 Good afternoon. In the last of the Mohicans, the book, not the film, an argument ensues between Hawkeye, the great frontiersman who lives with his Indian friends in the wilderness, and David Gamet, a religious singer lost in the woods. They debate the validity of predestination, the doctrine of divine election. David, a devout Christian and defender of predestination, demands of Hawkeye, in which of the holy books do you find language to support you? Hawkeye responds, book, what have such as I to do with books? I never read but in one, and the words that are written there are too simple and too plain to need much schooling. What call you the volume, David persists in asking? It is open before your very eyes, says Hawkeye. I have heard it said that there are men who read in books, to convince themselves there is a God. I know not, but man may so deform his works in the settlements as to leave that which is so clear in the wilderness. The book, nature's book, the book of nature, it is a metaphor that was widely disseminated during the Middle Ages, intended as proof of God's existence and revelation of his word. The book of nature metaphor became quite popular in the literature of the 19th century. Henry David Thoreau, for instance, writing in his journal for March 1856, inventoried the local Massachusetts flora and fauna and lamented that the nobler animals have been exterminated here. The cougar, panther, lynx, wolverine, wolf, bear, moose, deer, the beaver, and felt as if the pages from the book of nature had been torn from his hands. Is it not, Thoreau asked, a maimed and imperfect nature that I am conversant with? Of Dr. Jared Diamond's many impressive credentials and accomplishments, graduating Summa Cum Laude from Harvard, winning several times a distinguished teaching award at UCLA as professor of physiology at the School of Medicine, being elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences, receiving a MacArthur Fellowship, winning Britain's Science Book Prize for his latest work, The Third Chimpanzee, I say of his many impressive credentials and accomplishments, I wish to focus here on one in particular. The column he writes for Natural History Magazine entitled, Nature is the number of years Dr. Diamond reveals of the environment that's been degrading by the hands-off management policy, designed by the very people who seek to preserve, if an essay stands as it narrates beyond any doubt that nature is not merely a book, but a first team from virtue of nature is the Earth's surface, Dr. Diamond will be the surface of signifier, the multiplicity of meaning for Dr. Diamond, as he once again speaks of nature's infinite work, this time from New Guinea. It's a great pleasure for me to be joining you for these couple of days. I want especially to express my gratitude to my hosts at Gustavo Sadafas, and particularly to the three people who have been shepherding me around the past couple of days, Don, Aaron, and Rachel, who've done so much to make my stay here so pleasant. I would like to talk with you about a little-noticed extinction crisis going on today. When we think of extinction crises, we tend to think first of the worldwide tragedy in which humans are the villains and most other species are the victims. That crisis, of course, is the reduction and the intending extinction of most plant and animal species because of human-linked causes such as direct killing, habitat destruction, and pollution. In debating the balance of nature today and yesterday, we are subconsciously defining nature as animal and plant species other than humans. But there is another extinction crisis, one in which humans are the victims as well as the villains. That crisis involves the extinction of the knowledge of living species possessed by people with traditional hunting and gathering lifestyles, people who are heirs to the knowledge built up over millions of years of human hunting and gathering existence. Ironically, the present decade is considered the golden age of biological research when our knowledge of biology seems to be exploding. Yes, it's true. The great majority of biologists who have ever existed on Earth are those alive now, publishing new discoveries at a rate swapping the capacities of our biological journals. But our knowledge of the biological world is nevertheless declining steeply because of the loss of our traditional knowledge. That's a specially tragic for the newly emerging subfield of ecology turned chemical ecology, the study of ecologically significant chemicals produced by plants and animals. Chemical ecology holds much practical significance for medicine and for natural products chemistry. The availability of all that traditional knowledge tells pharmaceutical and chemical companies where to start in their search for valuable natural products instead of having to prospect large. And so I would like to discuss with you today some examples of traditional biological knowledge, how that knowledge is shrinking for two reasons. First, the specific laws of biological knowledge within intact cultures and secondly, the laws of most of the world's languages themselves. And finally, I'll discuss a couple of examples of what chemical ecologists can learn from traditional cultures. In effect, I shall be discussing the end of the last human societies living as part of nature in some kind of balance with the rest of nature. My field work for the last 30 years has been on the tropical southwest Pacific island of New Guinea working with their traditional