21 February 2008 is International Mother Language Day. In the grand scheme of the universe, we may have another billion years or so to colonize outside our solar system before the sun dies out, but probably only a few generations to devise a stable context for social continuity and the survival of our species. Human population and planetary resource equations look uncertain at best: Climate change, pollution, and political/cultural/religious conflicts create a host of challenges for humankind in the next hundred years. Establishing an economically and environmentally sustainable mesh of interconnected regional societies — avoiding catastrophic collapse — will require solving all of these problems and more. No one group of people has all of the answers or enough resources to solve these challenges on their own.

Recent research shows that a diverse group of actors is more effective at problem-solving than a smart group. The smartest people will get stuck at the same place and are less likely to think themselves out of a box. Groups selected for diversity rather than smarts will get stuck more often, but get themselves unstuck more quickly, ultimately solving intractable problems with greater speed and higher success rates.

Languages represent vast storehouses of human knowledge. Most languages are not written down, but live only in the memories and cultural practices of human communities – groups of people who over millennia have devised unique systems of survival in difficult circumstances. Human languages are catalogs of plants, animals, insects, people’s stories, weather patterns, diseases, social paradigms, songs, jokes, aphorisms, strategies for war and peace, practices of trade and negotiation.

Human language diversity was at its peak in pre-colonial times. It is now well past its prime. “Language death” has accelerated to a current rate of 2 languages lost per month. As last speakers die, carrying their languages to their graves, repositories of information and understanding that took thousands of years to gather… gone. From a probable peak of 20,000 we are already down to only 6 or 7 thousand extant languages. Experts estimate that of these, 3,000 more will become extinct in the next 30 years, further gutting the storehouse of human knowledge.

Environmental changes make our current landscapes susceptible to rapid change. Access to ever scarcer resources create flash points of tension. By diminishing the range of human perspectives available to solve human and environmental challenges, language death heightens the dangers faced by our future generations as they struggle to survive in a rapidly changing world.

Not everyone agrees. Some writers argue that while an ancient language may preserve knowledge of how to collect grubs for food, people abandon their old language because they’d rather eat a Big Mac. We ourselves have argued that some languages matter more than others, economically speaking. But all languages matter to the human communities where they are spoken. And language diversity matters to humankind as a whole. Our long-haul survivability probably depends upon it. Entrenching the practice of localization at all levels of social, political, and economic activity – while seemingly removed from the great issues of our day — may end up meaning more to humankind, as a species, than finding the cure for cancer.