Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Wade Davis is a familiar figure on the TED stage, but he’s probably best known for sharing his incredible pictures of Tibet or the Amazon or the various farflung places to which he’s traveled. This time, he tells the “story of my own backyard,” the sacred headwaters in British Columbia. “It’s the most stunningly wild place I’ve ever been,” says Davis, whose own first job was in the region, as a park ranger in 1970.

Now, says Davis, the area is under threat. “Isolation has been the great saving grace of this beautiful place,” he says, “but now, it could be its doom.” He reminds us of the development of tar sands, the Anchorage pipeline, the “tsunami of industrial development that is sweeping across the wild country of northern Canada.” Now, Imperial Metals and Shell are proposing to mine the headlands, “fracking coal with hundreds of millions of tons of toxic chemicals,” and creating “a network of roads and pipelines and flaring wellheads to generate methane gas that will most likely go east to fuel the expansion of tar sands.”

This, Davis reckons, is a pretty bad idea. So too do the native residents, the Tahltan people. “For them the headwaters are a kitchen, sanctuary, the burial ground of their ancestors,” says Davis. “Those who own it are as yet unborn.” And yet, decisions this year will determine the area’s fate. Davis concludes his short talk by asking for support from all to help the Tahltan protect the sacred headwaters of the Stikine. He calls on Shell not only to withdraw from the area, but to set it aside as a protected area for all time. “The Tahltan need your help; we need your help.”

See also Wade’s 2003 TED Talk, Dreams From Endangered Cultures and his 2008 TED Talk on the web of belief and ritual that makes us human. For even more Wade, see his TEDxWhistler presentation proposing the idea that race is fiction, or his photographs of The Sacred Headwaters in British Columbia, shown in 2011 at TEDxUWO.

Unsurprisingly, almost half of the National Geographic Explorers, as well as a few members of their staff, have given TEDTalks. Below the jump is a list of links to all the talks that bring TED and National Geographic together.

Here’s National Geographic Explorer and TED Prize 2009 winner Sylvia Earle:

National Geographic Explorers-in-Residence:

Robert Ballard, Oceanographer
Robert Ballard: Exploring the ocean’s hidden worlds

Jared Diamond, Scholar
Jared Diamond: Why societies collapse

Louise Leakey, Paleoanthropologist
Louise Leakey: Digging for humanity’s origins

Paul Sereno, Paleontologist
Paul Sereno: What can fossils teach us?

Jane Goodall, Primatologist and Environmentalist
Jane Goodall: What separates us from the apes?

Jane Goodall: Helping humans and animals live together in Africa

Wade Davis
Wade Davis: Cultures at the far edge of the world

Wade Davis: The worldwide wed of belief and ritual

Tierney Thys, Marine Biologist/Filmmaker (a 2004 Emerging Explorer)
Tierney Thys: Swim with giant sunfish in the open ocean

Spencer Wells, Genographer (a 2004 Emerging Explorer)
Spencer Wells: Building a family tree for all humanity

Zeresenay Alemseged, Paleoanthropologist (a 2004 Emerging Explorer)
Zeresenay Alemseged looks for humanity’s roots

Joseph Lekuton, Teacher (a 2006 Emerging Explorer)
Joseph Lekuton: A parable for Kenya

Corneille Ewango, Tropical Botanist (a 2007 Emerging Explorer)
Corneille Ewango: A hero of the Congo Basin forest

Nathan Wolfe, Biologist (a 2009 Emerging Explorer)
Nathan Wolfe: Hunting the next killer virus

National Geographic staff

Frans Lanting, National Geographic Photographer-in-Residence
Frans Lanting: A lyrical view of life on Earth

Keith Bellows, Editor in Chief, National Geographic Traveler
Keith Bellows: Celebrating the camel

David Griffin, Director of Photography, National Geographic Magazine
David Griffin: Photography connects us with the world

