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Impoverishment and Extinction,
Degradation and Disappearance

International strategies for species extinction focus almost entirely on the final disappearance of the last individuals, not on the fact that long before  this happen, the environment has been altered and the genetic diversity of species  impoverished to the extent that the species is no longer really viable, even if it is not finally gone. A more serious approach to extinction would recognize the need to maintain viable populations in viable habitat, not just a handful of last individuals in a zoo, divorced from their evolutionary context.   A long slow process of genetic and environmental degradation takes place before actual species extinction, analogous to the cultural degradation that precedes the disappearance of a human language. No better example of the links between degradation and disappearance of species and human cultures has been written than the following chapter, “Humboldt's Parrot", in the recent book on language disappearance, "Spoken Here", by Mark Abley, reprinted with his kind permission.
For more information on Mark Abley and information for ordering his book, please see below.
Thomas Goreau

 HUMBOLDT’S PARROT

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the German scientist Alexander von Humboldt arrived in South America. Most of it still belonged to the stagnant Spanish Empire. Humboldt and his companion, a French botanist named Aimé Bonpland, would spend five years exploring a region that had dropped out of European consciousness since the forced departure of the Jesuits decades earlier. Having spent a few months in the coastal lowlands around the small city of Caracas, the two men ventured by foot, mule and canoe into the vast interior. Before Humboldt, no European or North American had realized what an incredible diversity of animal and plant life flourished in the tropics. In what would soon become Venezuela, Humboldt found pristine forests, broken occasionally by Indian settlements. Their residents, unlike the Mohawks far to the north, had avoided the wrath of foreign armies. But even here, colonization had left a bitter legacy. Many of the indigenous peoples had been weakened and diminished by epidemics. Often the survivors lived at small mission stations scattered along the rivers that drained and shaped the jungle.

Humboldt rarely had a chance to speak his native language in South America. For the most part he relied on Spanish and French. During his years away from Berlin, he is said to have discovered the electric eel, made the first accurate drawings of Inca ruins, given the Brazil nut its scientific name, crossed the Andes four times and recognized the cold current off the coast of Peru that still bears his name. There was nothing, it seems, he didn’t want to know. Curious and knowledgeable about a host of scientific disciplines, Humboldt was also a linguist. His great series of books Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent includes much first-hand news of indigenous languages. Amid the upper reaches of the Orinoco, for example, the sheer abundance of small languages surprised and troubled him. Spanish was little use. And without a lingua franca, Aa traveler, however great may be his talent for languages, can never hope to learn enough to make himself understood along the navigable rivers.

 We live among shadows. The dodo and the passenger pigeon have more and more company every month: since human beings began to dream and talk their way across the Earth, thousands of species of animals and plants have died out, and many thousands more are at risk. Previous episodes of mass extinction likely occurred after a collision with some errant heavenly body. Now the asteroid is us. Hunting, the oldest profession, still endangers some animals. The last wild gorillas and chimpanzees are turning into bush meat daily. But a much larger number of creatures have fallen into danger as an indirect result of human behavior: the ravaging of forests and coral reefs, the use of chemical pesticides and industrial pollutants, the technologies of modern farming ... These forces take their toll on minority cultures, too.

Like languages, species can vanish by accident and oversight; often their demise is casual. Most of the victims are neither large nor photogenic. One of the smallest birds to disappear was a songbird called the Stephen Island wren, which disappeared in 1894 from its single home, a green rock off the New Zealand coast. Over the millennia, free from the usual predators, the bird had lost the power to fly. Stephen Island’s only human inhabitant was a lighthouse keeper, and the lighthouse keeper had nothing against flightless wrens. But for company he kept a cat named Tibbles B and Tibbles exterminated the species.

On a visit to the Rocky Mountains a couple of years ago, I dangled my left hand off a walkway beside a natural pool in Banff National Park, eighteen inches above a bed of brown-green algae. A dragonfly skimmed the surface. The algae rippled in the wind. Pond scum, you might say. Except that this particular scum harbored a few diminutive mollusks: Physella johnsoni, the Banff Springs snail, which is known to survive in just five ponds near the town of Banff. The snails occur only where lukewarm water spills out of Sulphur Mountain, smelling as rotten as the name suggests. Notable, under a magnifying glass, for their tiny black eyes and their coiled, globe-like shells, the snails devour the algae that grow in the sulphurous water. Even the largest of them are no bigger than a small fingernail.

