We know now how important biodiversity is to a healthy physical environment and how much damage our rapacious appetite for agricultural and urban land has done to it.

The parallels with cultural diversity are clear. Peoples with unique cultural identities need to be truly and effectively respected, cherished and supported, for them and for all of us. Our ethnodiversity, our ‘ethnosphere’, must also be protected. It is the sum total and manifestation of all the thoughts, dreams, myths, ideas, inspirations and intuitions produced by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness. It is all that we have created through our endeavours as a wildly inquisitive and astonishingly adaptive species. In short, it is humanity’s greatest legacy. Let us ensure that the ultimate legacy is not its own destruction.