The newest edition of UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger totes up 6,000 world languages — and counts 2,500 as endangered and 200 as completely lost. The interactive atlas, released today, ranks the 2,500 endangered languages by five levels of vitality: unsafe, definitely endangered, severely endangered, critically endangered and extinct. This free, browsable resource complements a print version to be released next month. From UNESCO’s announcement:

For example, the Atlas states that 199 languages have fewer than ten speakers and 178 others have 10 to 50. Among the languages that have recently become extinct, it mentions Manx (Isle of Man), which died out in 1974 when Ned Maddrell fell forever silent, Aasax (Tanzania), which disappeared in 1976, Ubykh (Turkey) in 1992 with the demise of Tevfik Esenc, and Eyak (Alaska, United States of America), in 2008 with the death of Marie Smith Jones.

Browse UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger >>

For more on endangered languages, watch Wade Davis’ 2003 TEDTalk on cultures at the far edge of the world:

UPDATE: Or check out this less-than-scholarly dictionary of endangered slang >>

Wade Davis recently spent time in the Northern Territory of Australia, working on a film with the Aboriginees on Dreamtime and the Songlines. He reports from his time there:

I must tell you of the Dreaming. Spent a month in the Northern Territory. Here’s a copy of the note that I sent back in week three, from a sat phone at a waterhole 200 miles east of the road in Arnhem Land.

These are and were a people with no notion of linear time. Theirs was one of the great experiments in human thought. The notion that the world existed as a perfect whole, and that the singular duty of humanity was to maintain through ritual activity the land precisely as it existed when the Rainbow Serpent embarked on the journey of creation. The logos of the Dreaming was constancy, balance, symmetry. In the moment there is deductive logic, on a hunt for example, when the men pay attention to signs with a perspicacity that would put Sherlock Holmes to shame. But in life there is only the Dreaming, in which every thought, every plant and animal, are inextricably linked as a single impulse, the inspiration of the first dawning. Had humanity followed this track, it is true that we would have never placed a man on the moon. But we would most certainly not be speaking of our capacity to compromise the life support of the planet. I have never in all of my travels been so moved by a vision of another possibility, born literally 55,000 years ago.

This world is so amazing. The realm of the modern is just the floss. The ancient rhythms resonate in ways we can only imagine.

With stunning photos and stories, National Geographic Explorer Wade Davis celebrates the extraordinary diversity of the world’s indigenous cultures, which are disappearing from the planet at an alarming rate, in this 2003 talk. This is many viewers’ favorite TEDTalk of all time — including a TED staffer or two. As one commenter says, “I was pinned to my seat by a tour de force of new ideas, brilliantly presented and illustrated in full color.” (Recorded February 2003 in Monterey, California. Duration: 22:13)

Watch Wade Davis’ 2003 talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances — including Davis’ equally amazing 2008 talk.

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Watch Wade Davis’s talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances.

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Subscribe to the TEDTalks video podcast via RSS >>
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It’s so surreal, I thought at first it must be a hoax. But Reuters just picked the story up, and I’m going to assume they did my fact-checking for me. The photo shows members of one of the world’s last uncontacted tribes, who were spotted and photographed from the air in a remote corner of the Amazon rainforest near the Brazil-Peru border.

Survival International, an advocacy group for tribal people, released the photos on their website and quotes Jose Carlos dos Reis Meirelles Junior, who works for the Brazilian government’s Indian affairs department: “We did the overflight to show their houses, to show they are there, to show they exist …This is very important because there are some who doubt their existence.”

“What is happening in this region is a monumental crime against the natural world, the tribes, the fauna and is further testimony to the complete irrationality with which we, the ‘civilized’ ones, treat the world,” Meirelles said.

Apparently, more than 100 uncontacted tribes remain worldwide, with half living in Brazil or Peru. Extraordinary.

UPDATE: Meirelles has admitted that while the tribe is not “uncontacted” — it’s been known since 1910 — the direct threat it faces from loggers drew him to be part of this photo. The group’s rainforest home, on the border between Brazil and Peru, is under pressure from logging, and Meirelles hoped the dramatic photo would convince people in the industry to protect the tribe’s habitat.