Ideas - Wade Davis' CBC Massey Lecture # 5 | The Wayfinders: Century of the Wind

Episode Date: May 24, 2024

In his 2009 CBC Massey Lectures, The Wayfinders, anthropologist Wade Davis explored how the modern world can learn from Indigenous peoples. From the navigational skills of Polynesian sailors to the healing properties of plants, there is old knowledge we can all learn from. IDEAS revisits Davis' 5th Massey Lecture. Go to cbc.ca/ideas to listen to the full series.

Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goltar and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and most of all true crime podcasts. But sometimes I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. Across our planet, we're facing an ecological crisis. With climate change, temperatures are rising.

Wildfires are devastating our own country and others. Animal migration patterns are changing in ways we don't understand. Species are becoming extinct at an ever-increasing rate. and, species are becoming extinct at an ever-increasing rate. We know all this, and we're mostly at a loss on how to deal with it. Wade Davis has been reporting on this growing storm for his entire life. Award-winning anthropologist, ethnobotanist, filmmaker, photographer, writer, the story he's told through his work is that of the beauty of the world, of the great dangers we face in losing it all, and what it is he thinks we need to do to save our planet and its cultures.

To acknowledge the wonder of other cultures is not to denigrate our way of life, but to rather recognize with some humility that other peoples, flawed as they too may be, nevertheless contribute to our collective heritage. To appreciate this truth, of course, is to sense viscerally the tragedy inherent in the loss of any language or the assimilation of any people. To lose a culture is to lose something of ourselves. In his 2009 CBC Massey lectures, The Wayfinders,

he points to a road forward. What is true today was true 14 years ago. We need new thinking. And for Wade, that new thinking means old thinking. What lessons we can learn from indigenous cultures. The subtitle of the book of his lectures says it all. Why ancient wisdom matters in the modern world. Today on Ideas, we're rebroadcasting the fifth and last of Wade Davis' Massey lectures.

It's called Century of the Wind. From Convocation Hall at the University of Toronto, here's Wade Davis. The Garden of Eden has been found, and it lies in the southwest coast of Africa, not far from the homeland of the Jowasi Bushmen, who for generations lived in open truce with the lions of the Kalahari. Humanity's point of departure from Africa has also been located with some precision on the other side of the ancient continent, on the western shore of the Red Sea.

From there, we walk through desert sands and over snow-covered mountains, through jungles and wild streams, eventually finding our way across oceans and wind-stripped coral atolls to black sand beaches that fronted entire continents of untold mysteries and latent hopes. We settled the Arctic and the Himalaya, the grasslands of the Asian steppe and the boreal forests of the north, where winter winds blow so fierce the willow sap freezes and caribou graze on branches dead to the sun. On the rivers of India, we encountered sounds that echoed the human heart, and in the searing silences of the Sahara, we found water.

Along the way, we invented 10,000 different ways of being. In the mountains of Oaxaca in Mexico, the Mazatec learned to communicate across vast distances by whistling, mimicking the intonations of their tonal language to create a vocabulary that was written on the wind. Along the beaches of Dahomey, voodoo acolytes opened wide the windows of the mystic, discovering the power of trance, allowing human beings to move in and out of the spirit realm with ease and total impunity. In the forests of Yunnan, Naxi shaman carved mystical tales into rocks, while in the Orinoco Delta, their counterparts amongst the Warao endured nicotine narcosis in their quest for visions and inspiration. Knowledge of the lords of the rain, the house of the swallow-tailed kite,

the heraldic raptor, and the dancing jaguar. Off the shore of Sumatra, on the island of Sibirut, the Mentawii people recognize that spirits enliven everything that exists. Birds, plants, clouds, even the rainbows that arch across the sky. Rejoicing in the beauty of the world, these divine entities could not possibly be expected to reside in a human body that was not itself beautiful. To respect the ancestors and celebrate the living,

the Mentawii, both men and women, devote their lives to the pursuit of ascetic beauty, preening their bodies, filing their teeth, adding brilliant feathers to their hair, inscribing delicate spiral patterns onto their bodies. In daily life, they approach every task, however mundane, fully adorned. In the mountains of Japan, outside of Kyoto, Tende monks sleep for two hours a day, and with only a bowl of noodles and a rice ball as food, run through the sacred Kryptomeria forest 17 hours at a stretch for seven years, covering at one point in the Kai-Higoh initiation 80 kilometers a day for 100 days. As a final ordeal, they must go without food, water, and sleep for nine days. Even as they sit in silent meditation, their bodies exposed to the roaring blaze of a bonfire.