peoples, farmers, New Guinea farmers, who still spend much of their time hunting and gathering or else hunter-gatherers carrying out no-falling. And as background to the rest of my talk, I'll now show you a series of slides of New Guinea people and their animals and their birds. For those of you who don't live, breathe and dream New Guinea as I do, let me just remind you that New Guinea is the large tropical island lying just north of Australia, straddling the equator and with mountains going up to 16,500 feet supporting snow and permanent glaciers at the summer. So New Guinea is one of three places in the world where there is permanent snow on the equator. New Guinea peoples were until recently all using stone age tools without knowledge of metal. Most New Guineans are Highlanders living in inland valleys until recently unknown to the outside world and with no knowledge of the outside world. And some of the people with whom I've been working and whom you'll be seeing in these slides were dependent on stone tools until within the last decade. New Guinea peoples speak about 1,000 different languages. That's one sixth of the world's total of 6,000 languages. All of those 1,000 New Guinea languages are strictly confined to New Guinea, spoken nowhere else, and 60 of them are more different from each other than Englishes from Chinese. Each of those 1,000 languages possesses its own oral encyclopedia of local zoology and botany. Traditional societies elsewhere in the world besides New Guinea, particularly traditional human societies in the Amazon and in Africa possess similarly detailed knowledge of their biota. Traditional New Guineans spend most of their time inside the forest or surrounded by forest. They hunt forest animals for food and for decoration. They gather forest plant products as building materials and as medicines and the forest provides much of the basis of their myths. Wherever I go in New Guinea, I'm always quizzing local people, particularly about their knowledge of birds. There's a branch of biology termed ethnobiology devoted to the study of that traditional knowledge. Local societies studied in detail turn out to have names and detailed knowledge for hundreds of local plant and animal species, sometimes over a thousand species. I want to emphasize that these local species, plant and animal species, about which New Guineans possess such detailed knowledge, most of them are ones about whose habits western scientists know little or nothing and many of them, in fact, are unknown to science, undescribed. As an example, let me tell you about my experiences with the Catangban people of the star mountains of Indonesian New Guinea where I was working in March and April of this year. During my few weeks with the Catangban people, they gave me names and detailed accounts of 165 bird species known to them. Naturally, they don't refer to these 165 species by their Latin scientific names and my conversations with them are not going on in scientific English. Instead, their names for these species are words in Catangban, one of those 1,000 New Guinea languages. And my discussion with them goes on in the Indonesian language, the lingua franca of Indonesian New Guinea. For example, some local Catangban names for birds are Tok Tok Pani, the name for the mountain mouse babbler, Wedi Bet Bet, the name for the alpine fly robin, Bula Bula, the name for the black sickle-billed bird of paradise, Pam Karee Tololup, the name for the mountain sore-billed kingfisher and so on. Even for the rarest of these 165 bird species, Catangban people were rattling off of accounts of the height above the ground at which the bird feeds, the other bird species with which it associates, the calls of adults, the calls of the juveniles and so on. Let me give you just a few examples of the detailed biological knowledge that Catangban people possess. One day I was in the forest with a Catangban villager named Robert Urupka, who was one eye, he had lost the sight of one eye. Naturally, he was not carrying binoculars, but I was carrying binoculars. And a small bird flittered overhead through the fog in the dark forest canopy, flew away, and all I could hear was a call. That wasn't enough for me to identify it. I turned to Robert Urupka and said, what bird is that? And he said, that's the gizakwa. I knew that that was the Catangban name for black-bibbed berry pecker, and he said, that's the female gizakwa. I said, how do you know that that's the gizakwa? He said, he calls it colts. And how do you know that it was the female gizakwa and not the male? He calls it colts, not colts. That's an example of the detailed knowledge by which they identify birds. Another example. On another day, I was excited to look up in the forest canopy, and with my binoculars, I identified a little-known New Guinea bird called warrensis whistler. Now, the reason that I was so excited about identifying warrensis whistler is that the male and female of warrensis whistler are identical to each other, and they're so similar to a much better-known New Guinea whistler called the regents whistler that it was not until the year 1941 that ornithologists, western ornithologists in the American Museum of Natural History, going over and measuring specimens, finally realized that warrensis whistler is different from females of regents whistlers, but we've known nothing about the biology of warrensis whistler. So I was excited to see this thing on the treetop so similar to regents whistler. There was Robert Uropka with his one eye