Diversity now

Wade Davis on indigenous cultures, dying
languages and the long road from Pointe
Claire to National Geographic

by JULIET WATERS

It might sound like a strange thing for a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence to say, but over coffee in Montreal last week, Wade Davis insists he’s never travelled.

“I’ve actually only ever travelled once in my life, in the true sense of travel, when you go with a one way ticket, no expectations, no sense of when you’re going to come back. Literally just casting yourself to the winds of fate.” That was a trip to Colombia he took in his 20s. Nevertheless, the winds of fate have still managed to blow him in some pretty radical directions.

As a young Harvard-trained ethnobotanist, Davis returned to Colombia in the mid-’70s as part of the first serious study of the coca plant and its use in indigenous cultures—just around the time it was becoming a primary crop in the international drug trade. This led to a PhD thesis on plants used in Haitian voodoo rituals, which became his first book, The Serpent and the Rainbow. The bestseller (and eventual Hollywood movie) put Davis near the forefront of the study of plants and altered consciousness.

In recent years, however, Davis has become best known as an activist on the issue of linguistic diversity. There is a consensus among linguists that in our lifetime, more than half of the world’s 6,000 languages will be destroyed. As Davis pointed out in a 2003 TED talk, every two weeks, a tribe elder dies with the last words of a language. “Genocide is universally condemned. But ethnocide is celebrated as development.” Davis’s latest book, The Wayfinders, is a collection of his CBC Massey Lectures on this subject (running on CBC this week and available at CBC.ca).

It’s a rivetting argument for the inextricable link between cultural diversity and biodiversity. It draws from his travels through the Southern Andes, Polynesia, the Sahara, the Himalayas and Australia and spins lucid, fascinating stories about endangered cultures and destroyed civilizations.

These places seem a far cry from the West Island of Montreal where Davis grew up. “I think a fascination with the ‘other’ came to me very young. And in part from growing up in Pointe Claire,” he explains. “I grew up in a time when the English and French communities where totally separate…particularly in Pointe Claire, which was an anglo community plunked like a carbuncle on the back of a very traditional old francophone community. In that era, my father could be a businessman in downtown Montreal for 12 years and not learn a word of French.”

But Davis’s fascination with the “other” is in no way nostalgic. “Indigenous people are neither sentimental nor nostalgic,” he stresses. Several of the cultures he writes about don’t even have words for the past. Many of the practices he describes in The Wayfinders—human, animal and child sacrifice, genital mutilation and subordination of women—are not ones we would by any stretch of the imagination want to adopt. Nor is Davis arguing against development or technology. “The problem isn’t technology. It’s power and domination.”

And there is still something fundamental that we can only acquire from a full engagement with indigenous cultures: an understanding that our way of seeing the world, with its emphasis on change, progress and domination, is not the only way of seeing it. If we’re serious about saving the planet, we have to learn something of the radical conservationism that has kept these cultures alive for this long. And Davis is adamant that we need to make them full players at the political table. Not just exotic, marginalized curiosities.

“Otherwise, the 20th century is not going to be recognized for its wars or its technological innovations,” he warns. “It’s going to be remembered as the era in which we stood by and actively endorsed, or massively accepted the destruction of biological and cultural diversity on the planet.”

THE WAYFINDERS BY WADE DAVIS,
ANANSI, PB, 262 PP., $19.95