Tradition dictates that those who fail to complete the training must end their lives. Beneath their white robes, they carry a knife and a rope. Slung from their back are rope sandals. They wear out five pairs in a day. In the last four centuries, only 46 men have completed the ordeal, a ritual path of enlightenment that brings the initiate ever closer to the realm of the dead, all with the goal of revealing to the living that everyone and everything are equal, that human beings are not exceptional, that nothing in this world is permanent. People often ask, why does it matter if these wondrous yet exotic cultures and their belief systems disappear?

I mean, does it matter to the people of Quebec if the Taurig of the Sahara lose their culture? Probably not. No more than the loss of Quebec would matter to the Taurig. But I would argue that the loss of either way of life does matter to humanity as a whole. If the marathon monks of Japan cease to run, or if the children of the Mentoi shift their sense of beauty

to something more mundane and uninspired, or if the Naxi shaman no longer write in stone and abandon their native script, Dongba, the world's last hieroglyphic language, will the sky fall? No. But we're not talking about the loss of a single way of life, a single species, or a single cultural adaptation.

We are living through and we are speaking about a waterfall of destruction unprecedented in the entire history of humanity. In our lifetime, half the voices of humanity are being silenced. Now, I want to stress that the problem is not change. We have this conceit in the West that, while we've been celebrating and indulging technological wizardry and innovation, somehow the other peoples of the world have been static

and intellectually idle. Nothing could be further from the truth. Change is the one constant in history. All peoples and all cultures are always dancing with new possibilities for life. Nor is a threat to culture technology. The Lakota did not stop being Sioux when they gave up the bow and arrow in favor of the rifle any more than a Canadian farmer ceased being Canadian when he gave up the horse and buggy in favor of the automobile. It is neither change nor technology that threatens the integrity of culture.

It is power, the crude face of domination. We have this idea that these indigenous peoples, these distant others, quaint and colorful though they may be, are somehow destined to fade away as if by natural laws, if they're failed attempts at being modern, failed attempts at being us. Nothing could be further from the truth. In every case case these are dynamic

living peoples being driven out of existence by identifiable forces. And this is actually an incredibly optimistic observation because it suggests that if human beings are the agents of cultural destruction, we can also be the facilitators of cultural survival. As late as 1871, Buffalo outnumbered people in North America. In that year, you could stand on a bluff in the Dakotas and look out to the horizon and see for 50 kilometers in every direction a single herd of bison. Herds were so big, they had grazing areas the size of the state of Rhode Island. Wyatt Earp described one herd taking weeks to pass a single spot. Within nine years of 1871, the herds had vanished from the plains. U.S. government policy was explicit, exterminate the

buffalo and destroy the commissary of the great cultures of the plains. In 1884, British colonial authorities outlawed the potlatch in the Pacific Northwest. A year later, as European delegates gathered at the Congress of Berlin to carve up the African continent, they formally pledged their support for all efforts, quote, calculated to educate the natives and to teach them to understand and appreciate the benefits of civilization. Within a hundred years, indigenous peoples were forced to surrender to colonial powers, land spanning half the globe. Millions died, victims of the very civilization that in its own spasms of self-destruction would twice, in little more than a generation, come close to immolating the

entire world. Now this legacy of dispossession, what Eduardo Galeano called the century of the wind, reminds us that these fateful events happen not in some kind of distant past, but in the lifetimes of our own great grandparents and grandparents, and they continue to this day. Genocide, the physical extermination of a people, is universally condemned. But ethnocide, the destruction of a people's way of life, is not only not condemned, in many quarters it's sanctioned and endorsed as appropriate development policy. Modernity provides a rationale for disenfranchisement

with the real goal too often being the extraction of natural resources on an industrial scale from territories occupied for generations by indigenous peoples whose ongoing presence on the land proves to be an inconvenience. The mouth of the Baram River in Borneo is the color of the earth. To the north, the soils of Sarawak disappear into the South China Sea, and fleets of empty Japanese freighters hang on the horizon, ready to fill their holds with raw logs ripped from the heart of Borneo. Some 150 kilometers upstream, however, is another world, a varied and magical landscape of forest, soaring mountains, and crystalline rivers.

