Cultures on the Edge: Modern Technology Empowering Ancient Ways | Chris Rainier

Imagine if you will, there's a tsunami spreading across the planet. A tsunami of modernity. And in front of it, what it's taking is cultural diversity, traditional language, traditional knowledge. Every two weeks, an elder somewhere on the planet passes away. And what passes away with them is a complex understanding of medicines, traditional medicines, deep understandings of climate and local ecosystems, and potential knowledge of cures to the diseases that plague our planet today. 7,000 languages. Of those 7,000 languages that are spoken on the planet today, a vast majority are oral, not written down, and are not being taught to the next generation. So essentially, in the next 50 to 60 years, we are going to lose a vast majority of the languages and traditional languages spoken on the planet. 80% of those languages are expected to disappear by the end of the century. So when that elder dies, a whole ecosystem of cultural and intellectual diversity created over tens of thousands of generations is lost. So when we speak of species diversity, the building of a seed bank of DNA diversity for our survival, but what about intellectual diversity, the ability to look at the world in a myriad of different ways? What about cultural diversity, that rich tapestry of human knowledge that dates back to when we left Africa? So, you know, Google, Silicon Valley is talking about downloading all known information. How can you do that if 80% of the world's languages are oral? So when that elder passes away, what goes is a huge wealth of vastly important information, cast off as if it's a relic from the past. Now I have spent my entire life documenting traditional culture, cultures from our past living in our present for future generations. Who are these people? Come with me, I want to share a few stories. So, I'm from Africa. We're all from Africa. I've spent a tremendous amount of time there. I wanted to go home. And where we all came from was Kenya, Maasai Mara, Serengeti, the plains right there. I wanted to go back and meet with my brothers and sisters. So I hired Jackson, a Maasai guide. He'd been sent off to Nairobi, trained, became very disillusioned with modernity, came back, was being trained in his village to be an elder. I wanted to just walk. So for five days we walked across Maasai Mara, Serengeti, past elephants, past giraffes, sleeping under the stars, firing him with questions every night. And then on the last night, under that fireplace, he said, Chris, I've answered many of the questions for you. I want to ask you some questions. I said, sure. He said, what are your initiation rituals in your culture? What do you do with your elders when they're too old to work in the fields? What do you do to preserve the land for the next generation? I was stumped. What are our initiation rituals? Seriously, what are our initiation rituals of any significance in our culture? I was stumped. So in the end, he had read about a Navajo elder from the southwest of the United States. And for them, they not only preserved the land for the next generation, but for seven generations. I'll come back to that story. I spent 10 years traveling in New Guinea, living there for six months each year. I wanted to do a complete documentation of all of the remaining Stone Age tribes. About halfway through the trip, I was over in Irian Jaya, way up in an isolated valley, and I'd heard about this young boy who was going to be initiated. So the day before this image was taken, I came over the ridge, down through the valley, up, and just to camera right, was an elder sitting there, watching me come up the hill. I sat down beside him, and through my translator, he said, which valley are you from? And I smiled, and I said, many, many valleys away. Because in New Guinea, you literally can find isolated tribal groups that stay in their valley, to the point where there's a thousand languages, not dialects, languages, in the island of New Guinea. So it's quite conceivable a white person could come over the hill and live in the valley behind. He kept pushing, which valley are you from? And I kept saying, many valleys away, many, many valleys away. And eventually he smiled, and he said, I know, you're from where the green meets the blue. He'd heard of this place, the color of the sky, when the land ended, was the ocean. And I thought about that. Because we're all from where the green meets the blue. We're from this small, isolated planet, spinning out in the universe, to the point, where about a year ago, I was at a conference, had the great privilege of lecturing with an astronaut, the last female astronaut up in the space station. And after she had lectured, I had lectured, she came running up to me, said, you're right! One of my favorite things to do, when I was up in the space station, at the end of the day, is look through that big window. Turn around, away from Earth, look out into infinity. And then pause a moment, turn around, and look at that small, little, fragile planet, where the green meets the blue. Near the end of my experience, the 10-year experience in New Guinea, we had heard about this isolated area up in the Northwest part, called the Bird's Head, where quite possibly, there were tribes that had never been contacted before. We put together an expedition, hiked in about three weeks, and indeed, we found a tribe that had never had contact with Western civilization. What a profound privilege it was. Through translators, we broke bread, we had amazing stories to share, we sat around, we exchanged ideas and thoughts, and on the very last day, when this image was taken, cameras packed away, bags all ready to go, a storm came rolling up the hill. They brought out their very fashionable banana leaf raincoats. The storm passed, the sun was setting, and I cast my eyes up, up in the sky. And about 30,000 feet above me, was this