But why is the loss of culture so important? What does it mean that every culture is a unique facet of the human imagination? Biologists have finally proven what philosophers have always dreamed to be true: We are all relatives. If you accept that we are all cut from the same genetic cloth, then all human populations share the same potential, the same raw intellectual genius. Whether a culture realizes this potential through technological wizardry, as has been the great success of the West, or through unraveling the complex threads of memory inherent in a myth is simply a matter of choice and cultural orientation. There is no trajectory of progress in human affairs. The old Victorian idea that there was a social Darwinian ladder to success that invariably placed us at the apex of the pyramid is now seen as ethnocentric myopia.

We have this notion that indigenous people, quaint and colorful though they may be, are nevertheless frail and fragile, somehow destined to fade away as if by natural law—the implication being that they are failed attempts at being modern, at keeping up. The truth is that these are dynamic, living peoples being driven out of existence by identifiable forces: disease pathogens, egregious industrial decisions or well-intentioned but ill-conceived development schemes, or ideological conflicts. But the bottom line is that in every case we can identify a concrete and specific cause of the humanitarian crisis. This is an optimistic observation, for it suggests that if human beings are the agents of cultural destruction, we can also be the facilitators of cultural survival.

Ecotourism can be corrosive, to be sure, but it can also be profoundly empowering. If one approaches another culture with a reflexive air of superiority, overt or implicit, the impact is invariably detrimental. But if you encounter another people on their terms, open to the reality that their knowledge is as deep as your own, their insights as precise, their hopes and prayers as profound, then magic happens. I learned this as a young student of plants in the Amazon. Though trained at one of the finest universities, I went to the forest as an acolyte, knowing full well that the shaman were the masters of the botanical realm and that nothing I had learned at Harvard could compare with what they had learned in the forest.

The suggestion that none of these other peoples have meaningful contributions to make, that they are only there to entertain us or to bemuse us or to be collected, as we would collect a postcard or an experience, is just wrong. You can go to Hawaii, into the most remote part of that archipelago, and still embrace it as some post-Don Ho fantasy. Or you can do some reading and try to understand what Polynesia was—the greatest culture sphere ever brought into being by the human imagination, tens of thousands of islands flung like jewels across the southern seas.

For years, the genius of the Polynesians was denied by Western academics. That they had inhabited ten million square miles of the planet—from Hawaii to New Zealand, Samoa to Easter Island, and beyond—was a historical fact. But academics maintained that the diaspora had been accidental, a consequence of serendipitous diffusion, as if fishermen went out looking for tuna and caught islands instead. In truth, these were the greatest navigators in human history. James Cook wrote of Polynesian vessels that could do three leagues for every two leagues he could do in his mother ship. He spoke with navigators who could place pebbles in the sand accurately representing every island group in the Pacific. He found men in Tahiti who could understand the people from the Marquesas.