I can't hear the plants sing.

A writer and photographer for National Geographic told a story about a South American indigenous people who showed him a plant in the forest that they used. Actually, they showed him 14 different varieties of this plant which to him all looked the same. The uses and treatment of the individual varieties were different and proper identification was important. He asked them how they were able to distinguish between the varieties. These people were incredulous that this person of much knowledge did not know how to do this. How was it that he did not know that each variety ‘sings’ in a different key?

The point of his talk was the great loss we are suffering in what he called our ‘ethnosphere’. The ethnosphere is made up of all the diverse cultures and each culture’s knowing. Cultures share many ways of knowing but are also unique in many ways. With homogenization, we are losing that unique knowing. Just as the loss of unique plants in our biosphere may cripple our ability to progress in the future, this loss of cultural knowledge bodes ill for us. According to this author approximately every two weeks some elder becomes the last person to speak a particular dialog as another culture is absorbed into the mainstream. The dialog could be recorded, rescued, sustained in some manner but the unique knowing of that culture dies when that culture is no longer lived. It’s like trying to read the Hebrew Scriptures in the original Hebrew. I may be able to learn the language in a relatively short period of time, but with a lifetime of study I could not fully grasp the cultural implications of phrases and words that carried rich and subtle meanings to the people who lived at the time the words were recorded.

Change happens. It is a fact of life. The exigencies of existence often demand that we leave behind one thing to pick up another. Life sometimes demands choices. Sometimes we force choices onto our world, thinking it will make our lives easier, less complex, less costly or simply less fearful. As the author of the presentation put it, “The world that we live in does not exist in some absolute sense. It is just one model of reality, the consequence of one particular set of adaptive choices that our lineage made many generations ago.” Today we can afford to embrace more diversity. I would like my grandchildren to know that there lives someone somewhere who can hear plants sing.

(To hear this story search for keywords ‘Wade Davis’ at http://www.ted.com/tedtalks/)