If you dip your hands into a pond while wearing insect repellent or sunscreen, you endanger an endangered species even further. Over the millennia, the snails have adapted to a delicate environment containing large amounts of dissolved gypsum, little oxygen and no artificial chemicals. Human swimming in the pools B tempting, despite the odour, but illegal B has destroyed some mats of algae, and with them the snails’ eggs. AAre snails just as important as grizzly bears? Asks a Parks Canada leaflet. AYou bet they are! Healthy populations of Banff Springs snails indicate the integrity of their unique hot-spring ecosystems. It’s all just a matter of scale. The snails used to exist at nine springs in the area; from four, they have disappeared.

To conserve Banff Springs snails, unlike languages, we don’t have to think about psychology. Give the snails a chance, and they’ll breed. The only necessary task is to safeguard their habitat. All the snails require is for their turquoise, algae-laden pools to be left untouched. In the heart of Canada’s most popular national park, that’s easier said than done.

Still, the idea that we have a moral duty to preserve Physella johnsoni B so small, so impossible to cuddle, so lacking in what you might call animal magnetism B is uncontroversial. To humans, the creature is useless. Yet time, energy and money are being spent to grant the snail a future. Consider this a sign of the intellectual success the conservation movement has enjoyed over the past century. Many populations of animals continue to suffer a grievous decline. But the public-relations battle on their behalf was won decades ago.

The more that human actions show up the fragility of the natural world, the greater lip-service we pay to the fight against extinction. Words like Aecosystem and Abiodiversity now trip off the tongues of children (the concept of linguistic diversity, by contrast, is still unfamiliar to many adults). From their earliest days in pre-school and nursery school, children grow up learning about endangered species. There are coloring books about big-eyed sea turtles whose eggs are stolen by poachers, whose nesting sites are destroyed by bulldozers and whose digestive systems are choked by plastic. Guilt precedes literacy: it’s a heavy weight to lay on a two-year-old head. Extinction, once a shocking idea, holds few surprises any more.

Only forty-seven Indians were left at the village of Atures when Humboldt and Bonpland arrived there, and in the absence of its Jesuit founders, the Catholic mission was in Athe most deplorable state. San Juan Nepomuceno de los Atures, to give the place its full title, had been built in 1748, taking the last of its names from the Indian people of the region. Barely half a century later, the Atures had disappeared. Humboldt found that the families living in the wretched settlement spoke languages called Guahibo and Maco. According to a Guahibo tradition, the Atures were being pursued by yet another people called the Caribs when they took refuge on an island in the Orinoco. There they died out. If the tale is true, it’s likely that disease, not warfare, killed them. All that survived of the Atures, Humboldt learned, were their tombs in a mountain cave high above the great river: Athe place of sepulcher of a whole nation destroyed.

He climbed there one evening, stopping to admire the view over savannahs stretching far to the west. Looking down on the Orinoco, he could see the cluster of forested islands where the Atures were rumored to have fled. A great rock jutted out of the granite mountain. In a hollow of the rock, Humboldt counted nearly six hundred skeletons, varnished with Aodoriferous resins and decorated with red paint. Each skeleton reposed in a palm basket. On the ground nearby were earthenware vases containing further bones. Humboldt chose several skulls and three complete skeletons, one of them a child’s, and as darkness approached he loaded them onto his mules. He intended to ship the bones to Europe for scientific study.

Night had fallen by the time he left the cave, and the starlight above the mountain was matched by a resplendent display of fireflies on the slopes below. Humboldt noticed the wild begonias and the sweet-scented vanilla growing near the entrance to the tombs. When he arrived back in the village, the local people became aware of a different smell: a resinous odour, coming from the backs of the tired-out mules. They knew what it meant, and they made sure Humboldt understood their fury. But if they were furious, they were also powerless.

Rare species of wildlife that range over a wide territory B sea turtles, tigers, Siberian cranes and so on B are among the hardest to conserve. Many of these creatures are also slow-growing and slow-breeding. But when any population shrinks to just a few dozen individuals, the threat of extinction calls for drastic measures. You may want to eliminate human traffic, as Australia did when it turned a flat, dry, grassy woodland in central Queensland into a national park with no public access. The woodland B once part of Epping Forest, a big cattle station B is the only remaining home of a species called the northern hairy-nosed wombat. Park wardens have fenced in three hundred hectares, keeping all livestock out and encouraging the native grasses to regenerate. The wombats are imprisoned in their own small wilderness. Human intervention led, indirectly, to their death everywhere else: clearing of forests, competition from sheep and cattle, infestations of foreign grasses. Now, human intervention B habitat management, genetic research, supplementary feeding and so on B is the wombats’ best hope. At last count their numbers were down to sixty-five.