This is the traditional territory of the Penan, who are often said to be among the last nomadic peoples of Southeast Asia. of Southeast Asia. The term nomadic, in fact, is a little bit misleading, implying a life of sort of constant movement, and with it perhaps a dearth of fidelity to place. In fact, the Penan passage through the forest is cyclical, resource-dependent, and the same sites are occupied time and again over the lifetime of every individual. Thus the forest for them is a series of neighborhoods, wild and potentially dangerous in some aspects, but fundamentally domesticated by generations of human presence and interaction. From the forest, the Penan say very simply, we get our life. From the forest, the Penan say very simply, we get our life.

What most impressed me when I first visited Penan in 1989 was a certain quality of being, an essential humanity that was less innate than a consequence of the manner in which they had chosen to live their lives. The Penan had little sense of time, save for the rhythms of the natural world, the fruiting seasons of plants, the passage of the sun and the moon, the sweat bees that emerged two hours before dusk, the black cicadas that electrify the forest at precisely six every evening. They had no notion of paid employment, of work as burden, as opposed to leisure as recreation. For them, there was only life, the daily round. Children learn not in school, but through experience, often at the side of their parents. With families and individuals widely dispersed in the forest, self-sufficiency was a norm,

with everyone capable of doing every necessary task. So there was very little sense of hierarchy. So how do you measure wealth in a society in which there are no specialists, in which everyone can make everything from raw materials readily available in the forest, a society in which there is no incentive whatsoever to accumulate material possessions because ultimately everything has

to be carried on the back. Well, the Penan explicitly perceive wealth as a strength of social relations between people, for should these relationships fray or break, everyone will suffer. So all priority is on the solidarity of the group. Confrontation, displays of anger are almost never experienced. The Penan also were an oral tradition. They lacked the written word. Oral traditions sharpen recollection, even as they seem to open a kind of mysterious dialogue

with the natural world. Just as you can hear the voices of a character when you read a novel, so too the Penan would hear voices of the animals in the natural world. Every forest sound was an element of a language of the spirit. Trees bloom when they hear the lovely song of the bare-throated crankleput. Birds heard from a certain direction bring good tidings. The same sounds heard from another direction may be a harbinger of ill. Entire hunting parties may be turned back to camp by the call of a banded kingfisher, the cry of a bat hawk. Before embarking on any journey in the forest, they have to see a white-headed hawk

and hear the call of the crested rainbird and the dog-like bark of barking deer. Tragically, by the time I first visited the Penan, those sounds of the forest had become the sounds of machinery. Throughout the 1980s, as the plight of the Amazon rainforest captured the attention of the world, Brazil produced less than 3% of the tropical log exports. Malaysia accounted for nearly 60% of production, much of it from Sarawak and much of it from the homeland of the Penan. By 1993, when I first returned, there were 30 logging companies operating in the Baram River drainage alone, each equipped with as many as 1,200 bulldozers working on over a million hectares

of forested land traditionally belonging to the Penan and their immediate neighbors. Within a single generation, the Penan world was turned upside down. Women raised in the forest found themselves working as servants or prostitutes in logging camps that muddied the rivers with debris and silt. Sometimes it seemed as if half of Sarawak was slipping away to the South China Sea from the sheer erosion of the soils. The Penan, of course, resisted, blockading the logging roads with rattan barricades, but this became a brave yet quixotic gesture, blowpipes against bulldozers, and ultimately, of course, no match for the power of the Malaysian state.

The basis of the existence of one of the most extraordinary nomadic cultures in the world has been destroyed. Throughout the traditional homeland of the Penan, the Sago and Rattan, the palms, lianas, fruit trees, they all lie crushed on the forest floor. The hornbill has fled with the pheasants and as the trees continue to fall a unique way of life, morally inspired inherently right and effortlessly pursued for countless generations has collapsed in but one generation.

Now it's not just egregious industrial intrusions or decisions that afflict culture the first time I visited the Khmer temple at Angkor Wat in Cambodia I met an elderly Buddhist nun who had had her feet and hands severed from her body during the era of Paul Pott and the killing fields her her crime had been her faith and her punishment the barbaric response of a regime and an ideology that denied all nuances of spiritual belief and indeed the very notion of ethnicity and culture. Reducing the infinite permutations of human society and consciousness to a simple opposition of owners and workers, capitalists and proletariat, Marxism, formulated by a German philosopher

in the reading room of the British Library, was in a sense the perfect triumph of the mechanistic view of existence inspired by Descartes. Society itself was a machine that could be engineered for the betterment of all. This was precisely what Paul Pott, brother number one, had in mind. He actually thought he was helping, moving history forward, even if it meant the death of three million.