and no binoculars. I asked him, what's that bird? He said, that's the bawe. Well, Robert Uropka had already given me the name bawe for regents whistler. So I thought, aha, I finally caught these guys in a mistake. I finally found an area where we, western ornithologists, where our techniques of museum measurement tell us more than these poor people can know. He doesn't know the difference between warrensis whistler and the regents whistler, but just to check out, since Robert and I had seen the regents whistler previously, I said, bawe, you already gave me that name for another bird that we saw down below. And Robert Uropka answered, of course. There are two very similar birds and so we use the same name for both of them, bawe, but nevertheless these birds are sufficiently different so that even you can tell the difference between them. And here are the differences, he said. Remember that neither Rhine nor anybody else, any other western ornithologists, as yet knows anything about the biology of warrensis whistler. And Robert Uropka is now about to explain to me the ecological differences between these sibling species. He said, this mawe lives at high altitudes. It forages up in the forest canopy. The song goes faster and then goes slower and the male and female are identical in plumage. But the other mawe, the one that you and I already saw, lives at lower elevations. It forages lower down towards the ground. The song is an explosive series of whistles and the female looks like this mawe but the male is very different with a black cap, a small bill and yellow feathers standing up on its name. Here's Robert Uropka's explanation. Remember one eyed guy without binoculars of the differences between these sibling species. One more example, when I was on the Solomon Island of Cullin-Bangorah, at the end of my field work, I had a couple of days free and so I sat down with my Cullin-Bangorah guide, a Solomon islander called Teo Zangete, pulled out a notebook and I asked Teo to tell me everything he knew about each species of Cullin-Bangorah. It turned out that he knew 76 bird species of Cullin-Bangorah and for a couple of days I wrote down in my notebook several pages that he dictated to me about each of those 76 species. For each of those species, Teo Zangete told me the native name in the Cullin-Bangorah language, the altitude on the mountain of which it lived, what it ate, what its nest was like, what its clutch size was, because Teo had personally found the nests of most of Cullin-Bangorah's 76 birds and taken the nestlings home and reared them out of interest. He also told me about the altitude migrations that each of these bird species performs with season. He told me how frequently they dispersed over water to colonize other islands and he told me about the size of groups in which they fly over water. So those are several typical examples of the detailed knowledge of local birds possessed by New Guinea people. Why is this wonderful detailed knowledge now damaged? There are two reasons. One, there's a specific extinction of this knowledge itself. New Guinea people are now spending much less time in the forest. New Guinea children are going to school rather than hunting in the forest. Young adults in New Guinea are moving to cities in search of jobs and the focus of interest within each language group has shifted from traditional forest-based life requiring knowledge of plants and animals to the modern cash economy. But there's a second much broader reason for this loss of biological knowledge in New Guinea and that is the local languages themselves that hold this knowledge are going extinct. In the modern world today there are about 6,000 different languages spoken that's 6,000 mutually unintelligible languages not just different dialects. But if present trends continue then by some time in the next century about 5,800 of those 6,000 languages will be extinct because most languages spoken today are already no longer being learned by children. The only languages with a secure future out of those 6,000 likely to survive to the end of the next century are the official national and regional languages of the world's 170 sovereign states but most of them speak one of a few big languages English, Spanish, Arabic, French, Portuguese, Chinese plus some other non-official languages with over a million speakers. That leaves only about 200 out of the world 6,000 languages facing a secure future but local biological knowledge is attached to local languages. Local species are known only by their native names in the local language. Hence not only each people's myths, dances and the rest of their human culture but also each people's knowledge of biology is disintegrating as all these languages fall into disuse. For example, out of the 20 Eskimo and Indian languages originally spoken in Alaska 18 today are spoken only by older people and are not being learned by children. All of those 18 native Alaskan languages have less than 1,000 speakers. Half of them are now down to less than 200 speakers and one of them, the Eyak language is now down to a single speaker and 83-year-old woman. There are only two out of those 20 Alaskan languages still being learned by children today. The Siberian Yupik language with 1,000 speakers and the Central Yupik language with a grand total of 10,000 speakers. Similarly, out of the 187 Indian languages originally spoken in North America outside Alaska 149 are now either extinct or else moribund in the sense that they are no longer being learned by