Ethnosphere
Wade Davis's term for the sum total of all the thoughts, dreams, myths, ideas, and intuitions brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness — humanity's cultural counterpart to the biosphere. Davis argues the ethnosphere is eroding today at a rate exceeding the biosphere's own well-publicized losses, with language death as its most measurable index, and that each intact lifeway is a distinct, field-tested answer to what it means to be human.