Languages need a larger habitat than hairy-nosed wombats or hot-spring snails. But for people who want to help languages endure, an essential challenge is similar: to find a way of encouraging them to reproduce. Queensland and the Rocky Mountains are two of the many areas where indigenous languages might benefit from a gift of energy, money and outside expertise. Even so, for the purposes of language reproduction, no external gift matters as much as self-belief. If mothers, fathers and grandparents want to speak a language with their children, that language will survive. But if mothers, fathers and grandparents are constantly told that their language is an old-fashioned relic, unfit to be uttered in a classroom or factory and useless for their children’s future, then few of them are likely to keep up the struggle.

Human environments are in perpetual transition. Change has always occurred; stasis is death. In an oral culture, word-for-word repetition may well be less faithful to tradition than creative adaptation. A language, unlike a wombat, can’t be fenced in B its speakers can’t be denied access to the world. Some kinds of access B vaccination programs, for instance B can even save a language by forestalling fatal epidemics among its only speakers. The future is not always a menace. But to ease the transition from the old ways, a minority culture needs the chance to adapt on its own terms.

The most damaging changes are often unintended. A generation ago, disaster was inadvertent when it fell upon Ladakh, a Himalayan valley at the far northwestern edge of India. Its people, who are Buddhist and ethnically Tibetan, speak Ladakhi, a language distantly related to Boro. Until the mid-1970s, the great snow peaks of the Himalayas sealed their communities off from all but the most intrepid outsiders. Then the government of India built a highway to connect the valley to the rest of the country, and the people of Ladakh found they were Aunderdeveloped. They had no TV sets, no refrigerators, no recorded music. They lived in mud homes. Economists drove in and told the people they were poor. For the first time, they began to feel imprisoned in their own small wilderness. Within fifteen years of the highway’s arrival, Ladakh’s self-sufficient local economy had been undermined by cash and credit, and its ancient forms of knowledge were being eroded by government schools in which Ladakhi children learned that their culture and language are inadequate for the modern world. The highway could not be unbuilt.

Young children I had never seen before used to run up to me and press apricots into my hands, wrote the British anthropologist Helena Norberg-Hodge in her book Ancient Futures: Learning From Ladakh. ANow little figures, looking shabbily Dickensian in threadbare Western clothing, greet foreigners with empty outstretched hands. The films they see and the tourists they meet make their lives seem primitive. No longer do the Ladakhi people stand at the centre of their own lives; instead they are conscious of existing on a periphery, far from the Areal life taking place in New Delhi or New York. Young travellers from rich countries flock to Ladakh, hoping to find an unspoilt refuge from the materialism of their own society. Instead they pass on the very values they were hoping to escape. They don’t speak Ladakhi. They don’t drink butter tea. Searching for the wisdom of the ages, they encourage the locals to speak English and sell soft drinks. Defenders of highway-building and globalization can rightly say that the Ladakhis are richer than before. But it would be hard to claim they’re better off.

If Humboldt had cared only about ornithology, he would still have found much in Venezuela to keep him busy. The nation contains forty-three species of birds that are known to exist nowhere else, some of them with memorable English names like Ahandsome fruiteater and Aguttulated foliage-gleaner. A secretive, insect-eating, ground-dwelling bird called the Tachira antpitta was last seen in Venezuela in 1956, and no-one can be sure if its extinct rare birds, like rare languages, sometimes survive unexpectedly. 

But the explorer had much else on his mind. Among other things, he wanted to trace the relationship of the vanished Atures to the surviving Indian peoples of the region. In the Orinoco’s Alabyrinth of petty nations, this proved to be a hard task. With no history texts to help, Humboldt realized that the best way to work out the labyrinthine interrelationships would be by Athe analogy of tongues. These are the only monuments that have reached us from the early ages of the world; the only monuments which, not being fixed to the soil, are at once movable and lasting, and have traversed time and space. His perceptions echoed B or did they influence? B the work of his older brother Wilhelm, one of the great linguists of the early nineteenth century, a man convinced that each language contains an inner form expressing its speakers’ vision of the world. AThere can never be a moment of true standstill in language, Wilhelm was to write, Ajust as little as in the ceaselessly flaming thought of men. By nature it is a continuous process of development.

Leaving the village of Atures, Alexander von Humboldt moved along the Orinoco to a mission settlement by the name of San Jose de Maypures. There two other indigenous languages were spoken. He arrived by night, struck by the solitude of a village where nothing could be heard except the calls of nocturnal birds and the clamour of a distant waterfall. Even in the middle of the night, however, the mosquitoes were ravenous. In the morning, scratching his wounds, he walked around Maypures: it didn’t take long. The little church, built of palm trunks, stood on a plain below the waterfall. Seven or eight huts surrounded the church, and in some of them the women were making pottery. Humboldt admired these huts for their Aappearance of order and neatness, rarely met with in the houses of the missionaries. Nearby, plantains and cassavas were being cultivated. The introduced goats had been devoured by jaguars, but descendants of the Jesuits’ black and white pigs had somehow managed to survive.

