The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World

“A language, of course, is not merely a set of grammatical rules or a vocabulary. It is a flash of the human spirit, the vehicle by which the soul of each particular culture comes into the material world […] Of the 7,000 languages spoken today, fully half are not being taught to children. Effectively, unless something changes, they will disappear within our lifetimes. Half of the languages of the world are teetering on the brink of extinction. Just think about it. What could be more lonely than to be enveloped in silence, to be the last of your people to speak your native tongue, to have no way to pass on the wisdom of your ancestors or anticipate the promise of your descendants. This tragic fate is indeed the plight of someone somewhere on earth roughly every two weeks.”

Davis speaks of language loss as the “canary in the coal mine” (3), the key indicator of cultural extinction. To destroy a language is “like dropping a bomb on the Louvre” (5) and destroying countless one-of-a-kind cultural products, each one articulating its own vision of being. Here Davis recounts a harrowing statistic of the decline of the earth’s languages and cultures, with clear intent of placing the audience in the position of someone facing the loss of their language. This evocation of pathos is one of the first examples of Davis’s continual humanization of indigenous peoples and equation of the value of their experience with his audience’s own. It is a crucial rhetorical stepping stone to his arguments about the genius of these cultures, their value, the tragedy of their loss, and the necessity of Western thought to step out of its historical biases regarding them.

“As a social anthropologist I was trained to believe in the primacy of history and culture as the key determinants in human affairs. Nurture, if you will, as opposed to nature. Anthropology began as an attempt to decipher the exotic other, with the hope that by embracing the wonder of distinct and novel cultural possibilities, we might enrich our appreciation and understanding of human nature and our own humanity. Very early on, however, the discipline was hijacked by the ideology of its times.”

Davis provides insight into the scope through which he attempts to read human cultural activity. While communicating Davis’s scientific perspective, this passage also restates a prior argument that our social world “does not exist in some absolute sense, but rather is simply one model of reality, the consequence of one set of intellectual and spiritual choices that our particular cultural lineage made” (1-2) in the past. As an anthropologist, Davis works to understand the other by seeing the world through their eyes, dissolving the boundary between his cultural upbringing and theirs. Such a profession naturally leads to a position that upholds the equality of all cultures and the perspective that it is only the circumstances of one’s upbringing that decide their beliefs, not some innate superiority of one culture to another. This perspective both elevates indigenous cultures as “modern” and decentralizes the Western industrial mode of existence within the anthropological discourse that follows.

“Evolutionary theory, distilled from the study of bird beaks, beetles, and barnacles, slipped into social theory in a manner that proved useful to the age. It was anthropologist Herbert Spencer who coined the phrase ‘survival of the fittest.’ […] Evolution suggested change through time, and this, together with the Victorian cult of improvement, implied a progression in the affairs of human beings, a ladder to success that rose from the primitive to the civilized, from the tribal village of Africa to London and the splendour of the Strand. The cultures of the world came to be seen as a living museum in which individual societies represented evolutionary moments captured and mired in time, each one a stage in the imagined ascent to civilization. It followed with the certainty of Victorian rectitude that advanced societies had an obligation to assist the backward, to civilize the savage, a moral duty that again played well into the needs of empire.”

This passage explains the imperial ideals of early anthropology and other cultural sciences. This is the “hijacking” Davis refers to in the previous quotation. Early anthropology was essentially an attempt to read the development of human civilization through the same lens that Darwin read animal evolution. Such a reading helped classist and ethnocentric ideologies justify colonial action, including genocide. This history is Davis’s primary example of how scientific practice can be corrupted with cultural bias and how one must step outside this bias to properly conduct anthropological study.

“Knowledge poses no threat to culture. What’s more, these research efforts only generate a certain type of knowledge, defined within a specific world view. Western science by definition rejects a literal interpretation of origin myths that root the Haida, for example, to Haida Gwaii. […] But this scientific ‘truth’ does nothing to limit the authority and power of the Haida today. Their ability to deal nation to nation with the Canadian government has little to do with mythic ancestral claims and everything to do with political power, a priori evidence of occupancy at the time of contact, and the ability of leaders such as Guujaaw to mobilize support for his people throughout the world.”