Now, the attempt of revolutionary cadre in scores of nations to impose Marxist thought, this European idea, on peoples as diverse as the Nenets reindeer herders of Siberia, the Dogon living beneath the burial caves of their ancestors in the cliffs of Mali, the Bantu, Bambara, Fulani, it would all appear almost laughably naive had not the consequences proved so disastrous for so much of humanity. In Tibet alone, more than a million would die for their faith, even as the Chinese cadre blasted to dust and rubble 6,000 monasteries and sacred temples. rubble, 6,000 monasteries and sacred temples. Now this dreadful history of what Churchill called the bloodstained century of violence was very much on my mind when I traveled a number of years ago

in the Himalaya with two good friends, Mathieu Ricard and Sherab Barma. The three of us met at Shiwong, a beautiful monastery that clings like a swallow's nest to the flank of the Himalayan Nepal and from there we went to the sanctuary of Thubten Choling home to some 800 monks and nuns who devote their lives to personal transformation

and what Mathieu calls the science of the mind that is Tibetan Buddhism over the course of nearly mind that is Tibetan Buddhism. Over the course of nearly a month in the mountains, Mathieu and Sherab led me on a remarkable pilgrimage that took us right up to the flank of Everest. But our goal was not the mountain, but rather the home of a simple Buddhist nun by the name of Satsang Ani.

For 45 years, she had not left the confines of a single small room. She had, of course, some human contact. Food was brought to her by an attendant each day, and Sherab, of course, in her older years as a physician, had examined her from time to time. But fundamentally, she had gone into lifelong retreat, dedicating her entire life to contemplative practice and solitude. She was the hero of all heroes, the true bodhisattva, the wisdom hero, the realized being who had found enlightenment and yet remained in the realm of samsara, of ignorance and suffering,

to assist all other sentient beings achieve their own liberation. Approaching finally, after a long walk, the shuttered window of her nunnery, the room in which she had lived for 45 years, I half expected to be met by a madwoman. Instead, the wooden door slowly creaked open to reveal the happiest of eyes, sparkling with light and laughter. She offered us sweets and immediately took Mathieu to task for the elaborate, baroque, and quite unnecessary rituals of monastic life.

She had distilled her entire religious practice into a single mantra, Om Mani Padme Hum, six syllables representing the six realms that must be passed before the whole of samsara is emptied and complete purity is embraced through the heart essence of the Buddha. is embraced through the heart essence of the Buddha. With each breath, Setsunani moved that much closer to her goal, which was not a place, but a state of mind, not a destination, but a path of salvation and liberation. So we stayed with her for perhaps an hour and then left Setsunani to her devotions. As we moved away from the village, we happened to pass some climbers who were slowly making their way toward Everest base camp. Most of us would find it inconceivable to do something similar to what this gentle woman

had done. Some of us would call it a waste of a human life. Most Tibetan Buddhists, by contrast, find it equally incomprehensible that one would choose to walk to heights where the air is so thin that consciousness is obliterated. To enter a death zone deliberately, to risk losing the opportunity of personal transformation, merely to climb a mountain is to them a fool's folly, the actual waste of a precious incarnation. For the Tibetan, the proof of the efficacy of the science of the mind that is the Buddhist path

is the serenity achieved by the practitioner. is the serenity achieved by the practitioner. And for them, it validates the entire tradition just as surely as a falling apple proves to us the existence of gravity. This may be hard to understand, but this really exists for the Tibetans. I remember Mathieu quoted a lama who once said to him, you know, we in Tibet don't really believe that you went to the moon, but you did. You may not believe that we achieve enlightenment in one lifetime, but we do. On Ideas, you're listening to Century of the Wind,

the fifth and last of the 2009 CBC Massey lectures by anthropologist Wade Davis. The Wayfinders, why ancient wisdom matters in the modern world. You can hear ideas on the CBC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts. We're also on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America on US Public Radio and Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas.

I'm Nala Ayyad. and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and most of all, true crime podcasts. But sometimes I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast, Crime Story, comes in. Every week, I go behind the scenes

with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. For Wade Davis, the environmental threats to our planet are matched by the threats to our Indigenous cultures. Half of the 7,000 languages spoken today are not being taught to children, he points out, and that tragic loss is all the more important because, he believes, Indigenous cultures and the knowledge and wisdom they carry

are the secret to finding our way forward, saving the planet, saving ourselves. Here's Wade Davis and the conclusion of the fifth of his 2009 Massey lectures, Century of the Wind. Our species has been around, scientists tell us, for 200,000 years since we descended from our progenitor, Homo erectus. The Neolithic revolution, which gave us agriculture, at which time we succumb to the cult of the seed

and the poetry of the shaman was displaced by the prose of the priesthood, occurred only 10,000 years ago. Modern industrial society as we know it is scarcely 300 years old. This shallow history should not suggest to any of us that we have all of the answers for all of the challenges that will confront us as a species in the coming millennia.

