Light at the Edge of the World. Wade Davis
Acknowledgements
IN MY TRAVELS I WAS NEVER ALONE, AND THROUGHOUT all of these adventures and investigations, I benefited enormously from the companionship and guidance of dozens of individuals. I am especially indebted to the men and women of the indigenous communities who have so generously and openly received me as a guest in their lives.
Although it would be impossible to list by name all those who have assisted me over these many years, I would like to express my gratitude to my teachers and mentors, friends and colleagues. In particular, I would like to pay tribute to four people who have died recently: Darell Posey, tireless champion of the Kayapó and the human rights of all Amazonian peoples; Bruno Manser, friend and defender of the Penan; Terence McKenna, mystic visionary; and Richard Evans Schultes, plant explorer and teacher.
I am also grateful to the editors and designers responsible for working with the words to create this book. Finally, I thank my family: Gail, Tara and Raina.
I would like to dedicate this book to my sister, Karen, for her unfailingly generous love and support.
1
The Wonder of the Ethnosphere
ONE NIGHT ON A RIDGE IN BORNEO, CLOSE TO dusk, with thunder over the valley and the forest alive with the electrifying roar of black cicadas, I sat by a fire with Asik Nyelit, headman of the Ubong River Penan, one of the last nomadic peoples of Southeast Asia. The rains, which had pounded the forest all afternoon, had stopped, and the light of a partial moon filtered through the branches of the canopy. Earlier in the day, Asik had killed a barking deer. Its head lay roasting in the coals.
At one point, Asik looked up from the fire, took notice of the moon and quietly asked me if it was true that people had actually journeyed there, only to return with baskets full of dirt. If that was all they had found, why had they bothered to go? How long had it taken, and what kind of transport had they had?
It was difficult to explain to a man who kindled fire with flint—and whose total possessions amounted to a few ragged clothes, blowpipe and quiver of poisoned darts, rattan sleeping mat and carrying basket, knife, axe, parang blade, loincloth, plug of tobacco, three dogs and two monkeys—a space program that had consumed the energy of nations and, at a cost of nearly a trillion dollars, placed twelve men on the moon. Or the fact that over the course of six missions, they had travelled a billion and half miles (2.4 billion km) and, indeed, brought back nothing but rocks and lunar dust, 82 8 pounds (376 kg) altogether.
One small fragment of this precious cargo found its way to Washington, D.C., where it is today embedded in a swirl of blood-red crystal, the focal point of a beautiful stained-glass window in the National Cathedral, one of the largest and most dramatic Gothic churches in the world. When I first visited the cathedral and sat beneath its soaring vault, moved by the perfect harmony of its architecture and the shafts of light flooding the nave, I thought of Asik and his queries. The panel of glass known as the Space Window is dense with primary colours, circles of the deepest blues and reds representing the spheres of the heavens, with small crystals flaring on all sides. In the Gothic tradition, the light pouring through these windows is the Light Divine, a mystic revelation of the spirit of God. In contrast to this sacred luminosity, the tiny moon rock appears cold and lifeless, black, inert.
Here, perhaps, was an answer to Asik’s question. The true purpose of the space journeys, or at least their most profound and lasting consequence, lay not in wealth secured but in a vision realized, a shift in perspective that would change our lives forever. The seminal moment occurred on Christmas Day, 19 6 8 , a full six months before the first lunar landing, as the crew of Apollo 8 emerged from the dark side of the moon to see rising over its surface a small and fragile blue planet, floating, as one astronaut would recall, in the velvet void of space. For the first time in history, our world was revealed: a single interactive sphere of life, a living organism composed of air, water and soil. This transcendent vision, more than any amount of scientific data, taught us that the Earth is a finite place that can endure our neglect for only so long. Inspired by this new perspective, this new hope, we began to think in new ways, a profound shift in consciousness that in the end may well prove to be the salvation of a lonely planet.
Consider how far we have come. Forty years ago, the environmental movement was nascent. Highway beautification was a key initiative and just convincing motorists to stop throwing garbage out of car windows was considered a great victory. Writers such as Rachel Carson, who warned of far more dire scenarios, were lone voices in the wild. Gary Snyder, whose poetry touched that place of sensual memory reached later by the prophets of deep ecology, used to hitchhike across the United States simply to spend an evening with someone to whom he could relate. No one thought of the ozone layer, let alone of our capacity to destroy it and thus compromise the very conditions that make life possible. A mere decade ago, scientists who warned of the greenhouse effect were dismissed as radicals. Today, it is those who question the existence and significance of climate change who occupy the lunatic fringe. Twenty years ago, “biodiversity” and “biosphere” were exotic terms, familiar only to a small number of earth scientists and ecologists. Today, these are household words understood and appreciated by schoolchildren. The biodiversity crisis, marked by the extinction of over a million life forms in the past three decades alone, together with the associated loss of habitat, has emerged as one of the central issues of our times.
What stands out in this checkered history is not merely the pace of attitudinal change, but its dramatic scale and character. A single generation has witnessed a shift in perspective and awareness so fundamental that to look back is to recall a world of the blind. Evidence of the impending environmental crisis swirled all around us, but we took little notice. Fortunately, we have come to see, at least partially; and though solutions to the major environmental problems remain elusive, no nation or government can ignore or deny the magnitude of the threat or the urgency of the dilemma. This alone represents a reorientation of human priorities that is both historic in its significance and profoundly hopeful in its promise.
Acknowledging a problem, of course, is not the same as finding a solution. And having one veil lifted from our vision does not necessarily mean that we have fully recovered our sight. Even as we lament the collapse of biological diversity, we pay too little heed to a parallel process of loss, the demise of cultural diversity, the erosion of what might be termed the ethnosphere, the full complexity and complement of human potential as brought into being by culture and adaptation since the dawn of consciousness. As linguist Michael Krauss reminds us, the most pessimistic biologist would not dare suggest that half of all extant species are endangered or on the edge of extinction. Yet this, the most apocalyptic assessment of the future of biological diversity, scarcely approaches what is known to be the best conceivable scenario for the fate of the world’s languages and cultures.
Worldwide, some 300 million people, roughly 5 per cent of the global population, still retain a strong identity as members of an indigenous culture, rooted in history and language, attached by myth and memory to a particular place on the planet. Though their populations are small, these cultures account for 60 per cent of the world’s languages and collectively represent over half of the intellectual legacy of humanity. Yet, increasingly, their voices are being silenced, their unique visions of life itself lost in a whirlwind of change and conflict.
There is no better measure of this crisis than the loss of languages. Throughout all of human history, something in the order of ten thousand languages have existed. Today, of the roughly six thousand still spoken, fully half are not being taught to children, meaning that, effectively, they are already dead, and only three hundred are spoken by more than a million people. Only six hundred languages are considered by linguists to be stable and secure. In another century, even this number may be dramatically reduced.
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. The biological analogy is apropos. Extinction, when balanced by the birth of new species, is a normal phenomenon. But the current wave