Part of the embarrassment for linguistics is that the discipline has been ill prepared to respond to LEL as a subject matter of scholarship. Those who have embraced language advocacy lacked the kind of expertise that environmentalists, most of whom have been trained in evolutionary biology, have. Empathy for “Indigenous” populations has prevailed over research on what it would take to keep languages alive. Lack of historical depth even in book-length accounts of these processes has even led to the confusion of human rights and language rights. The root causes of the phenomena, including the economic and political plights of the “Indigenous” peoples, have too often been overlooked. The focus has been more on symptoms than on the causes. The failure to distinguish between different styles of colonization has also led to extrapolations that are often disputed by the facts. These are among the reasons why I have written this book. While we may disagree on my analysis of the state of art, I hope that we agree that it needs revisiting and revising.