The goal is not to freeze people in time. One cannot make a rainforest park of the mind. The question is not the traditional versus the modern, but the rights of free people to choose the components of their lives. The point is not to deny access to anything to anybody, but rather to ensure that all peoples are able to benefit from the genius of modernity on their own terms and without that engagement demanding the death of their ethnicity. Were I to distill a single message from these Massey lectures, it would be that culture is not trivial. It is not decorative. It's not artifice. It's not the

songs we sing, even the prayers we chant. Ultimately, culture is a blanket of comfort that gives meaning to lives. It is a body of knowledge that allows the individual to make sense out of the infinite sensations of consciousness, to find order and meaning in a universe that may have neither. Culture, by definition, is a body of laws and traditions, a moral and ethical code that insulates all people and all cultures from the barbaric heart that history suggests so sadly lies beneath the surface of all of us. It is culture alone that allows us, as Abraham Lincoln said, to always seek the better angels of our nature.

Outside of the major industrial nations, globalization has not brought integration and harmony, but in my opinion, a firestorm of change that has swept away languages and cultures, ancient skills, and visionary wisdom. This does not have to happen. To acknowledge the wonder of other cultures is not to denigrate our way of life, but to rather recognize with some humility that other peoples, flawed as they too may be, nevertheless contribute to our collective heritage, the human repertoire of ideas, beliefs, and adaptations that have allowed us as a species historically to thrive. To appreciate this truth, of course, is to sense viscerally the tragedy

inherent in the loss of any language or the assimilation of any people. To lose a culture is to lose something of ourselves. Fortunately, change is coming, and not a minute too soon, as people come in a new perspective to view culture and value it in different ways. In many ways, I really think that Canada is leading the way, not only as a model of a successful multicultural country, but as a nation-state prepared to acknowledge past mistakes and seek appropriate means of restitution, even as we chart our way forward as a pluralistic society.

I recall this every time I travel to the Arctic, but especially to Nunavut. Nunavut's very existence is a powerful statement to the world that Canada recognizes that indigenous peoples do not stand in the way of a country's destiny. They contribute to it only if given a chance. Their cultural survival does not undermine the nation-state. It serves to enrich it if the state is willing to embrace diversity. The power of this idea grows even stronger when you consider how far as Canadians we've come in redefining our relationships with the First Nations.

For the Inuit in particular, the original clash of cultures was traumatic in the extreme. When the British first arrived in the Arctic, they took the Inuit to be savages. The Inuit took the British to be gods. Both were wrong, but one did more to honor the human race. The British failed to understand that there was no better measure of genius than the ability to survive in a harsh Arctic environment with a technology that was limited

to what you could carve from ivory and bone, antlers, soapstone, and slate. The runners of the sleds were originally made of fish, three Arctic char laid in a row wrapped in caribou hide and frozen. The Inuit didn't fear the cold. They took advantage of it.

And European expeditions that mimic their ways achieved great feats of exploration, but those who failed to do so suffered terrible deaths. When the last of Lord Franklin's men were found frozen at the Starvation Cove on the Adelaide Peninsula, the young sailors were stiff in the leather traces of a sled made of iron and oak in Manchester that weighed 650 pounds. On it was an 800-pound dory loaded with all the personal effects of a British naval officer, including silver dinner plates and even a copy of the novel, The Vicar of Wakefield. This they somehow expected to drag through the immense boreal forests of the north, hoping that they might bump into a Hudson Bay post. The Inuit, of course, by contrast, moved lightly on the land,

and I was really reminded of this on a recent trip to the Arctic as my good friend and Canadian filmmaker Andy Gregg and I joined two Inuk friends, Theo Ikumak and John Arnatsiak, and a party of hunters from Igloolik as they set out on the ice in search of polar bear. We were traveling, I suppose by that point, 200 kilometers offshore, and with the windshield the temperature hovered at around minus 50 Celsius. A snowmobile pulling a fully loaded cometic hit a piece of rogue ice and spun out of control, and the momentum of the sled carried it up and over

both driver and machine of the skidoo. One of the skis simply twisted like a pretzel, the other was torn completely in half. And I watched in astonishment as Theo and John pounded out the metal, blasted four holes in it with rifles at close range, improvised clamps from a scrap of iron, scavenged a splint from a hockey stick, and had the entire works bound back together within 20 minutes.

