The Wire

Canadian ethnographer and National Geographic Explorer-In-Residence Wade Davis will use the 2011 Thomas Oration in Sydney tonight to argue for the need to maintain as many cultures as possible on the planet.

He says that every two weeks somewhere in the world an elder dies and takes with them the last vestiges of a language, and this process has been accelerating.  He says: “In a single generation or two we are losing by definition half of humanity’s social,intellectual, and spiritual ecological legacy.”