Anthropology is a science, the study of people. While pseudoscientific bastardizations of it should be highly suspect, we must remember that anthropological findings do little to defy the deeper, often mythological truths of cultures. In fact, anthropology works to equate such cultural conceptions with our own and establish a deeper ground for human culture through analysis of their similarities. The true enemy of cultures is not reduction to the scientific terms of anthropology but the industrial, governmental, and military powers that are set upon people—what Davis elsewhere calls “identifiable and overwhelming external forces” (167). In recapitulating the political conflict between the Haida people and the Canadian government, Davis asserts that indigenous groups, by nature of their small populations and Western scientific and industrial biases against them, are always handicapped when dealing with these forces.

“Science is only one way of knowing, and its purpose is not to generate absolute truths but rather to inspire better and better ways of thinking about phenomena.”

This is Davis’s summative point about science. His argument that science is only “one way of knowing” is supported by the biased applications of scientific disciplines. The statement supports the idea that indigenous cultural adaptations are sciences in their own way that have much to tell us about the essence of life.

“Clayton, too, sensed that the cave art did much more than invoke the magic of the hunt. Human beings, he suggested, were at one time of an animal nature, and then at some point, whether we want to admit it or not, were not. The art pays homage to that moment when human beings, through consciousness, separated themselves from the animal realm, emerging as the unique entity that we now know ourselves to be. Viewed in this light the art may be seen—as Clayton has written—almost as ‘postcards of nostalgia,’ laments for a lost time when animals and people were as one. Proto-shamanism, the first great spiritual impulse, grew as an attempt to reconcile and even re-establish through ritual a separation that was irrevocable.”

The cave paintings at Chauvet and in other Upper Paleolithic caves depict animals local to the landscape. These are the earliest pieces of art found in the archaeological record, and their meanings are contested. The paintings are often thought to be involved in sympathetic magic: the channeling of animal powers through their depiction, likely invoked for the hunt. Here Davis argues that these images recall a period of human history in which “animals and people were as one,” which is not the dominant perspective on these paintings. This is an example of Davis’s own bias shining through in his scientific analysis.

“All peoples face the same adaptive imperatives. We all must give birth; raise, educate and protect our children; console our elders as they move into their final years. Virtually all cultures would endorse most tenets of the Ten Commandments, not because the Judaic world was uniquely inspired, but because it articulated the rules that allowed a social species to thrive. Few societies fail to outlaw murder or thievery. All create traditions that bring consistency to coupling and procreation. Every culture honours its dead, even as it struggles with the meaning of the inexorable separation that death implies.”

Davis uses anthropology to delicately disconnect his readers’ loyalties to their cultural heritage, exposing the processes that created the modern world as just one of many processes that created other cultures. Like the religions of the Barasana, the Australian Aborigine, or the Wiwa, the Judeo-Christian religion is a set of rules that enshrines cultural adaptations, thereby ensuring the community’s best chances for survival. This exposition, as well as the statement that all cultures produce similar religious doctrines based on common-sense tenets of societal health, is one of many ways Davis equates indigenous cultures with Western society in terms of their modernity and aptitude for problem-solving.

“The skills of the traditional navigator are not unlike those of the scientist; one learns through direct experience and the testing of hypotheses, with information drawn from all branches of the natural sciences, astronomy, animal behaviour, meteorology, and oceanography. Temper this with a lifelong training of impossibly intense commitment and discipline, all to be rewarded with the highest level of prestige in a culture where status counted for everything. All the intellectual brilliance of humanity, in other words, together with the full potential of human desire and ambitions, was applied to the challenge of the sea.”

Davis describes the skill, dedication, and prestige of Polynesian wayfinders. He explicitly refers to Polynesian navigation as employing scientific techniques of empiricism and hypothesis. He also praises the lifelong dedication of these individuals. Notably, he connects the success of this navigational practice with the prestige it earns within Polynesian communities. Prestige economies are a common trait of many pre-capitalist cultures and have occurred throughout the world. In making these three comments, Davis illustrates how the very structure of Polynesian culture is itself a technology that aids in the “challenge of the sea,” equating wayfinding with other modern career pursuits. It is intellectually rigorous, requires intense dedication, and earns societal position.

