I was educated at Oxford University and spent the next 35 years teaching and writing. I was a regular essayist on National Public Radio from 1989 until 2010, and I’ve published sixteen books. I’ve had work published in the New York Times magazine, the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, National Geographic, Outside, and nearly a hundred other publications.

The Endangered Alphabets Project arose quite by chance out of my decision to carve each of my family a name-board, or shingle, for Christmas 2009. Having discovered how much I enjoyed carving, I started to carve Chinese characters, and then stumbled on the website Omniglot.com, an online encyclopedia of the world’s writing systems. It struck me at once how mysterious and beautiful many were, and also that fully a third of the world’s roughly 100 writing systems were in danger of extinction. Some are victims of globalization and the increasing threat to traditional or indigenous cultures, and are thus no longer taught in schools or used for official purposes, and in some cases are actively suppressed or banned.

An endangered alphabet, by the way, is not the same thing as an endangered language. Many minority cultures—Native American peoples and Australian aborigines, for example—have endangered languages, but never had their own scripts, and in fact may not have used writing at all. An endangered alphabet tends to be one created by a culture that has been subsequently dominated by another culture, with the latter imposing its own form of writing. Cherokee, for example, had its own script, but for more than a century Cherokee children were denied the right to use it in schools.

There is a growing and vital movement among the world’s linguists and anthropologists, as well as members of the cultures themselves, to study and preserve endangered languages. Almost nobody, though, is doing the same for writing systems. Hence the Endangered Alphabet Project.

In early 2010, I decided to carve Article One of the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights in a dozen or so of these scripts and exhibit them to draw attention to this aspect of cultural erosion, or in some cases cultural genocide. The text of Article One reads: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”

The first exhibition of the Endangered Alphabets Project was held in April 2010, and to my surprise the carvings were received with almost universal appreciation and interest, both as an act of cultural preservation/education and as works of art. The first of several video documentaries arose out of that exhibition, and almost at once I was invited to bring a selection of the carvings to colleges, universities, and libraries, including Harvard, Yale, and the Smithsonian Institution.

Over the next five years, my work has expanded to explore these questions and many others. In addition to documenting various endangered writing systems, I also consider the relationship between the writing and the wood, and even aspects of utility by creating items of Endangered Alphabets furniture.

Increasingly since 2012, I have spent a great deal of energy researching endangered writing systems, especially undertaking the difficult task of tracking down people who can still read and write traditional scripts that in some cases are used by no more than a couple of dozen people. My aim is to continue creating striking and original artwork that pays tribute to traditional cultures worldwide and draws attention to the fact that when a written language is lost, the collected wisdom of a culture is illegible.

Select list of exhibitions

April 2010 Champlain College, Winooski, VT
May 2010 Middlebury College
September 2010 University of Vermont
December 2010 Rutgers University
February 2011 Central Connecticut State University
March 2011 Montserrat College of Art, Beverly, MA
December 2011 SUNY Geneseo, Geneseo, NY
March 2012 Western Wyoming College, Rock Springs, WY
April 2012 Yale University
June 2012 Cambridge University, UK
Universidad Abat Oliba, Barcelona, Spain
July 2012 Bennington College, Bennington, VT
April 2013 Harvard University
June-July 2013 Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC
October 2013 Carleton University, Ottawa, ON
Eastern Tennessee State University
January 2014 First Nations University, Regina, SK
March 2014 Harvard University
April 2014 American University, Washington, DC
March 2015 University of Maine, Presque Isle