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A theme of The Sacred Balance is that human culture grows out of its environment. In Episode Four of the TV series, David Suzuki travels to the Andes to witness an ancient Incan fertility ceremony and visit Wade Davis, an explorer and scientist who has recently created the term "ethnosphere" to describe the web of human culture. Wade believes that maintaining the cultural diversity of the ethnosphere is as important to life on the planet as maintaining the organic diversity of the biosphere. |
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David speaks to Wade in a place where nature is alive for the people in a tangible and spiritually vibrant way. In addition to the broadcast portions of David's interview, here is more of what Wade Davis had to say: |
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Wade Davis on Incan spirituality: "Often when you think of sacred landscapes it's almost metaphorical. Here they really believe the Earth is alive. I mean, that river is not just a sacred river, it is the veins of Potumama. The Milky Way is its heavenly counterpart. When a shooting star flies, it's a bolt of silver, and silver is the tears of the moon. That mountain is an Apu. That doesn't just mean it's a symbol of god. It is a god. And as long as you're in the shadow of that Apu, it will direct your destiny. And all of your life will be determined by your relationship to landscape. The entire landscape becomes a prayer." |
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Wade Davis on the Incan idea of the connection between human conciousness and nature: "Indigenous people are neither sentimental nor weakened by nostalgia, but they have forged through time and through ritual a traditional mystique of the Earth that is based not on the idea of being self-consciously close to it but a far subtler intuition, and that is the idea that the Earth itself can only exist because it was breathed into being by human consciousness. And what that means is that a young Varunacuna lad, from the village of Cincero or from the sacred valley, who believes that mountain is an Apu, will have a profoundly different relationship to it than a Canadian kid who's raised to believe that that mountain is a pile of ore ready to be mined." |
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Wade Davis on the "ethnosphere": "The great revelation of anthropology is that there are other ways of being, other ways of thinking, other ways of organizing yourself on the planet. And that's an idea that not only fills you with hope, it shows you the absolute importance of cultural diversity. You know, all these myriad cultures put together - from the Aboriginal Peoples of Australia to the Inuit people of the high Arctic, from Kalahari Bushmen to Pana in the forests of Borneo, from the yak herders to the voodoo acolytes of Haiti - all of these myriad cultures form a kind of an intellectual and spiritual and cultural web of life that envelops the planet and is as important to the sustenance of the planet as is the biosphere, the biological web of life. You might think of that web of cultural life as the ethnosphere, and you might define the ethnosphere as the sum total of all thoughts, dreams, ideas, myths, beliefs, intuitions, inspirations brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness." |
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