We pushed on into the night, and it was only days later that the driver mentioned casually that in the accident he had broken his foot. Theo and John grew up together, and their lives in many ways encapsulate the story of the Inuit in the 20th century. At the ages of six and eight, Theo and John were sent south, 800 kilometers to the residential school at Chesterfield Inlet, where, forbidden to speak their own language, they remained for seven years. When finally they were allowed to return home, their families took them immediately onto the land in what Theo today describes as a rescue mission. Over a series of years, he recalls, they turned us back into Inuit men. This culmination of his rebirth was an epic journey by dog sled, 1,800 kilometers from Aglulik across Baffin Island, north along the shore of

Ellesmere Island, and across Smith Sound to Greenland. Theo had done the journey with dogs in two months. Andy and I invited him to return with us on a charter flight of a mere six hours. Almost immediately, the plane crossed over Baffin Island. We could see from the expression on Theo's face that something was terribly wrong. It was April, and the flight path was 12 degrees south of the North Pole. The sea ice was not there. Smith's sound, which Theo had crossed with his dogs, was open water.

He stared out the window in disbelief. The Inuit are a people of the ice. As hunters, they cannot live without it. They depend totally on the sea ice for their survival, even as the ice itself inspires and influences the very essence of their character and culture. My good friend Gretel Ehrlich, a wonderful writer, lived among the polar Eskimo in Greenland for eight years, and she suggests that it's the very nature of ice, the way it moves and recedes, the way it dissolves and reforms with the seasons, that gives such flexibility to the Inuit heart and

spirit. They have no illusions of permanence, she writes. There is no time for regret. Despair is a sin against the imagination. They deal with death every day. To live, they have to kill the things they most love. Blood on ice for the Inuit is not a sign of death, but an affirmation of life itself. Well, Gretel was waiting for us in Connock when we landed, and with her was Jens Danielsen, her mentor in the north, a great bearer of a man with an enormous heart

and immense skills as a hunter. And like Theo, Jens had made his own epic journey with dogs, in his case, retracing the route of the entire Fifth Thule expedition of Rasmussen, going by dog all the way from Greenland, across the top of Canada, to distant Alaska. And so, in the company of these two quite remarkable men, Jens and Theo, our plan was to spend a fortnight on the ice, establishing a hunting camp beyond the western shore of a large island, roughly two days offshore from Kanak. To get there, we would travel by dog sled. Kanak alone, among all Inuit communities in the north, long ago banned the use of skidoos. In their wisdom, the people recognized that keeping sled dogs was the fulcrum of their culture.

Dogs loosened the shackles binding the families to the cash economy. They made limitless the length of any journey. They honed the skills of the hunter who had to provide a constant supply of meat they brought security to the night if you were a master of dogs you were as Jens said a master of your own life as it turned out the dogs were of limited value

once we reached the island there were great open leads in the ice and we were obliged to hunt by boat. Jens was stunned. He had never seen open water in April. In his language, the word sila means both weather and consciousness. Weather brings animals or leads them away, allowing people to survive or causing them to die. The ice, Jens explained to me, used to form in September and remain solid until July. Now it comes in November and is gone by March. The hunting season has been cut in half in a single generation. Gretel told me of a trip she and Jens had made the previous summer. They were hunting narwhal and it rained every single day. They had stood one afternoon alone on a

headland looking out to sea and Jens simply looked to the horizon. He said, this is not our weather. Where does it come from? This then, in a sense, is a tragedy in the inspiration of the Arctic. When you think about it, a people who have endured so much epidemic disease, the humiliation and violence of the residential schools, the culture of poverty inherent in the welfare system, drug and alcohol exposure leading to suicide rates six times that of southern Canada, leading to suicide rates six times that of southern Canada, now on the very eve of their emergence as a culture reborn politically, socially, and psychologically,

they find themselves confronted by a force beyond their capacity to resist. The ice in the Arctic is melting, and with it, quite possibly, a way of life. These lectures set out to ask a simple question. Why ancient wisdom matters in the modern world? The phrase actually is somewhat flawed, implying if it does that these many remarkable peoples we have encountered are somehow vestigial, archaic voices stranded in time, having at best a vague advisory role to play in contemporary life. In truth, all the cultures I have referenced in these lectures, the Tibetans and the San, the Arawakos, Wiwas, and Kohi, the