Indian children. Even the North American Indian language would by far the greatest number of native speakers. Navajo with 100,000 speakers faces doubtful prospects for its survival beyond this generation because many or most Navajo children today speak only English and are not learning Navajo. Similarly, in other countries throughout the world native minority languages are disappearing. There are several reasons for these disappearances of native languages and hence of all the biological knowledge tied to these native languages. First, some languages have disappeared or are disappearing because all their speakers are murdered or die off. As happened with the Yahi Indian language of Northern California the last Yahi famous ishi died in 1916 and as in the case of the native languages of aboriginal Tasmania the Tasmanians were exterminated by the first European settlers. A second reason even when all the speakers are not killed off many polyglot national states forbid and punish the use of local minority languages other than the national ones in an attempt to enforce a monolithic national unity. The countries that forbade the use of minority languages included until recently the United States until the last decade or two the policy of the US federal government was to forbid the use of any American Indian language in US schools even in Indian schools. Indian children who were court speaking and Indian language instead of English had their mouths washed off washed out with soap or they were starved for a day or they were punished by having to scrub several flights of stairs. In that respect that's one of the few respects in which the United States was similar to the late Lamentin Soviet Union under Stalin and Brezhnev the USSR similarly for bad school use of minority languages other than Russian. In the containment valley of Indonesian New Guinea where I was working earlier this year the native language of every single person in the valley except for the one school teacher is Katangban but instruction in schools in Katangban schools is still carried out strictly in the Indonesian language as a matter of Indonesian government policy. Finally even in cases where governments do not murder speakers of local languages or forbid or discourage their use people are still being constantly seduced to abandon their local language. With the end of inter-tribal warfare comes migration and inter-marriage. Local people are constantly assaulted with the national language on radio, on television in the newspapers and in schools and access to jobs and to commerce and to the rest of the wider world is through the national language. As these 5,800 minority languages disappear their oral encyclopedias of biological classification and of biological knowledge are disappearing along with them. Okay you may say so why? What are we losing with the loss of all that traditional biological knowledge? Well remember that much of that knowledge is considered commercially valuable by the outside world. For example, the Guineans who guide me in the jungle are constantly pointing out to me as we walk along plans and their uses for each plan. They'll say from that plan we get a material as a contraceptive that plant over there gives us a medicine to treat malaria that plant over there gives us a treatment for wounds that plant gives us an extract to induce abortion and so on. As a result, drug companies hire ethnobiologists the biologists and the anthropologists who study the biological knowledge possessed by traditional people drug companies hire ethnobiologists to collect potentially useful plants and animals for testing as a new source of drugs. Tribes people tell the ethnobiologists which species to collect and what to test each species for. A promising trend in conservation biology today is for drug and chemical companies to buy what are called chemical prospecting licenses in the world's beleaguered remnants of tropical rainforests namely the right in return for pain the government of the country some money to search for potentially valuable natural products. The science concerned with the chemicals elaborated by living plants and animals and with their function is termed chemical ecology this is a branch of ecology that has been exploding in recent decades. I would now like to describe to you two examples of what chemical ecologists can learn from local peoples. In the first example, chemical ecologists have already followed up the accounts given by local New Guinea people they've extracted the chemical involved they've determined its molecular structure and they've started to work out its ecological and biological significance. In the other example that I'll describe to you that has not yet been accomplished we have the accounts of local people but the molecular biologists have not yet extracted the substance. And the second example will then illustrate how a project in chemical ecology looks at the outset before you've got the western solution. My first of these two examples is the case of the poisonous bird. It's the story of the discovery of the world's first known instance of a poisonous bird. You know that there are many different names but he was collaborating with a New Zealand anthropologist the late Ray Fulmer who helped Magnef write down and organize his observations of birds. And so this 219 page book Birds of My Kaelin Country summarizes Magnef's knowledge what he knows about 137 bird species occurring in the Kaelin area. In Magnef's account of one of these New Guinea bird