If Indiana Jones had been created by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Stephen Pinker instead of Lucas and Spielberg, he might have been something like Daniel Everett.  His story is as visceral as it is intellectual – it’s got love, beauty, pain and suffering in the South American jungle and a high-stakes search to understand the cognitive underpinnings of human language.

Everett has simultaneously produced a ground-breaking linguistic anthropology text and a riveting, powerful memoir about life lessons learned on missionary work in the Amazon.  Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle was released on November 11th and he’ll be presenting “Endangered Languages, Lost Knowledge and the Future” as one of our Seminars About Long-term Thinking on March 20th, 02009.

Daniel Everett lived for 7 years throughout 3 decades among an isolated Amazonian tribe called the Pirahã, initially in order to convert them to Christianity.  These unique people speak a language that defies long-standing theories and live a simple, hard life as hunter-gatherers.  His time among them caused Everett to renounce both Christian faith and some of the basic tenets of modern linguistic theory.

Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes includes Everett’s descriptions of the overwhelming beauty of the jungle (something he couldn’t help but notice even while desperately canoeing his entire family up an unfamiliar stretch of river to save his wife and daughter from malaria), harrowing life-or-death struggles (see above), and thoughts on the implications of a people that speak without embedded clauses or a perfect tense (things, demonstrated by this sentence, I obviously can’t live without).

The book has been reviewed by Time and the London Times. A New Yorker article about Everett’s work has been discussed here previously.  And if you’re wondering about the title, it comes from the Pirahã’s lack of small-talk such as ‘Hello’ or ‘How are you?’: Instead of wishing someone ‘Goodnight,’ they offer a pragmatic reminder of the omnipresent dangers of jungle life.

Buy the book from Amazon through Long Now’s Store page and Long Now gets 15%.

Because of the name I noticed this art project:

The Art of Recycling in Antarctica: The Long View

According to the NSF site: The “Art of Recycling in Antarctica: The Long View” project conceived by artist, Michael Bartalos will result in a sculptural book made from recyclable materials collected at McMurdo and South Pole stations in Antarctica. The artist intends that the project will “raise international awareness of resource conservation practices in Antarctica, and by extension, promote and inspire sustainability worldwide.” The sculptural book, comprised of 100 vignettes housed in uniformly sized shadow boxes will be hinged to one another to display as a continuous, free-standing accordion-fold book structure. The artwork’s lengthy form draws analogies to taking “the long view” in regard to worldwide environmental consciousness as exemplified by the U.S. Antarctic Program’s rigorous recycling program.

San Francisco-based artist Michael Bartalos goes into more detail on his web site, excerpted here:

The project is inspired by the environmental mandates of the Antarctic Conservation Act and its principles. In an act of exceptional recycling, nearly all the refuse generated by the U.S. Antarctic Program is periodically removed from the continent. I’ll be looking for a variety of usable material representative of the 3.64 million pounds of solid waste generated by McMurdo and South Pole Stations, and I’ll be referring to Antarctic waste management data to conceptually structure my compositions and determine the relative amounts of each material to include.

In an homage to this legacy, each of my 100 vignettes will symbolically correspond to each year passed since Shackleton’s example of innovation and resourcefulness. Thirdly, the number represents a coming century (at least) of sustainability. Hence the title The Long View.

Bartalos is scheduled to leave in January 09, the height of summer at the South Pole.

I met Derek Dukes the other night the founder of Dipity, the maker of the coolest web based timeline software I have seen yet.  You can manually generate timelines, or set up a timeline that is auto-generated out of RSS feeds, Twitters, Facebook updates, etc.  He set up a timeline for Long Bets in about 10 seconds based on the Long Bets RSS feed (seen embedded above).  They are still working on some of the longer term timeline issues like the BC problem.

The latest Seminars About Long-term Thinking are now available as audio downloads or podcasts and in hi-res video for Long Now members.

*Drew Endy and Jim Thomas in “Synthetic Biology Debate” – audio up now, video coming soon