The disintegration of the ‘ethnosphere’

For most of the world’s people, climate change is inextricably linked to starvation, migration and extinction; the phenomena cannot be mentioned independently of declining crop yields, rising seas and vector-borne disease. For the overwhelming minority of us living in the developed world, however, this is far from the case. Here, the social sciences insist that speaking about the costs of global warming is commensurate to fear-mongering; that the dialogue must be framed instead in the context of green jobs, trade competitiveness with emerging economies and the need to reduce dependence on dangerous foreign oil. But for children in the Maldives and high school students in Montana, fear of coming of age in a sunken nation and outsourced manufacturing and service jobs is a matter of lived experience; in the Global North entire societies have been built an arm’s length away from the Earth’s natural systems, while poorer populations live and die by subsistence economies.

This fundamental disconnect is all too tangible when nations gather to discuss and debate solutions to the climate problem. Copenhagen was fraught with mistrust and misunderstanding between the developed and the developing, riddled with economic excuses for inaction from the former and impassioned pleas for survival from the latter. Parties were practically speaking different languages; some employed the metrics of GDP and GNP while the others had nothing to leverage but potential body counts. It is no wonder negotiations culminated in an agreement leagues away from the fair, ambitious and legally binding international climate agreement that is still needed.

We desperately need shared experience. We need metrics around which we can build solidarity and understanding and trust. And we need them from every nation on earth; scientists maintain that stabilization of the climate system will require both sweeping emissions reductions from the world’s richest nations (on the scale of 80-95 percent below 1990 levels by 2050), and ‘substantial deviation from business as usual’ from the poorest. Economists have called for the collective mobilization of hundreds of billions of dollars for low-carbon growth and adaptation crucial to delivering billions from poverty in an already warmer world.

A common thread does exist in the form of a threat to our collective humanity. Nowhere is this more apparent than where I spent the summer: West Kalimantan, Indonesia. There, indigenous Dayak populations are starving. Their centuries-old agricultural practices are incompatible with a climate that no longer experiences a dry season, and their rice supplies are devastatingly insufficient as a result. National and multi-national palm oil companies have responded by buying up significant swaths of land made cheap by desperate families, and the vibrant culture of the Dayaks is diminishing in parallel with their sovereignty.

Worldwide, roughly 300 million people still retain strong indigenous identity, wedded to a particular geographic place through myth and memory and with a distinct history and language. These cultures account for 60 percent of the world’s spoken languages and collectively represent more than half of humanity’s intellectual legacy.

They face, however, assimilation and acculturation similar to that confronting the Dayaks of West Kalimantan. The likelihood of violence, conquest, famine or natural disaster compromising their unique ways of life increases every day climate change continues unabated.

The demise of cultural diversity is not among those climate impacts frequently listed, but it is among those affronts against which we can unite. The ‘ethnosphere’ — the full complexity and complement of human potential that lives and breathes in languages, medicinal practices, agricultural systems and oral traditions the world over — is sacrosanct. It is that which separates us from other species, that which could, above all else, justify the preservation of our entire race, as opposed to simply a wealthy portion of it.

This piece is, of course, the act of a desperate person: a frantic searching for a motivation that will deliver all nations to the negotiating table immediately. Idealistic it most certainly is. But in all our picketing and protesting and lobbying, I do believe that we have failed to approach those responsible as fellow people. We have failed to reach out to them on a spiritual level and discuss climate change as something that transcends national interest. It is time we celebrated the beautiful complexity that lines our shared humanity; time we saw that in a universe that remains largely a mystery, we cannot afford to silence the sacred pluralism of the human race. At the very least, it’s time we tried.