species the hooded Pitta Huey on page 103 of that book Magnef wrote its skin is bitter and puckers the mouth. Another group of New Guineans and Southeast New Guinea added another comment about the Pitta about the hooded Pitta Huey. They said, quote, it's good for nothing a rubbish bird not to be eaten unless carefully skinned. The comments about the Pitta Huey's bad mouth puckering taste were followed up recently by a University of Chicago graduate student Jack Dunbar. Jack was catching birds of paradise in New Guinea in misnets to ban the birds of paradise and his misnets also caught some hooded Pitta Hueys which Jack had to take out of the nets. The hooded Pitta Hueys have strong claws and a strong beak as Jack was removing them and a lot scratched him and drew blood and Jack licked the blood off his skin. He was then frightened after licking the blood off these Pitta Huey wounds to realize that his tongue was going numb and his mouth was going dry and tingling. And he then asked the local natives and that was when he got the account of the hooded Pitta Huey Well, at that point he then saved some carcasses of hooded Pitta Hueys and brought them back to our National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland and gave them to chemists to try to extract the substance that made his mouth go numb. The chemists made extracts of Pitta Huey's skin and feathers injected the extracts into mice as a bioassay and they found that a few micrograms of Pitta Huey's skin or feathers was enough within a few minutes to send the mouse into convulsions and then the mouse would dark. The chemists eventually isolated the poison and astonishingly the Pitta Huey poison turned out to be an already known poison. It was the poison Homer Betrayka Toxin already famous as the poison of the poison-dark frogs of tropical South America. Now those frogs get their name of poison-dark frogs because South American Indians rub their arrows in the skin of that frog in the poisonous skin to make their arrows poisonous. The appearance of the same poison Homer Betrayka Toxin in both a bird and in a frog is a remarkable example of what biologists call convergent evolution. The likely function of the poison in the skin of feathers of Pitta Huey's is that there are major predators on birds in trees in New Guinea, especially snakes. You've seen that snakes before they strike and grab a prey are licking out their tongue to get sensation. They'll even lightly touch the prey if they can do it without alarming the prey and evidently the poison that Huey's skin and feathers is sensed by snakes or other arboreal predators and wants the snakes bad news to eat them. Well, the biological significance of this bit of traditional biological knowledge that Inse Matrimet passed on goes beyond the first discovery of poison in birds, goes beyond this example of convergent evolution because Jack Dumbock was a geographically varying degree in three related species of Pitta Huey's that mimic each other in plumage to a geographically varying degree. To ornithologists like myself what Pitta Huey's have been previously most famous for is that one Pitta Huey species, the so-called variable Pitta Huey is notorious as the New Guinea bird species showing the most marked geographic variation in plumage. Some populations of variable Pitta Huey's look exactly like hooded Pitta Huey's others look like rusty Pitta Huey's still others look like something else again. And evidently then there is mimicry going on among Pitta Huey's mimicry that varies geographically over New Guinea and possibly poison but also varies geographically in these three species over the map of New Guinea. This is an example of the first example in birds of what biologists call Rulerian mimicry namely several poisonous species evolving to exhibit the same warning signal in this case of plumage. But the biological significance of Ian's saying Natch-Neph's traditional knowledge goes even further. The plumage and the calls of Pitta Huey's are mimicked also by several dozen bird species belonging to at least seven other species which go around together in mixed species flocks with the Pitta Huey's. We don't yet know whether those other 35 species are also poisonous like Pitta Huey's in which case this would be Rulerian mimicry or whether these other 35 species are simply mimicking the poisonous Pitta Huey's in appearance in which case this would be what we call Bayesian mimicry. Finally, Natch-Neph's traditional knowledge about bitter-tasting Pitta Huey's may at last explain the Pitta Huey-like rusty and black plumage of many female birds of paradise. Male birds of paradise are Nagini's most famous birds. The males are iridescent black with plumes up to three feet long growing out of their eyebrows or tails or flanks and the males use these plumes in spectacular plumage in connection to rude females or cow competing rival males. So the male birds of paradise have attracted much attention. In fact, the first Nagini bird to become known in Europe was a bird of paradise wrought back to Europe in the early 1500s by the surviving crew of Magellan's voyage of circumnavigation. We've been ignoring the female birds of paradise but female birds of paradise have the Huey-like rusty and black colors. Now it turns out that female birds of paradise frequently join the next species flocks led by Pitta Huey's. Furthermore, the birds of paradise themselves, these most studied of Nagini birds may, may not have realized, also be poisonous. A bird of paradise collector who