Recent research (Posey ed 2001) links the imminent extinction of more than 2,500 world languages to a great loss of environmental knowledge. Why? Native peoples have thrived for millennia in rich natural habitats and managed them for the benefit of themselves, and often, the animals and plants as well. Those groups who have managed to employ stable yet slowly evolving survival strategies for thousands of years must surely know something about sustainable practices, or they would not be around today. While modern science has many answers, a tremendous amount of very specific and useful information remains with indigenous peoples. It is hard to rival the shear length of time and intimacy with which they have experienced particular environments. Their languages, meanwhile, are the gatekeepers to this experience.

Native languages are repositories and transmitters of information on how to acquire food without compromising its future viability, how to make constructions of local materials, navigate and track wildlife, interpret signs of habitat change and predict their impact, distinguish between myriad species, their behaviors, and developmental stages, overcome dangers posed by the local environment, and many other survival strategies and facts about the natural world.

You might be thinking, "Well, even if a people's language dies, don't they still all know those things? The language may have died, but the skills remain." It is true that a community that has lost a language doesn't suddenly become powerless, memory-less, and hopeless. But it can definitely be constraining. Their traditional language has developed alongside generations of folk struggling, adapting, and overcoming the challenges of their own particular environment. The language has had to accommodate the complete variety of species the people regularly come across, the particular palette of illnesses that are likely to be contracted in that place, the particular mood swings of the weather.

Every language has different strengths and weaknesses in expression: some languages may have a broad set of vocabulary for certain things, while be weak in other areas. And these differences usually arise from the demands of the environment. Having many synonyms for snow is simply not a priority for a place where it only snows once a year. In a place of abundant snow, where differentiating types can cut travel time, signal changes in weather, and even influence the acquisition of food, a richer vocabulary is warranted. Therefore, when a native language is replaced by another language which has developed in a different context, there may be a mismatch between the new language and the local environment---a piece will be "lost in translation," so to speak.

Not everyone believes this postulation. Some assert that any language is capable of expressing anything that you could possibly want to express. This may be true. Even if an imported language did not have the specific word for X plant, for instance, you could string enough sentences together to fully describe it. Regardless, the original language may still hold an edge over the imported; as Hunn (1990) points out, precise labels for different thoughts and images can be called up by name at will, and hence dramatically increases memory capacity. It is not an accident that those indigenous groups who have suffered the most language loss are often those who are least in touch with their traditional skills, knowledge of the local environment, and cultural practices. And tragically, this void can be coupled with rising rates of alcoholism, unemployment, and other modern scourges.

Klaus Toepfer, Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) stated in 2001: "Indigenous peoples not only have a right to preserve their way of life. But they also hold vital knowledge on the animals and plants with which they live. Enshrined in their cultures and customs are secrets of how to manage habitats and the land in environmentally friendly, sustainable, ways. Much of this knowledge is passed down from generation to generation orally... So losing a language and its cultural context is like burning a unique reference book of the natural world."

Published in the Sun.Star Baguio newspaper on August 18, 2011.