The wayfinders
"Many of us are alarmed by the accelerating rates of extinction of plants and animals. But how many of us know that human cultures are going extinct at an even more shocking rate? While biologists estimate that 18 percent of mammals and 11 percent of birds are threatened, and botanists anticipate the loss of 8 percent of flora, anthropologists predict that fully 50 percent of the 7,000 languages spoken around the world today will disappear within our lifetimes. And languages are merely the canaries in the coal mine: what of the knowledge, stories, songs, and ways of seeing encoded in these voices?" "In The Wayfinders, Wade Davis offers a gripping and enlightening account of this urgent crisis. He leads us on a fascinating tour through a handful of indigenous cultures, describing the worldviews they represent and reminding us of the encroaching danger to humankind's survival should they vanish."--Jacket.
Stats for nerds
4recommend
5mentions
4people
2011–2022years
80% recommend20% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- The Wayfinders, by Wade Davis, is a great book on the topic.
- Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer [0], because it brought the concept of reciprocity to the fore for me this year, and nudged me towards Finding the Mother Tree (Suzanne Simard), Eat Like a Fish (Bren Smith), and The Wayfinders (Wade Davis), all about ways of life that embrace diversity towards resilience in the face of the hyperobject of climate change. The life stories of the authors has been helpful in my personal development to be a better parent to my child, and a better spouse, so that we’re better-able to adapt to and shape change.
[0] https://www.worldcat.org/search?qt=worldcat_org_all&q=braidi...
- The Wayfinders by Wade Davis
If you're interested in what living 20k years ago would have been like this is a pretty good place to start.
- I highly recommend The Wayfinders by Wade Davis. This might expand your thinking on the topic. http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/home/search/?keywords=wayfinde...
- Sometimes we just like a challenge, especially when we’re young and full of wanderlust. Wade Davis, in The Wayfinders, tells about a Pacific trade network of white beads going one way (clockwise, iirc; listened to the book) and red beads going the other, with acted-out hostility on the island, and approach-protocols by the voyagers, followed by trading strings of beads and some social-bonding time together before the voyagers departed. With each island having what it needed for survival (the ocean provided quite a lot before mechanized exploitation; see, for one, Eat Like a Fish, by Bren Smith), the trade across such distances may well have been to keep up the social network with people showing similar origins.
