Language and Biodiversity

By: Sigrid Frederikdottir

 

The globalization of humanity is causing one of the biggest and potentially most devastating meltdowns in history. Not only are actual biopools of indigenous peoples, folk groups and races being annihilated in the soup tureen of modern life, but all the wonderful pageant of their individuality and diversity through thousands of years of evolution are going with them. Language is one of these and, as National Geographic News reports, language encapsulates for many indigenous groups the entire heritage of the group and all of its collective knowledge base.

Another reason to fight globalization with everything you've got at your disposal: Biodiversity is nature's way of ensuring survival. Humanity must take cognizance of this and adapt itself or much will be lost forever. And once everyone is the same, new ideas from fresh perspectives are often not forthcoming. Sometimes these are what are needed to ensure survival. That is why nature diversifies minutely in every environmental condition in order to ensure that if disaster strikes some group may have the means to fight back, and in the case of humanity, such a scenario would initiate the aid to survival that would ensure the continuance of human biodiversity as part of natural process. Not a popular idea. Too many little bitten off voices yelping "fascist" and "bigot" every five minutes and for no good reason.

Earth needs wide diversity. Nature creates it. Humanity and especially universalist ideology, destroys it. It's up to us to defend the right of peoples to their self expression and self determination in all spheres of human endeavour. There is no Shangri-la-la-land. There is only the prospect of desolation through draconian egotistical determinism.

No one has the right to demand an individual must change for the sake of being the same as every cloned specimen in some manufactured menagerie. This problem is not limited to humans. It is affecting indigenous crop varieties and animal species that used to be employed for farming. Agriculture is being globalized too. And if people are too afraid to say "I refuse to help destroy the world's natural and created diversity", then the damage will continue until we all look like we slipped off a factory conveyor belt and we all speak some new language that forbids us to remember the past.

If you want to see a certain kind of evil in progress, look no further than three feet in front of you. It's happening everywhere. It's a new kind of social disease and it's lethal and the only cure is the courage to stand up and be counted and to speak out against incorporation - while you still have a chance. Once you are a tightly packed little sardine crushed up in your little tin on the conveyor belt to nowhere, with a price stamp on your forehead and a micro chip up your ass you won't be much good at anything but consumption by the massive monster you helped to create because you thought it was cool to be a "revolutionary" and help humanity become "one". Humanity has never been vaguely interested in universalizing its reality. If this has ever happened it has often been because people were forced into it by conquest. Humanity has always been keen on the expression of individuality and in so doing made a tapestry of diversity among evolving cultures and peoples. In our time, we shall see the end of this. It’s a tragedy--but one that can be reversed and rebuilt. 

All it takes is two little words spoken reasonably: "No thanks". Those two little words have the power of twenty million tons of TNT when used for the right reasons in the appropriate places. No one has to die. Nothing has to be blown to kingdom come. Just say "no thanks" to your own makeover as a little sardine person of the new divine commune of prisoners that is being touted as "one world". There most certainly is only one world and only one human species, but that is where the definition ends in terms of how humans interpret their existence here. After that there has always been a crazy mosaic of diversity as each group took its own ideas to the zenith of its capabilities. That is what being human is really all about, not slouching around in a grey world of one language, one people, one community - and one political ideology, one spirituality and one set of definitions.

Help keep us vibrant by being yourself. Every day, in as many ways as you can, remember your ancestors and do something, wear something and say something that makes them real, keeps them with us and keeps the waves of greyness breaking on that melancholy shore of the planetary prison a step further away.

It is also imperative that researchers extend their field work beyond minority group indigenes and focus also on the enormous destruction being waged against cultural diversity within large groups. Everything from dialects, to food, fashion, ethics and religious belief are being damaged by an increasingly dominant global culture phenomenon that is literally consuming the past by consuming and altering the descendents of human history.

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