of academia, it would be better to let the language die than preserve it. ...you know, I could document a language... He had to destroy his entire PhD research. So just imagine, you know, 90% of languages will be extinct probably in my lifetime. It's a catastrophic impact to an ecosystem to talk about that kind of extinction. Culturally, we're talking about the same thing. I mean, you know, what if you lost all of Russian literature, or something like that, or Russian, you know? If you took all of the Slavic languages and just they went away, you know, and no more Tolstoy. It occurred to me that in the time we spent with him in the greenhouse, possibly three or four languages had died. In our efforts to preserve endangered species, we seem to overlook something equally important. To me, it is a sign of a deeply disturbed civilization where tree huggers and whale huggers in their weirdness are acceptable, while no one embraces the last speakers of a language. McMurdo is full of characters like our linguist. The bleak Motel 6-drabness of the corridors is misleading. Behind every door there is someone with a special story to tell. JOYcE: Back in the '80s, I took a garbage truck across Africa from London to Nairobi. That was a trip. Four months in a garbage truck. It was horrible. On numerous occasions we came pretty close to, I don't know about dying, but pretty close to being in some