tried to eat a bird of paradise described it as, the most shocking flesh I've ever tasted as bitter as gold, truly abominable in quotes. In short, two sentences about the bitter taste of Pitta Huey's from the traditional knowledge of New Guineans proved to be the starting point for a whole cascade of discoveries. The first poisonous bird, a case of convergent evolution, the first case of malaria mimicry in birds and a gigantic mimicry complex involving even New Guinea's most famous and best studied birds, the birds of paradise. That's an example where we know with hindsight that traditional biological knowledge led to a major discovery in chemical ecology. In the other example that I would now like to describe to you, molecular biologists have not yet extracted the chemicals involved. So this other case will give you a feeling for what these in chemical ecology sound like at the outset when all you've got to go on is the clues furnished by the local people. And this other case that I'll describe to you is the case of the living fly trap. One day in 1965 when I was in the Highlands of Central New Guinea a tribesman of the Foray tribe called Peran Anayabu brought me a specimen of a big bird that he had just shot. His name for it in the Foray language he said was the yasa and zoologists know this bird as the Papuan frogmouth. The frogmouth gets its English name from its colossal mouth like a frog. The function of the colossal mouth of the frogmouth has always been mysterious to us since western scientists thought that frog mouths eat beetles and little mice which don't require a colossal mouth to hatch or swallow. Well Peran told me this Foray tribe with Peran told me that the frogmouth had a smelly sticky substance on its palate and the frogmouth sit during the day on a branch of a tree with their mouth wide open. Insects he said are attracted by the smell of the substance on their palate. The insects fly into the mouth and they're caught in the sticky substance and the Peran claimed that the yasa the Papuan frogmouth acts like a living fly clown. Well I thought that that was incredible, too incredible to be true had to be nonsense. But nevertheless I found Peran to be an accurate observer who didn't exaggerate or tell me stories. The details that he told me about other birds were ones that I was always able to satisfy myself were true and then I read an observation by an Australian bird watcher who kept a frogmouth as pet and the Australian described watching his pet frogmouth sitting during the day on a branch with its mouth wide open and snapping its mouth shut as an insect flew in. Well I was being inundated with biological knowledge by dozens of New Kingdom people so I put the story of the yasa of the frogmouth aside until last April. When I was in the Catangban Valley asking Robert Erupka what he knew about those 165 bird species and eventually he described to me a bird that he called in his local language the sumae and Robert Erupka said that the sumae has a colossal mouth and he then began to describe to me its habits and my heart started to beat a little faster. Robert Erupka said this is all going on in the Indonesian. The sumae he said sits during the day with its mouth wide open and insects fly in of their own accord. So does the papal and frogmouth really secrete a chemical insect attractant and a fly catching paste on its palate as Peron told me? Do insects really fly spontaneously into its mouth as Peron and Robert saw? If that's true then I will invest my pension in the stock of the chemical company that isolates manufacturers and patterns the insect attractant in frogmouth paste. It's now up to a chemical ecologist to confirm or refute the case of the living fly trap. Well these examples illustrate a broader message. We think of biological knowledge today as undergoing explosive growth. The editor of the weekly science magazine Daniel Koshland assures us that now is the golden age of biology. In some respects that's true. In particular laboratory biologists are learning more and more about a few excessively abundant pest species such as rats, mice, fruit flies, the bacterium estericiacoli without the worst of all proliferating pest species homo sapiens. In other respects though our knowledge of biology is really shrinking. Ten thousand years ago when all humans on earth were hunter-gatherers they were ears to a knowledge of their local natural environment that had been built up by humans and proto-humans over the course of previous millions of years. That local knowledge was so extensive that not even professional biologists can hope to capture more than a small fraction of it. And other members of western industrial society can scarcely even imagine it. At the end of the 24 days that I spent with the Ctengman people I felt like a Philistine because I was so overwhelmed trying to keep up with their knowledge of birds that I kept nudging the subject whenever they began to talk of anything else. The Ctengmans as I was walking through the forest with them they were pointing out to me and they wanted to tell me about this plant and that rat there and that crayfish and that insect but I kept cutting them short and just going back to birds, birds, birds because only by cutting short their attempts to tell me everything that I knew about all these other species could I record even a fraction of their knowledge of birds traditionally the Ctengmans acquired this knowledge by spending much of their time in the forest from childhood onwards. I asked my