International Development and USAID
Recently (Dec. 99) Amy and I attended a Sunday service at the Northern Virginia Ethical Society in Vienna, VA. We enjoyed ourselves very much, and we appreciated the effort NOVES members went to to make us feel welcome. The speaker was a recently retired gentleman named Carl Hemmer who had worked with USAID for much of his career. He spoke about the goals of AID and some of the organization's accomplishments. He was very enthusiastic about the work AID has done.
While I admire Hemmer and the long years he has devoted to something he believes in, there are a number of reasons why I cannot support the mission of AID. I was particularly disturbed by Hemmer's remark that AID was "the only way" third-world nations could come to enjoy the "blessings" that we in the developed nations have such as shopping malls filled with affordable goods. AID operates on the assumption that all human beings would be happier if they adopted American technology, American-style politics, American marketing practices, etc. But this is a fallacy as anyone familiar with the history of the our relationship with the American Indian, the Arab, the African, and many others knows.
Americans have not yet learned what the educated people of any mature culture know: Our way is not the only way. Before European expansionism disrupted life on virtually every continent, there were thousands of viable cultures all over the globe, each living in an intricately balanced relationship with their natural surroundings that had evolved over hundreds if not thousands of generations. Each of these cultures held, as it were, a unique recipe for long-term human survival. This information will become increasingly important in coming generations as we squander away more and more of our precious natural resources and bring more and more human beings into an already over-crowded world. However, most of it has already been lost to us forever, although there are efforts here and there to catalog what remains of this knowledge. For example, in my native Utah there is an on-going project to catalog Gosiute knowledge of the medicinal value of certain plants native to what we call the Western desert or, approximately, the area between the Great Salt Lake and Reno, Nevada. If you're interested in learning more about this research, click here or here.
In Man's Rise to Civilization: The Cultural Ascent of the Indians of North America, Peter Farb examines historical evidence which indicates that in all of history since the first European contact with Native Americans, no Indian ever chose of his own free will to adopt the European lifestyle. However, many Europeans did choose to "go native," and there are many written accounts of whites who became chiefs and other respected members of their adopted tribes. This may sound fantastic to you, but it isn't difficult for me to imagine what would motivate an indigent laborer living under the thumb of a likely abusive employer, whether on a farm or in a factory, to choose a life of freedom in a loose federation of free individuals out in a rugged, beautiful, and mostly empty wilderness.
My point is that AID's attempts to bring improved agricultural techniques, hosptitals, and literacy to the developing world are laudable but, in my view, misguided. Throughout known human history, agriculturists have been slowly but surely encroaching on the lands of hunter-gatherers, either assimilating them into their own societies or killing them off altogether. Things have progressed to the point that today there are very few of these groups left. In my view, AID's work is accelerating the already perhaps inevitable demise of these groups from whom we have so much to learn. And the sad thing is that this is not what these people want! Like you and me, they would like to see their own cultures thrive and progress. Evidence for this abounds in our own country where Indian nations as diverse as the Mohawk, the Lakota, the Ute, the Cherokee, the Tohono O'odham, the Yuchi, and dozens of others struggle to keep their languages intact and to develop ways to make their cultures viable in a world that considers them obsolete. Just one example of the diverse beauty these cultures represent can be found in the RealAudio files of an Iroquois Thanksgiving Prayer in the Mohawk language that can be listened to by clicking here. Another example can be viewed in a collection of Ainu artifacts currently traveling around the world. I saw the exhibit at the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC recently, and it was spectacular. (The Ainu are the indigenous people of northern areas of Japan who have now been all but displaced by the Japanese).
I would like to see the US government take greater steps, both in our own country and abroad, to finance the purchase of large land reserves where alternative cultures could continue to thrive without pressure from the ever-encroaching interests of loggers, farmers, poachers, and the like. Conventional American and Canadian reservations are largely unsuitable for this purpose because they are usually situated on the poorest lands in their respective areas and, additionally, are not large enough to support the animal and plant populations needed for them to practice their traditional life styles. I am talking about a large-scale effort to purchase, for example, an area like the Black Hills and let it slowly evolve back into what it was before we raped and pillaged it for wood, gold, and uranium. Similar large-scale reserves could be located in New York state and other regions of the United States and other countries. Perhaps Indonesia, Thailand, and other Southeast-Asian states are the best places to start such a program since there are many tribes still living indigenously in these areas even today.
In the 1970s, a group of Mohawks forcibly occupied state parkland in up-state New York with the goal of receiving ownership of it in compensation for lands usurped by white farmers in the same old never-ending story that is still going on now on the threshold of the supposedly enlightened twenty-first century. The state eventually granted them ownership of this land. I don't have much information on this group, but I understand they are still living there today and have been successful in maintaining their language and living off the land like their ancestors did. In contrasts, their cousins on other Mohawk and Iroquois reservations languish under the administration of such laboriously bureaucratic entities as the American and Canadian federal governments, the state of New York, and the provinces of Ontario and Quebec.
I am aware that some reservations in the Western United States are quite large. However, it is often the case that bits and pieces of the best land are held privately -- usually by wealthy whites who understood early on how to procure for themselves what they wanted no matter what the price others might have to pay.
The thing is, AID's goal to bring "progress" to the "unenlightened" nations is doomed to failure simply because the earth will not support an entire world that attempts to live like most Americans and Europeans live today. I've heard it said that if every household in China had a refrigerator, environmental conditions would be significantly worse than they are now. (And they are bad in China). I don't know enough about what refrigeration does to the environment to verify the statement, but consider a China in which every household owned a car -- or two cars as is the average in America -- and imagine the toll that would take on the world's air quality. Then imagine what it would be like if every household all over the world owned two cars. The traffic jams alone would make it unbearable!
Anyway, that is my opinion. I'd be interested in hearing yours: forgetfuljones@oocities.com
Thanks,
David Harris
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Last Updated on December 13th, 1999