Nor were they the only domestic species in Maypures. 

The greatest concentrations of linguistic diversity lie in the tropics. Languages thrive where the web of biological diversity is also at its most intricate: in tropical rainforests, above all. More languages are indigenous to Venezuela than to all of central and eastern Canada B an area many times its size. Where food is abundant, territories don’t need to be large. Where food is scarce, territories expand. The same principles hold true for both linguistic and biological evolution.

The wet, hilly, verdant island that belongs to the nation of Papua New Guinea and the Indonesian-controlled region of Irian Jaya has given birth to about 1,100 living languages. One in every six languages spoken on the planet comes from this island. (These are languages, remember, not dialects.) In New Guinea each valley, each mountain, each tributary, each bay seems to have a language of its own. Five times more languages are native to the island than to the whole continent of Europe. New Guinea is also a hotbed of biological diversity on a scale almost inconceivable in colder realms. In 1996, Conservation International sponsored a team of scientists to undertake a rapid assessment of biodiversity in the Lakekamu Basin, a lowland rainforest in Papua New Guinea. Some of the sites they visited were already being logged by transnational companies. Working in an intact forest just a single square kilometre in size, the scientists counted more than 250 species of ants. A month of work in the Lakekamu Basin was enough for the research team to discover twenty-three species of previously unknown insects, eleven new species of frogs, seven new species of reptiles and three new species of fish.

Unknown to Western science, that is. Often the indigenous people of a region have been familiar with a Anew species since time immemorial. One of those species, the Arnhem Land long-necked turtle, lives in the far north of Australia. I first heard of the turtle at the visitor centre in Nitmiluk National Park. A few minutes’ walk away, orange-red cliffs overshadowed a river whose relentless waters have pushed a deep gorge through the Arnhem Land plateau. Until the year 2000, the turtle that lives in rockholes among those cliffs had neither an English nor a scientific name B a name, that is, in the dead language used by taxonomists. The animal’s small size and flattened head, along with its habit of feeding on water lilies as well as fish, distinguish it from Chelodina rugosa, the northern long-necked turtle. Yet one of the Aboriginal peoples of the plateau B the Gagudju B have always known that Burrungandji, the Anew species, is not the same as Almangiyi, the Aold one. It’s just that nobody bothered to ask them. The Gagudju language is now endangered; it belongs to a very few oldtimers. In tribute to Gagudju, the Australian scientists who formally described the species have given it the Latin name Chelodina burrungandjii. If and when Gagudju vanishes, what other environmental knowledge will vanish with it?

Language centres in many countries are fighting against the clock, recording the words of elderly speakers before time swallows them up. I think of Ngaapa Wangka Wangkajunga, a wordbook in an Australian desert language that is also at risk of extinction. An old woman called Dolly Snell enriched the book with dozens of Wangkajunga terms for plants and bush tucker B essential knowledge in an arid environment. Perhaps her knowledge can be transferred across languages; perhaps not. Neither she nor the linguist who compiled the book had a precise English word for karlijita (Aan edible grass seed), nartutaka (Aa small plum-like fruit from bushes that grow on hills), ngalyilka (Aa small edible mushroom) or purti-purti (Aa plant similar to bush tobacco. Eating this plant will make a hungry person feel full). The language reflects its value in the environment: Wangkajunga may have as many words for lizard as Wall Street does for financial instruments. In the future, perhaps, zoologists will find that the language had reason to distinguish lungkurta (Aa blue-tongue lizard) from lungminka (Aa blue-tongue lizard) and ngintul (Aa blue-tongue lizard). They may well be able to clone a duneful of lungkurtas on demand. But by then, other kinds of meaning that went with the Wangkajunga knowledge system will no longer be available. A threatened language can never be cloned.  

