Wade Davis on the 'Ethnosphere'

Anthropologist Wade Davis, author of the well-known book on Haitian voodoo The Serpent and the Rainbow, celebrates the extraordinary diversity of the world's indigenous cultures, many of which are disappearing, as ancestral land is lost and languages die. Davis argues that we should be concerned not only for preserving the biosphere, but also the "ethnosphere," which he describes as "the sum total of all thoughts and dreams, myths, ideas, inspirations, intuitions brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness."