Cambridge Common

Before I go any further I feel the need to clarify some things. My first post essentially attempted to question the widely-held belief that the middle-class Euro-American way of life is what the world should aspire to. I was not saying that it’s fun to be poor in the Third World. I’ve been poor in urban Africa and its no joyride. However, my relatives in the village who were significantly “poorer” and “underdeveloped” than my family had a much higher quality of life (in my and their opinion). So the first post was mainly about exposing and questioning the way we think about poverty and development. In this post I hope to give (and hope I have already given) a few reasons why (barring amazing scientific innovation) progressing along the commonly-held paradigm of development would not be a good idea.

One goal of development that is currently gaining a lot of currency is sustainability. Like all seals of discourse “sustainability” has been used and misused in a number of different ways. For this post I’ll say that sustainable ways of life are those that can continue indefinitely within the constraints of their natural environments. I say ways of life, and not way of life for 2 reasons:
1)there is no one sustainable way of life and 2) all ways of life influence each other, as globalization is showing us.

One example of point 2, is the so-called “genocide” of indigenous people described by Wade Davis and numerous other anthropologists. The United States and Europe do not have within their borders the natural resources to maintain current levels of consumption and so they must look elsewhere for these resources, goods, and now, services. These resource extraction operations often destroy or deplete the natural environments of people leading seemingly sustainable ways of life (Shell in Niger delta, Forestry operations in Southeast Asia, Fisheries in Lake Victoria, and the sugar plantations of the Carribbean). This disruption of natural environment makes the traditional ways of life of the people inhabiting these regions impossible forcing them to migrate or assimilate (often at the lowest levels) into the modern society that made theirs extinct. Now I’m not saying that I’m against trade at all, but I don’t think that “fair trade” in any sense of the term is possible given our current consumption rates.

Our current culture of consumption has to consume other cultures to survive. One interesting side-effect of this is the creation of the global culture market: members of endangered cultures commodify their culture, making World Music CD’s, giving tours for foreigners, opeining ethnic restaurants, teaching dance classes, etc. Our culture of consumption turns cultures into commodities to be consumed. But I digress…

The natural resource demands of current Euro-American lifestyles necessitate the removal of resources necessary for other ways of life to sustain themselves. The reason I privilege many so-called “indigenous” and “primitive” ways of life is that, to me, they appear to be sustainable. That is, they do not have to consume other ways of life in order to survive (however, this is not true of all “indigenous” or “primitive” cultures by any means). So if sustainability is to be one of the goals of development, perhaps we should look to learn from existing sustainable cultures instead of trying to “develop” them into our non-sustainable image.