Kiowa, Barasana, Makuna, Penan, Rindili, Taltan, Gitsan, Wutsuitan, Haida, Inuit, and all the peoples of Polynesia are very much alive and fighting not only for their cultural survival, but also to take part in a global dialogue that will define the future of life on Earth. There are currently 1,500 languages gathered around the campfire of the internet, and the number is increasing by the week. Why should these voices be heard? Well, there are scores of reasons, but to sum it all up, perhaps we can distill it in two simple words, climate change. There is no serious scientist alive who questions the severity and the

implications of this crisis or the factors, decisions, and priorities that caused it to occur. It has come about because of the consequences of a particular and singular worldview. We in the West have for three centuries now, as Tom Hartman has written, we have consumed the ancient sunlight of the world. Our economic models are projections and arrows when they should be circles. The hope, however, lies in the severity of the crisis. Aside from the Arctic, the greatest immediate threat is being felt in the severity of the crisis. Aside from the Arctic, the greatest immediate threat is being felt in the mountain ice fields that are the birthplaces of the world's great rivers.

On the Tibetan plateau, the source of the Yellow River and the Mekong, the Yancey, the Brahmaputra, the Salween, the Sutle, the Indus, and the Ganges, there has been no net accumulation of snow since 1950. Conservative estimates predict that 60% of the glaciers of the Himalayan massif will be gone by the end of this century. Half of humanity depends on these rivers. 500 million people in India alone turn to the Ganges for water. During the dry season, fully 70% of the river's

flow originates in the Gangotri Glacier, which is receding at a rate of nearly 40 meters a year. If, as currently anticipated, the glacier completely disappears, the Ganges will become a seasonal river within our lifetimes. What I've found in my travels is that throughout the world, mountain people who have played no role in the creation of this crisis are not only seeing the impact of climate change on their lives, they are in this sort of beautiful way taking personal responsibility for the problem, often with a seriousness of intent that puts many of us to shame. Eighty percent of the fresh water that feeds the western coast of South America is derived from Andean glaciers. These are receding at such an obvious rate that the pilgrims to the Coyeriti,

the festival I described and celebrated in the fourth of the Massey lectures, the pilgrims are today no longer carrying ice from the sacred Sinicata Valley back to their communities, foregoing the very gesture of reciprocity that completes the sacred circle of the pilgrimage and allows for everyone to benefit from the grace of the divine. In the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Colombia, the Mamos observe that each season the recession of the snow in the ice fields creates a crisis in what is for them the literal heart of the world. They see the disappearance of birds, amphibians, butterflies,

and the changing ecological character of the disappearance of birds, amphibians, butterflies, and the changing ecological character of the páramos, these alpine meadows upon which so much of their spirituality is based. They have in fact dramatically increased their ritual and political activities, and they have formally called on the younger brother to stop destroying the world. So all of these voices matter because they can still be heard to remind us that there are indeed alternatives, other ways of orienting human beings in social, spiritual, and ecological space. This is not to suggest naively that we abandon everything and attempt to mimic the ways of non-industrial societies,

or that any society be asked to forfeit its right to benefit from the genius of technology. It is rather to draw inspiration and comfort from the fact that the path we have taken is not the only one available, that our destiny, therefore, is not indelibly written in a set of choices that demonstrably and scientifically have proven not to be wise. By their very existence, the diverse cultures of the world bear witness to the folly of those who say we cannot change, as we all know we must change,

the fundamental manner in which we inhabit this planet. Some years ago, I traveled north from Timbuktu, 1,000 kilometers into the Sahara, to reach the ancient salt mine of Taudeni. With a number of friends and colleagues, including Canadian photographer Chris Renier, who had made the journey several times, I followed the route of the camel caravans that once defined commerce in West Africa. Until the Portuguese found a way to sail across the Bight of Benin and the Spaniards discovered and sacked the wealth of the Americas,

two-thirds of Europe's gold moved overland from Ghana and the African coast, 52 days by land across the Sahara to Morocco. Timbuktu, located a days north of the Great Bend of the Niger River, became the most important port on the great sea of sand that was a western desert. Today, of course, Timbuktu is a mostly forgettable place, dry and dusty, impossibly hot. In 1914, when the French took control of the city, they confiscated the ancient manuscripts, threatened the scholars with jail,

