Endangered Cultures

Wade Davis’ TED talk on endangered cultures.

Wade Davis, one of National Geographic’s Explorers in Residence, is an anthropologist and ethnobotanist advocating for indigenous cultures around the world. Out of the 6 000 languages that once existed, less than half are still taught to children placing them on an endangered list that supersedes the extinction rate within the biosphere. Without language, cultural identity is difficult to embrace. He contends that preserving the Earth’s cultural diversity, which he labels as the ethnosphere, requires the Western world to acknowledging the importance of indigenous cultures and indigenous ways of knowing before more cultures and their languages become extinct.