“The stern of the Hokule’a is square, which allows the navigator readily to orient to east and west at both sunset and break of day. There are eight marks incised along the railings on both sides of the vessel, each paired to a single point in the stern, giving bearings in two directions, fore and aft—thirty-two bearings altogether, which correspond to the thirty-two directional houses of the star compass. The navigator by day conceptually divides the horizon ahead and behind, each into sixteen parts, taking as cardinal points the rising and setting of the sun. Thus by day he or she replicates the star compass of the night. The metaphor is that the Hokule’a never moves. It simply waits, the axis mundi of the world, as the islands rise out of the sea to greet her.”

Polynesian wayfinders navigate vast stretches of ocean without the aid of compass, chronometer, sextant, or other modern navigational tools. Their only two tools are their minds and the vessel itself. Here Davis describes how the hull of the Hokule’a is a tool for the wayfinder. The Hokule’a, a symbol of successful cultural revivalism akin to Colombia’s Resguardos, is also an image of the deceptively complex material innovations of ancient cultures.

“But as we isolate, deconstruct, even celebrate these specific intellectual and observational gifts, we run the risk of missing the entire point, for the genius of Polynesian navigation lies not in the particular but in the whole, the manner in which all of these points of information come together in the mind of the wayfinder. […] The science and art of navigation is holistic. The navigator must process an endless flow of data, intuitions and insights derived from observation and the dynamic rhythms and interactions of wind, waves, clouds, stars, sun, moon, the flight of birds, a bed of kelp, the glow of phosphorescence on a shallow reef—in short, the constantly changing world of weather and the sea.”

Davis describes the mental acuity that Polynesian navigation requires. This emphasis on the wayfinder’s mind as the navigational heart of the voyage is also what requires the navigator to perform such incredible feats of dead reckoning, staying awake for 22 hours at a stretch, “tracking with their minds” (61), collating all their observations in real time to keep the vessel on course. The lack of this mental acuity “kept European sailors hugging the coastlines before the problem of longitude was solved” (61), as no navigator in Europe could rival the Polynesians. Here, instead of honoring Polynesian technology, Davis honors their mentality and dedication. Like bodhisattvas of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, wayfinders are wisdom heroes who are celebrated within their culture and present an incredible narrative of human accomplishment. Davis implies that such acumen should be recognized by the West to contribute to new understandings of indigenous peoples, the concept of technology, and the limits of human potential.

“If you took all of the genius that has allowed us to put a man on the moon and applied it to an understanding of the ocean, what you would get is Polynesia.”

When Apollo 11 landed on the moon on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong famously called the event “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” While Davis does not diminish this scientific achievement, he does note that human technological achievements of equal merit have already occurred on earth. The Polynesian people, who used wayfinding to cross thousands of kilometers of void ocean space, land on small distant points, and return, are an apt example. The statement also reminds readers of the nationalistic loyalties of scientific practice: The United States had the wealth and international power to fund the space program, using both to draw scientists from across the globe to work for NASA. This allowed America to place a man on the moon, declaring it a success for mankind when in reality it was a success for this nation over others, punctuating a narrative of the nation’s scientific and technological excellence.

“Anthropologists today recognize that our understanding of these ancient worlds has been for too long filtered through our experience with the marginal societies that survived what was in fact a holocaust. To understand the prehistory of the basin through this lens is rather like attempting to reconstruct the history of the British Empire from the perspective of the Hebrides after London had been wiped out by a nuclear bomb. Within a century of contact, disease and slavery had swept away millions of indigenous lives.”

Before colonial contact, the peoples of the Amazon lived in dense cities along the Amazon River. In North and South America, the Mayan, Incan, and Native American peoples lived in similar numbers—and modern statistics on their pre-contact populations are consistently underexaggerated. This improper accounting is due to a historically reified urge to marginalize these peoples to more easily justify colonial action, as well as the massive population losses that genocide and disease delivered on these communities. Here Davis describes the perennial anthropological issue faced when attempting to extrapolate historical data out of living indigenous groups. Colonialism and time have drastically modified these cultures. While the San of the Kalahari may resemble the peoples of a pre-exodus Africa, this is not a one-to-one comparison. Similarly, the Kogi, Arhuacos, and Wiwa developed a new version of their society only after escaping colonial persecution, certainly founded but in no way equivocal to their pre-modern counterparts (141). To examine a culture through such a historicizing lens is akin to denying them their historical numbers and complexities.

