The Wayfinders (The CBC Massey Lectures)

by Wade Davis

the idea that the social world in which we live does not exist in some absolute sense, but rather is simply one model of reality, the consequence of one set of intellectual and spiritual choices that our particular cultural lineage made, however successfully, many generations ago.

œethnosphere,” a term perhaps best defined as the sum total of all thoughts and intuitions, myths and beliefs, ideas and inspirations brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness.

Science is only one way of knowing, and its purpose is not to generate absolute truths but rather to inspire better and better ways of thinking about phenomena.

Archipelago. Moreover, the distances in the Pacific are not as formidable as they appear on a chart. With the exception of the three most distant points of the Polynesian Triangle, Rapa Nui, Hawaii and Aotearoa (New Zealand), no voyage from Melanesia through Polynesia has to traverse more than 500 kilometres of open water, at least as the crow flies. And there is more land than the maps reveal. At sea one can see roughly 50 kilometres in any direction. Draw a circle with a radius of 50 kilometres around every landfall, and suddenly the ocean shrinks and the area effectively “covered” by land increases.