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Humanity is addicted to consumption; to driving everywhere, to eating foods out of season and to pushing natural resources to the tipping point.

It’s this behaviour that’s led to climate change and dire warnings about the unsustainable nature of our consumer culture. But what if out-of-control consumption and destructive commerce wasn’t the only option? What if someone forced us to see the truth of our situation?

Wade Davis, a former explorer-in-residence for the National Geographic Society, has taken on that task.

Climate change is humanity’s problem Davis, an anthropology professor at the University of British Columbia, said Friday in Antigonish.

“But it wasn’t caused by humanity. It was caused by a very narrow subset of humanity with that particular worldview that only goes back about 300 to 400 years,” he said in an interview before speaking publicly at St. Francis Xavier University.

Western traditions have led us to this crossroads “where for our own collective survival and well-being, we need to begin to think in different ways,” he said.

Thinking differently is what Davis has done for the bulk of his career, one that has led him to study cultures as diverse as the Inuit in Canada’s North to Voodoo practitioner’s in Haiti. One of the fruits of his labours is the book, The Wayfinders: why ancient wisdom matters in the modern world.

When Davis first formulated an answer to the question, why ancient wisdom matters in the modern world, it was a simple, two-word answer; climate change.

That doesn’t mean, he said, that societies need to revert to a pre-industrial past, but “rather to suggest that the very existence of these other ways of thinking, these other cultural interpretations of reality...puts the lie to those of us in our own culture who say that we cannot change, as we know we must change the fundamental way we live on the planet.

“I think that is true not just in terms of climate change, but also in terms of our fundamental attitude towards resource extraction for example. One of the lessons of anthropology is that every culture has something to say, each deserves to be heard.”

Davis points out that he’s not condemning western society, adding that anthropology has shown that all cultures tend to have a myopic view of others. “This is probably the curse of humanity. The idea that my way is the real way and you’re a failed attempt at being me.”

How we treat the world, he said, is based on our western European cultural myopia that sees a mountain as a pile of rock that could be mined and a forest as board feet and wood fibre. Other cultures may see those same landscapes as the home of spirits and the land of ancestors. “We get hung up on this thing of who’s right and who’s wrong...what we miss in that is the interesting question of how the belief sustains the culture, mediates the relationship between that culture and the natural world with profoundly different consequences for the ecological footprint of that society.”

He traces the western worldview to the tradition of moving away from absolute faith during the enlightenment and the rise of the scientific method. “It gave us great benefits but at the same time, in a single gesture, it de-animated the world. We tossed out all notions of myth, magic, mysticism but also metaphor to the extent that if things couldn’t be measured and seen they couldn’t exist...it also explains how we see the world as just an inanimate object, there to be exploited.”

In the face of negative forecasts for the future of the planet, Davis said there are reasons not to be pessimistic. He cites the advancement of women from the home to the boardroom, black people from the woodshed to the Whitehouse, and gay people from the closet to the altar. “One of the things that is coming out of this climate change dilemma is a recognition that we are all in this together. Whether humanity will come together or not to cease emissions in a way that would be meaningful, is to my mind doubtful, but we will come together to mitigate the impacts of what’s going on. And hopefully in doing so, make a cleaner and better world.”

The study of ancient wisdom and the goal of anthropology, said Davis, is “to make the world safe for human differences. Anthropology is the antidote to Trump...Diversity is a fundamental indicator of health among all sentient creatures and that goes for societies as well as organisms.”