protecting the ethnosphere

The dilemma of what to do about 'uncontacted tribes' or, for that matter, indigenous peoples the world over has been a theme in some of my earlier blog posts. The real issue is the shattering of their worldviews and culture that 'development' almost inevitably brings. I ended my last post on the subject by saying that:

Perhaps, I should just stay well away and avoid even thinking about polluting them with my own confusion!

But this would suggest that there isn't even a role to play in helping them to exist... Though I still have no idea what to do, this wonderful video from the TED talks by Wade Davis (from National Geographic), warmed my heart and, despite the tragic undertones, left me with a small ray of hope:



The idea of there being an ethnosphere that is undervalued (I am trying to imagine, somewhat unsuccessfully, an ethnological economics, like environmental economics, that may offer us ways of protecting it) and, it would seem, whose destruction is considered to be an indication of development itself is really disturbing.

As Wade Davis says in this passage based on his time with aboriginees in northern australia:

...in life there is only the Dreaming, in which every thought, every plant and animal, are inextricably linked as a single impulse, the inspiration of the first dawning.

This seems like the deepest recognition of everything being one that is conceivable: a life based on it rather than a life spent trying to grasp it. And how different a world this would produce.

So what do we do now?