and taught the children that their ancestors were not Arab or Berber, Tamashek or Tg, but Gaul. They also went after the salt trade, flooding the market with sheep salt from Marseille, not out of economic rivalry, but because of the symbolic importance of the traditional trade. The salt of Taodeni was the gold of the Sahara, valued throughout West Africa for its curative properties, gold of the Sahara, valued throughout West Africa for its curative properties, and the culture of movement that grew up around its exchange defined the people of the desert. Until an Arab boy endured thirst and privation and crossed the Sahara, 20 days each way by camel, he could not marry or be considered a man. An old professor in Timbuktu described the journey as a test of strength,

a physical and spiritual transformation that left a child the master of his senses. Our guide on the journey was a venerable elder, Baba Umar, famous for having located a lost party of French legionnaires simply from the description over the radio of the scent and color of the sand at their position. We traveled north by jeep,

with Baba at times rather frantically pointing this way and that as our drivers raced over these flat pans of hard white ground. When we slowed to maneuver through soft sand or take on water at a well, he took notice of the orientation of the dunes, the color and texture of sand, the patterns the wind made in the lee of plants. He carried an old French military compass and from time to time lay spread eagle taking a bearing. His true compass, however, was clearly within. Asked if ever he had been lost, he replied that orientation in the desert was a gift given to few, and if he was ever uncertain,

he simply sat and waited for a sign from Allah. Two exceptional events unfolded over the next days. events unfolded over the next days. The mine itself was a biblical scene. Mounds of excavated dirt piled for kilometers across a flat horizon of an ancient lake bed. Men stripped to the waist, skin cracked by salt, chipped away slabs of it with picks and cave-like crevasses of underground pits. Our Torah companion, Esau Muhammad, took one look and said to me, I would not bring my wife to this place. When I asked a group of men their nationalities, they replied, there are no countries here. On our last day at the mine,

we met a man trapped in shame, beholden to debt, whose body, though younger than mine, had been broken by 25 years in the pits. He lived alone in a tiny room built of blocks of crude salt. His only possessions were a rusted oil drum and his tattered bermousse,

a cloak of coarse wool that with a hood sheltered and shadowed his face, he had the eyes of a gazelle. In the entire 800-year history of the seasonal mine, he was the only person known to have spent a summer at the site. He survived by working at night and slipping away before dawn to walk to a distant well where he sat alone all day in temperatures that can melt sand. His debt, for which he had suffered so long,

an obligation that had kept him from his family for two decades, was less than the cost of a dinner at an upscale restaurant in Toronto. Chris and I gave him the money very discreetly. He simply said, Bismillah. Bismillah. Peace be upon you. As we left his hovel, a sandstorm blew across the mine, enveloping him like a veil. We never knew if the story was true or if he'd been

beaten and robbed or perchance had actually bought his way to freedom. On our way back to Timbuktu, we came upon a caravan that we had passed on our way north. The freak thunderstorm that had broken over our camp on our first night at the mine had apparently swept the entire country. If the salt gets wet, it crumbles and loses all value. So the young men had been forced to stop in the desert to dry out the slabs in the sun. They lost three critical days, and by the time we ran into them, they were down to their last quart of water. The six men were 150 kilometers from the nearest well, with a precious consignment of cargo and 20 or more camels that represented the entire wealth of their families. There was no sign of panic.

As we pulled up, I saw one of them with one camel shimmering as a mirage on the horizon to the east. Apparently, they knew of a depression in the ground some 25 kilometers away that, if excavated to a sufficient depth, might yield water. Without food, a body can live for weeks, without water mere days. In the desert, in the absence of water, delirium comes in an evening, and by morning one's mouth is open to the wind and sand, even as the eyes sink into another reality and strange chants echo from the lungs. The truck smugglers of the Sahara say that the good thing about brake fluid is that it keeps you off the battery acid. While we waited for their friend to return, Muhammad, the leader of the party, kindled a twig fire and with their last reserves of water, offered us tea. us tea. It is said in the Sahara that if a stranger turns up at your tent, you will slaughter the last goat that provides the only milk for your children to feast your guest. One never knows when you will

be that stranger, turning up in the night, cold and hungry, thirsty and in need of shelter. As I watched Muhammad pour me a cup of tea, I thought to myself, these are the moments that allow us all to hope. Thank you very much. On Ideas, you've been listening to Century of the Wind, the fifth and last of Wade Davis' 2009 CBC Massey lectures, The Wayfinders, Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World. Our partners in the Massey Lectures series are Massey College in the University of Toronto and House of Anansi Press. The book of The Wayfinders is published by House of Anansi Press.

This program was produced by Philip Coulter. Our technical producer is Danielle Duval. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Acting senior producer, Lisa Godfrey. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas. And I'm Nala Ayed. I'm Nala Ayyad.