“In five extraordinary years [Martin Von Hildebrand] secured for the Indians of the Colombian Amazon legal land rights to an area of some 250,000 square kilometres, roughly the size of the United Kingdom, establishing 162 Resguardos altogether—titled lands that were encoded by law in the 1991 Political Constitution of the country. Nothing like this had ever been done by a nation-state. In the years that followed, as Colombia endured the ravages of war throughout the 1990s and early days of the new century, a veil of isolation fell upon the Northwest Amazon. And behind this veil, as Martin explained when he invited me in 2006 to return with him to the Río Piraparaná, an old dream of the earth was reborn.”

The revival of indigenous Colombian Amazon communities is a cultural regeneration unmatched by other narratives in The Wayfinders. In fact, it stands in stark contrast to most of the narratives, which document decline into poverty and addiction due to forced settlement and assimilation (such as for the San of the Kalahari, the Inuit of Northern Canada, and the Rendille of the Kenyan desert) or complete extermination and cultural death. Notably, this cultural revival was accomplished only through collaboration of governments and anthropologists who spoke for the needs of indigenous groups. Furthermore, such revival is impossible without modern legal entitlement of the indigenous community to its traditional lands. This passage exemplifies a common facet of the text, the statement that cultures cannot exist without the geographies that produce them. To protect indigenous cultures, we must also protect their landscapes through modern legislative acts.

“Food in this sense is power, for it represents the transfer of energy from one life form to another. As a child grows he or she is only slowly introduced to new categories of food, and severe food restrictions mark all the major passages of life […] Meat is not the right of a hunter but a gift from the spirit world. To kill without permission is to risk death by a spirit guardian, be it in the form of a jaguar, anaconda, tapir, or harpy eagle. […] Animals are potential kin, just as the wild rivers and forests are part of the social world of people. […] All of these ideas and restrictions create, as anthropologist Kaj Arhem has written, what is essentially a land management plan inspired by myth.”

The Barasana develop relationships of reverence and stewardship with their local geographies and ecological systems. These relationships generally go hand in hand with religious understandings of the landscape, crafting “sacred geographies.” Other cultures that exhibit similar practices are the Penan, Australian Aborigines, the Kiowa of British Columbia, the Inca, and the Kogi, Arhuacos, and Wiwa of the Southern Andes. The Barasana are particularly notable for developing a set of religious restrictions on harvest and consumption, which enshrines their “land management plan inspired by myth.” This program is subtle enough to ensure minimal ecological impact on the Barasana’s environment. Given the Amazon’s fragile ecosystem, this is a triumph of harmony with the environment that modern sciences should take more note of.

“White people, Ricardo told me, see with their eyes, but the Barasana see with their minds. They journey both to the dawn of time and into the future, visiting every sacred site, paying homage to every creature, as they celebrate their most profound cultural insight, the realization that animals and plants are only people in another dimension of reality. This is the essence of the Barasana philosophy.”

It is important to recognize that the Barasana do not see their religion as a land-management plan. This definition was constructed by Western scientists, assisting in the categorization of this spiritual doctrine into terms as an environmental adaptation. As the Barasana shaman Ricardo Marin notes, the difference between Western and indigenous thought comes down to ways of seeing. Davis suggests that if Western science and thought embraced more holistic understandings of spirit, society, and landscape—thoughts that embrace rather than reduce the manifold sacred ascriptions of these categories—then it would have a much easier time understanding these cultural philosophies.

“For several centuries the rational mind has been ascendant, even though science, its finest expression, can still in all its brilliance only answer the question how, but never come close to addressing the ultimate question: why. The inherent limitation of the scientific model has long provoked a certain existential dilemma, familiar to many of us taught since childhood that the universe can only be understood as the random action of minute atomic particles spinning and interacting in space. But more significantly, the reduction of the world to a mechanism, with nature but an obstacle to overcome, a resource to be exploited, has in good measure determined the manner in which our cultural tradition has blindly interacted with the living planet.”

Davis examines how the Enlightenment’s materialist philosophies predicted the West’s current resource economy. Capitalist models of transforming raw resources into manufactured goods have manifold consequences for the earth’s populations. First, these models require the processing of resources directly from the earth, damaging large tracts of landscape and often displacing communities. Second, with no way to answer the existential questions of human existence, such an economic model leaves the citizens it protects in an aporia of purpose. This philosophy is contrasted with indigenous beliefs that acknowledge the universe requires human agency to remain alive and cast human groups as centrally responsible for the stewardship of the earth.