In an appeal for action, not just rhetoric, biologists are warning of the consequences that lie in wait if the loss of biodiversity continues apace. They say that self-interest, not just altruism, warrants a major shift in behaviour. Biologically diverse regions can better withstand drought and other natural (or unnatural) stress. A lot of our most common and effective medicines derive from wild plants, but Western scientists have studied only a tiny proportion of plant species for their medicinal value. If potential cures for crippling diseases are being shredded into pulp or shipped across an ocean as plywood, we may never know about them. By Awe, I mean the mainstream cultures of wealthy nations. Many indigenous peoples know a great deal about the natural world, and part of the knowledge lies embedded in their languages. In the isolated Haida language spoken in British Columbia and Alaska, the name for a common plant means Aleaf remedy of the grizzly bear. If the Haida people lose their language, the plant will revert to Aalum root, its old meaning forgotten. Might human lives be saved thanks to words like th’alátel B literally, Aa device for the heart B a term in the endangered Halkomelem language, also native to British Columbia, for wild ginger?

Biologists and environmental activists can threaten as well as plead, warn as well as cajole. Until very recently, linguists have done little except analyze and describe. You can debate a politician about the intrinsic usefulness of an old-growth forest, pointing to the long-term economic benefits of tourism and sustainable harvesting B yet sustaining an ancient language may not be good for anybody’s gross domestic product. Most visitors to Bathurst Island want to see Tiwi funerary poles and dine on locally caught fish; but after they hear a sentence or two in Tiwi, they want to see those poles and eat that food in English. A language is not a commodity (wild ginger notwithstanding); trade rules don’t apply to it. Forget the economics of language, then. But it’s also tough to argue on purely moral grounds that a threatened language has the right to be protected. Individuals have rights, companies and governments insist they have rights, animals may or may not have rights B but languages?

When forests are erased, the rights of local peoples are usually ignored. They scatter or die. So do their languages. Now, almost in desperation, some linguists have begun to adopt the tactics and metaphors of biologists. Linguists have been learning how to act as partisans, campaigning on behalf of the languages they once set out to study in a cool, neutral light. At last they are speaking out about the resilience that comes with diversity; they are condemning the wanton advance of bulldozers and chainsaws; they are pleading for niches of equilibrium to remain undisturbed. In short, they are warning of the dangers inherent in what the biologist Edward O. Wilson calls an Aimpoverished and homogenized world, one in which a few dominant lifeforms have overrun and erased the diversity that used to sustain us.

But he means creatures like rats and starlings, cane toads and zebra mussels. Linguists mean the tongue I’m using now.

In the village of Maypures Humboldt was delighted to see, not only black and white pigs, but also Atame macaws around the huts of the Indians, and flying to the fields like our pigeons.... These macaws, whose plumage glows with vivid tints of purple, blue and yellow, are a great ornament to the Indian farmyards. He had noticed the species near other tropical rivers, and had tasted its cooked flesh: Ablack and somewhat tough. Ever punctilious in his descriptions, Humboldt called it Athe largest and most majestic species of parrot with naked cheeks that we found on our travels. It was, almost certainly, the blue-and-yellow macaw, a species that still survives over wide stretches of South America.

Other macaws have been less fortunate. Of the eighteen recognized species, all of them native to Latin America, two are extinct and a third, Spix’s macaw, perches on the brink. The last wild member of the species lived in eastern Brazil until it disappeared in October 2000, leaving a few dozen captive specimens divided among a Qatari sheikh, a Philippine industrialist and a Swiss entrepreneur. The species is not just a commodity but a trophy, the birds’ rarity a symbol of their owners’ power. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature describes the status of seven other types of macaw as vulnerable, endangered or critical. Only eight species appear safe.

Amid the shadows of the huts in Maypures, Humboldt was shown a talking parrot. It too was a trophy of sorts. He didn’t specify whether it happened to be a blue-and-yellow macaw or a member of a different species. It was an old bird, a feathered survivor. But the local people insisted Athey did not understand what it said. When Humboldt asked why, he was told that the parrot Aspoke the language of the Atures B the language of the people whose sweet-smelling bones his mules had carried off the granite mountain. The Atures language had died out among humans. It was last heard coming from a bird’s beak.  

Mark Abley was born in England in 1955 and grew up mostly in western Canada. He was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford between 1975 and 1978. Abley is a winner of Canada's National Newspaper Award as well as the author or editor of ten books of prose and poetry. His first travel book, Beyond Forget: Rediscovering the Prairies, was published internationally in the late '80s; one of its main themes was the environmental degradation of the Canadian West. Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages has been or will be translated into French, Japanese, Spanish and Catalan. Abley, who is a member and supporter of many environmental organizations, lives with his wife, two daughters and two cats in a suburb of Montreal. He is now working on a book about the future of language.

Permission to reprint on this site is granted by the author.

US edition, Houghton Mifflin, 2003; Mariner paperback, forthcoming, 2005

Canadian edition, Random House of Canada, 2003

UK edition, William Heinemann, 2004; Arrow paperback, 2005.