Must read book this week

This weeks must read book is by Wade Davis a well renowned anthropologist among several other titles from British Columbia. Wayfinders is an investigation into, and at the same time call to preserve, the languages and cultures which are so quickly dying out in our generation. He cites how biologists are concerned, rightly so, about 18 percent of mammals and 11 percent of birds facing extinction, yet no one is crying wolf about the predicted loss of 50 percent of all languages with in our life time.

Wayfinders is an excellent read not only for Davis' fascinating perspectives on cultures around the world, all first hand recounts, but for the critical view it takes of our own culture. For so long western ideologies have seen native societies and nomads as lagging behind on the social development ladder. Even today much of the development efforts seek to modernize natives and assimilate them, yet there are so many cultural practices within these societies that once examined seem so intuitive that our modern societies don't understand. An example Davis gives is examing the water bed in the Spatsizi wilderness of BC which feeds all major waterways in British Columbia and its counter part in Tibet the base of Mount Kailash. Kailash is considered so sacred people are forbidden from walking its slopes let alone climbing it, to desecrate it with industrial development would be a complete outrage. However the Sacred Headwaters of Spatsizi even though they are sacred to the people and a vital environmental resource providing most of our water, are being considered for massive open pit mining. Mining techniques that are known to be deadly are being considered and likely will be approved by the government of BC, at least in the opinion of Davis. So he asks us "to think for a moment what these proposals imply about our culture. We accept it as normal that people who have never been on the land, who have no history or connection to the country, may legally secure the right to come in and by the very nature of their enterprises leave in their wake a cultural and physical land scape utterly transformed and desecrated." (119)