Exploring the Ethnosphere

In another recent post to YouTube, anthropologist and botanist Wade Davis spoke in Februrary to the people of the TED Conference about the declining diversity of cultures in the world, and the contribution that these disappearing indigenous cultures make to the human condition. He discusses similar themes in an earlier (2003) talk at TED. Given this, and the recent discovery of previously unknown tribes in the Amazon, what does the future hold for the world's diminishing "ethnosphere"?

Some quotes (from the 2003 talk): "Genocide, the physical extinction of a people is universally condemned, but ethnicide, the destruction of a people's way of life is not only not condemned, it's universally, in many quarters, celebrated as part of a development strategy..."

"And in the end then, it really 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. Margaret Mead the great anthropologist said before she died, that her greatest fear was that as we drifted toward this blandly amorphous generic worldview, not only would we see the entire range of the human imagination reduced to a more narrow modality of thought, that we would awake as if from a dream one day having forgotten that there were other possibilities."

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