeks for money he cannot every possibly spend?

Language

"More than a cluster of words or a set of grammatical rules, a language is a flash of the human spirit, the filter through which the soul of each particular culture reaches into the material world. A language is as divine and mysterious as a living creature...each language is, in itself, an entire ecosystem of thought, an old growth forest of the mind. Each is a window into a world, a monument to the culture that gave birth to it, and whose spirit it expresses."


-Wade Davis, The Wonder of the Ethnosphere, The Light at the Edge of the World