guide Robert E. Rubka how with one arm having lost the side of the other arm and without binoculars how would he come to know so much about even tiny dull plumage species of warblers that live in the treetops tiny jirigony warblers that would feed up on the mist that he can recognize to species when I need my binoculars and still have difficulty. Will Robert explain to me that as a child he and his Ctengman playmates used to climb trees and they would build blinds and hides in the treetops and they would sit in those blinds and watch canopy birds including little warblers fly by and they would shoot the birds and pick them up and look at their plumage and learn the calls and habits that way. But Robert E. Rubka then pointed out to me his 80 year old son and he told me that all this Ctengman knowledge is disappearing. Children like his son go to school now and only at vacation times can they live in the forest. The results as I've seen elsewhere in New Guinea who know scarcely more about birds than do American inner city dwellers. Within a decade or two drug companies carrying out chemical prospecting will have to go in blind lacking guidance as to which of those thousands of locally present plant and animal species they should collect or what they should tell the chemical ecologists to test these species for. There's an analogy that recurs to me and it's one related to Bob May's analogy yesterday of the burning books. For me the analogy is the final destruction in the year 391 A.D. of the largest library of the ancient world at Alexandria. The library of Alexandria housed all the literature of ancient Greece plus much of the literature of other cultures as well. When that library was burned to 391 A.D. later generations lost. All the Greek epics except for the Iliad and the Odyssey we know that the Iliad and the Odyssey belong to a cycle of at least 12 epics of which we've lost the other 10. We lost with the burning of that library most of the poetry of Pindar and Sappho and we've lost a total of 246 plays by Euripides, Sophocles and Escalus to mention just a few examples of what went up in the burning of that library. The parallel today is the loss of our inherited traditional knowledge of the natural world and oral library. Not only are most of the world's species going extinct as we heard yesterday but also so as much of our information about those species that survive going extinct. In the future, no children will be growing up in the forest where they could receive or rediscover that traditional knowledge. Certainly professional biologists don't have the necessary time. I count myself lucky if I can spend a month every year or two in New Guinea. It's as if we biologists today are burning most of our books while the language of those few books that remain becomes as lost to us as the undeciphered linear ray writing of ancient Crete. Is the situation then really hopeless? Are native languages and traditional biological knowledge doomed to disappear beneath the onrushing jugonaut of a homogenized, worldwide coca-cola culture? Is there nothing that we can do to stop the jugonaut? Of course not. There are many things that we can do. Field biologists can put more effort into recording the knowledge still possessed by local peoples. We can support more ethnobiologists, of whom there are presently very few with very little support. We can support more chemical ecologists as chemical and pharmaceutical companies are already starting to discover that it's in the economic interest to do. Linguists can put much more effort into studying vanishing languages. Until recently, linguists have been astonishingly oblivious to the fact that 97% of their subject matter is disappearing. As if for astronomers, 97% of the stars were going to vanish in the next few decades. Linguists have not behaved as well as their subject matter is going out of existence. Instead, the attention of linguists has been focusing on modern languages whose survival is sure, such as English and German, or else long, extinct languages such as Hittite and Sumerian. Incredibly, it's only within the last few years that even a first meeting was held by linguists to focus on the problem of disappearing languages and to suggest to linguists that they ought to embark on a crash program to record knowledge of these disappearing languages. So that linguists now are using the language of conservation biologists facing a biodiversity crisis at last. Governments can be persuaded to abandon policies of forbidding the use of local languages. Just as Canada and the U.S. and Russia have recently done, reverse their policies of forbidding the use of local language. And Westerners by explaining to traditional peoples why their local plants and animals and their knowledge of it are unique. Local peoples usually have no awareness of that uniqueness. Just as a concrete example, it was only 10 years ago that the U.S. Congress repealed its law forbidding the use of native Eskimo or Indian languages in Alaskan schools. And U.S. Congress is still debating a law that would provide a modest sum of money of like a million dollars to do something positive to support the retention of Eskimo and Indian languages. That's something about which you can write your congressman. Well, those then are some of the ways in which we can do something to hold the juggernaut. Just as it is true for the extinction crisis itself facing biodiversity, the extinction crisis facing our knowledge of biodiversity is one that we can reduce by 10 years.