white jet trail, of a jet, streaming probably from Darwin or Sydney to Bangkok or Tokyo. It struck me, what an amazing moment. We are all alive, at this crossroads of human evolution, where there's still cultures, with one foot in the Garden of Eden, still connected to ways that began Africa, our permeable past, and yet we have all this amazing technology at our disposal. So here we are, deep in the 21st century, let us take one last look over our shoulder, at the millennium behind us. What cultural traditions do we leave behind, and which ones do we carry with us, into this new century of technology, information, and profound cultural choices? How will these new tools really affect us? Using the internet, the Navajo elder is already sharing his stories with Jackson, my Maasai guide, using Facebook. While an Ethiopian priest, after his first prayers, before the morning light falls on his computer, will be emailing his shaman friend in Asia. And why not? There are internet cafes in Timbuktu, and smartphones in the jungles of New Guinea. Indeed, we're all a part of a modern planet, yearning now more than ever for dialogue among our civilizations. Let us use this new technology to celebrate ancient traditions, to build profound bridges of communication, and share the stories of cultures living on the edge, that lie deep in the desert of our existence. So how does this work? Well, we at National Geographic have created a program, in combination with the foundation that I have, called Last Mile Technology Program, to connect people. People that want to not get left behind on the wrong side of the digital divide. I ask you, are we the ones to decide? Like some cultural imperialists, who gets connected and who doesn't? It's not our decision. It's a larger revolution that's happening here. So we go, we're invited, bring cameras, computers, video cameras, and we empower people to tell their own stories. So in the 20th century, certainly National Geographic, guilty as charged, has sent out white male photographers and writers around the world to tell other people's stories. We're living in a different era. We're living in the 21st century. If we're going to talk about a flat world, then let's make it flat. Let's not just convince ourselves that we're democratizing the process. So we go in, we create opportunities for people to tell their own stories, whether it's connecting around archiving their information, their mythology, or working as we do in areas like Nepal with the Sherpas that have some social issues, or I just got back from the Amazon about a month ago, where we were dealing with some issues with the Peruvian government empowering indigenous tribes in the Amazon. Giving people the opportunity to connect, to share information. We created a website that is password sensitive so indigenous groups are talking all over the world. So, indeed, Jackson is talking to the Navajo and the Ethiopian shaman is talking to the one in Borneo and it goes on and on from there. Everybody downloading and uploading information and coming together around the digital fireplace of sharing the story of what it means to be human. We work very closely with YouTube and they have created a disappearing language website and this is a website for indigenous people. They want to share their stories. Up it goes. You can have a look at it. Now this is a very famous image by Steve McCurry, an incredible photographer. Afghani girl, one of the classic iconic images of our lifetime. But quite frankly, I'm more interested in what the Afghani girl has to say. I'm not saying either or. We're not talking about either or. We're talking about merely putting more seats at the table so there's a bigger dialogue, a bigger conversation. We have a program giving grants to indigenous and underrepresented cultures to empower them to be visual storytellers and videographers. So we have this amazing photographer that won a grant. Oh, by the way, the first recipient of one of our grants was an Afghani girl, the first Afghani girl to graduate from the first post-Taliban media school in Kabul. She's gone on, she's worked for the New York Times, National Geographic magazine, books coming out. We've empowered her and she is off and running. Ayin, an amazing Mongolian herdsman, spends six months of the year out with his tribes doing his work, documenting it, and then the other six months putting it together in books and publications from around the world. I call him the modern Edward Curtis. Akitende, another incredible photography from Nigeria, doing amazing, amazing work. We live at this moment where there are opportunities for everybody to be a part of the dialogue. And a part of our program is the grand hope that we can create a digital database where everybody can load up this pertinent, absolutely important information. Because it's disappearing. And again, I talk about DNA diversity, having a seed bank of opportunities for us to survive the issues of the 21st century. But what about intellectual diversity, cultural diversity? So as the chainsaws fill the last trees that hide the first people, we're alive at an amazing moment in human evolution. That rich tapestry of human culture, that fabric that is made up of the dazzling ray of man's diversity is at a crucial crossroads. Will we as a species let go and sever that fragile umbilical cord to our permeable past, finding ourselves truly alone, without cultural purpose, adrift in a vast sea of space with nowhere to go? Or will we make a different choice? It is my hope that we can all gather around the digital fireplace of humanity and continue for generations to tell the stories of what it means to be alive on a planet that has survived the 21st century. Margaret Mead, the great social anthropologist, once said her greatest fear, having been born into a polychromatic world, is that our children will wake up in a monochromatic world and never have known the difference. Thank you.