“As a young man I was raised on the coast of British Columbia to believe that the rainforests existed to be cut. This was the essence of the ideology of scientific forestry […] This cultural perspective was profoundly different from that of the First Nations, those living on Vancouver Island at the time of European contact, and those still there. If I was sent into the forest to cut it down, a Kwakwaka’wakw youth of similar age was traditionally dispatched during his Hamatsa initiation into those same forests to confront Huxwhukw and the Crooked Beak of Heaven […] The point is not to ask or suggest which perspective is right or wrong […] What matters is the potency of a belief, the manner in which a conviction plays out in the day-to-day lives of a people, for in a very real sense this determines the ecological footprint of a culture.”

Davis contrasts his cultural relationship to the forests of British Columbia with the relationship a “Kwakwaka’wakw youth of similar age” would have with this exact same landscape. The forest becomes a metaphorical stage on which two young men of oppositional cultures meet. This allows Davis’s reader to interpret these two cultures through a single anthropological lens, dispelling the disingenuous appellations of modernity and civilization assigned to one and primitivism to the other. Today both cultures live off of the same landscape. One draws from its resources and transforms them into monetary wealth, the other draws spiritual sustenance, existential satisfaction, and a much lower-yield and more participatory level of resource. In arguing that the meanings of these beliefs are irrelevant against their ecological impacts, Davis asserts that Western nations must transition into more traditional relationships with the earth. Such relationships do not require any specific religious belief; any model of belief can be molded to enshrine sustainability. Such a transition simply requires accepting other, more holistic views of the earth.

“Cocaine, first isolated from the [coca] leaf in 1855, had revolutionized modern medicine […] By the mid-1970s the Latin American cartels were emerging, though no one knew quite how […] Every conceivable social ill and pathology was blamed on the plant. The eradication of the traditional fields became a state priority, and with the intervention of the United Nations in the late 1940s, international policy […] our team conducted the first nutritional study of the plant in 1975, and what was discovered proved to be astonishing. The plant had a small amount of the alkaloid, roughly 0.5 to 1 percent dry weight, a modest concentration that was benignly absorbed through the mucous membrane of the cheek. But it also contained a considerable range of vitamins, and more calcium than any plant ever studied by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which made it ideal for a diet that traditionally lacked a dairy product.”

Used for centuries in its leaf form by the people of the Andes, coca is now processed into a narcotic form for pharmaceutical use by Western science. The destruction of the traditional coca fields of the Inca was a mandate fuelled by Western desire to control the substance and the intellectually lazy ascription of social ills onto the beneficial use of the plant. This is a trademark example of the dangers of reducing indigenous activity to Western stereotypes, one that reveals the hypocrisy of a Western government that created a narcotic from an innocuous plant and then punished an indigenous society for the social ills brought about through this narcotic.

“On January 9, 2004, at the height of the violence unleashed by the international consumption of cocaine […] the Kogi, Wiwa, and Arhuaco issued a joint declaration: ‘Who will pay the universal mother for the air we breathe, the water that flows, the light of the sun? Everything that exists has a spirit that is sacred and must be respected. Our law is the law of origins, the law of life. We invite all the Younger Brothers to be guardians of life. We affirm our promise to the Mother, and issue a call for solidarity and unity for all peoples and all nations.’ It is humbling to think that even as I write these words the mamos of the Elder Brothers, living just two hours by air from Miami Beach, are staring out to sea from the heights of the Sierra Nevada, praying for our well-being and that of the entire earth.”

The Kogi, Wiwa, and Arhuaco, who live in harmony with their ecosystem on the “highest coastal mountain formation on earth” (142), are set upon and regularly murdered by paramilitary groups associated with drug cartels. These people, culturally isolated from the rest of the world but still subject to the dual destructive forces of crime and climate change, maintain a policy of pacifism. Davis’s inclusion of their official declaration demonstrates that these cultures participate in the modern world and have agency within it—far from remnants of a bygone history, these tribes are socially and ethically active communities. Davis’s comment on the geographical proximity of this group to the United States reminds readers of the deep interconnectivity of the earth’s communities.

