Home Editorial Letter from the President WorldWire News from around the world The Theme Diversity in the Age of Globalization RoundTable Indigenous Internet: Can traditional peoples survive the Information Age? The Accidental Empire Globalization may not be intended to create an empire based on Western culture, but it is having that effect all the same. A look at the past gives us insight on how cultural diversity weathers hegemony. by Nini Bloch Almost Indian At the turn of the last century, upper-class Peruvian women took on the trappings of Quechua culture. Photographs from that time help clarify whether their fervor went more than skin deep. by Dr. Michele M. Penhall The Clan of the Clam Having the technical answer to saving an endangered species is useless unless itās integrated into the culture responsible for protecting that species. An Earthwatch scientist offers a case in point on Tonga. by Dr. Richard Chesher Buffalo and Thunder In the 1970s, biologist Lyall Watson was exploring Indonesian islands in the Banda Sea when he encountered a people with a radically different way of experiencing the world, one that forces us in the West to question our own understanding. by Dr. Lyall Watson A Loss for Words Over half of the worldās 6,000 languages will not survive our childrenās generation. Can we protect our cultural diversity? by Dr. Michael Krauss RoundTable Brutes or Brothers? Are Neanderthals evolutionary dead ends or our long lost relatives, and what do the answers say about us? One Thousand Years of Solitude The Lord of the Flies would have us believe that human nature tends to violence, that a group of people isolated on an island will break into factions, fight over limited resources, and destroy themselves. But Easter Island gives that idea the lie, Chris Stevenson is finding out. by Suzanne Powell š Photos by Owen Jones One Weird Elephant Isolation breeds speciation. The cause may be rising seas or a major extinction event, but it always prompts a burst of genetic creativity, since any adaptation might work. Hereās one one that didnāt stick. by Dr. Larry Agenbroad Opinion Conserving Environments Past by Karl Laumbach   East may be East and West may be West, but these days, the twain are meeting and mixing in ways that Rudyard Kipling never imagined. Between the globalization of the economy and the ubiquity of the Internet, there is no such thing as an isolated culture anymore. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Will all this mixing lead to hybrid vigor or bland homogeneity? What exactly happens when two different cultures meet, and why should we care, anyway? These are precisely the questions that we tackle from several different angles in this special anthology issue of Earthwatch Journal. First we go to the source and ask representatives of indigenous cultures around the world what opportunities and threats they see in the Internet. Then, taking a cue from Mark Twain, who said that ćhistory doesnāt repeat, but it rhymes,ä anthropologists give their view on what really happened when Neanderthals met Cro-Magnon humans. In a similar vein, our archaeologists tell what there is to learn from empires past and their effects on the cultures they encountered. Then we put the theory into action with two cultural case studies: One from turn-of-the-century Peru, discusses how Peruvians of European ancestry and mestizos romanticized the Indian cultures they had subjugated. A second case study documents a productive interface between Western science and traditional culture in Tonga. To show why we need to preserve cultural diversity, we go to a Pacific island, where a biologist discovers just how little he understood of the world. With luck, weāll all learn that lesson.