“In the Aboriginal universe there is no past, present, or future. In not one of the hundreds of dialects spoken at the moment of contact was there a word for time. There is no notion of linear progression, no goal of improvement, no idealization of the possibility of change. To the contrary, the entire logos of the Dreaming is stasis, constancy, balance, and consistency. The entire purpose of humanity is not to improve anything. It is to engage in the ritual and ceremonial activities deemed to be essential for the maintenance of the world precisely as it was at the moment of creation. Imagine if all of Western intellectual and scientific passion had focused from the beginning of time on keeping the Garden of Eden precisely as it was when Adam and Eve had their fateful conversation.”

Davis twice dwells on cultures said to have no word for time—here, and in discussion of Barasana culture (100). In both cases Davis connects this linguistic facet to the absence of ideals of progress in these cultures. Through the worship of ancestors and living gods, inanimate sites are vivified and human action reverberates throughout the cosmos. Davis directly contrasts this concept to “linear progression […] goal of improvement […] idealization of the possibility of change,” which he uses to typify Western thought. While highlighting the difference between this ideology and our own, Davis also helps us consider the concept through our own religious paradigm—the reference to the Garden of Eden and the Judeo-Christian thought that forms the moral basis of Western philosophy. This allusion idealizes the aboriginal way of life, as these people do not live in Eden but a dangerous landscape of large predators, toxic plants, and aggressive warriors from neighboring tribes.

“The Dreaming answered both the questions how and why. It dictated the way a person must live. Man’s obligation was not to improve upon nature, but to sustain the world. The literal preservation of the land was the most fundamental priority of every Aboriginal man and woman. It was a profoundly conservative ideology. I am not saying whether it was right or wrong, good or bad. But it had consequences. Clearly, had humanity as a whole followed the ways of the Aborigines, the intellectual track laid down by these descendants of the first humans to walk out of Africa, we would not have put a man on the moon. But, on the other hand, had the Dreaming become a universal devotion, we would not be contemplating today the consequences of industrial processes that by any scientific definition threaten the very life supports of the planet.”

Davis posits a relatively bipartisan conception of the historical differences between industrial and indigenous cultures. The passage reads somewhat like a cost-benefit analysis, weighing the pros and cons of the two cultural propositions. However, it is clear from the structure of the passage where Davis’s own loyalties lie. Again, Davis cites the moon landing as the pinnacle of Western technological advancement. In Quote 12 we saw him reduce the significance of this event through comparison to Polynesian wayfinding. Here, the example serves to exclude other, more significant accomplishments of modern industry, such as modern medicine, democracy, the liberation of women, and the increase of globalized wealth that has drawn several peasant populations out of poverty. While the text’s effort to stymy the tragedies of indigenous genocide and cultural collapse is noble, it must still be read for rhetorical bias, as this passage evidences.

“A single adaptive challenge, surviving drought, reverberates through the entire culture, defining for these nomadic tribes what it means to be human.”

Here Davis summarizes one of the central conceits of his lecture series. The adaptive conditions, challenges, and solutions that a culture produces end up defining its nature. In other words, the solutions that cultures create to answer their central problems, usually related to the demands of a landscape, become central ideologies of these cultures, usually articulated through religious metaphor, law, and worldview. This is reflected in basically all the cultures covered in the text.

“As cultures wither away, individuals remain, often shadows of their former selves, caught in time, unable to return to the past, yet denied any real possibility of securing a place in a world whose values they seek to emulate and whose wealth they long to acquire. This creates a dangerous and explosive situation, which is precisely why the plight of diverse cultures is not a simple matter of nostalgia or even of human rights alone, but a serious issue of geopolitical stability and survival.”

In the final chapter Davis discusses the real-world political, ethical, and ecological consequences of dual culture and habitat loss. Empathizing with those people who are displaced by industrial progress, dislocated from their mother culture to become “shadows of their former selves,” he provides a psychological picture for how “dangerous and explosive situation[s]” emerge, such as extremist ideologies, excessive cultural conservatism, organized crime, despotism, and war. He later notes that “anthropology suggests that when peoples and cultures are squeezed, extreme ideologies often emerge” (198). Here Davis transcends the ethical necessity to stabilize the incredible rate of cultural and habitat loss to discuss the geopolitical necessity.