deplete the land. We did not have much, and we threw away nothing that was usable, or at least biodegradable. We ate well enough to survive. We made shelter from what we found where we were. We made clothes, if we needed, from materials
we found where we were. We had nothing but leisure time.
Now almost half a century ago I knew people like that. Aboriginal people, living in the deep jungles of Southeast Asia. (The jungles of course have mostly been leveled today). True, they looked poor, dressed in rags (or nothing at all). But they had a joie de vivre, they were joyfully alive, something modern man has forgotten They made huts on stilts from bamboo that grows everywhere. They gathered
fruit, edible leaves, roots, and hunted very occasionally, and of course never more than they could eat. They lived in small groups, rarely more than a dozen.
They sang, told stories around tiny little fires in the evening. True, they probably did not live as long as we do, although at the time I knew them, their most serious illness was a disease we had brought, to which they had no immunity. Food
was never hard to find because they knew their environment intimately because they knew themselves part of the environment, not different from the animals and plant life around them. They smiled the most wonderful open smiles.
We have come a long way from those primitives! Today a family of mother, father, and 2.3 children, lives in a 2300 square feet house (the average today, I
read), with four or more bedrooms and two or three bathrooms, a kitchen with all the gimmicks and gadgets that are current. And probably a mortgage that they pay a few thousand dollars a month to amortize. They have three TVs in this
house, at least two cars, probably two or three computers, five telephones. You know the rest. Their leisure time is spent in a gym to stay in shape because they don't work with their body any morel. Both parents work in order to be able to pay
for their "standard of living." According to what I read recently they have no savings, but many credit cards, many of them maxed out. I cannot even imagine how much electricity they use, how much gasoline to run their SUVs and vans. How much energy (oil) they use to make trips, either by car or by plane.
every toddler needs his own computer! Every teenager needs a cell phone and an iPod. My pre-teen grandchildren all have their own web site (and my family is not rich, not even middle class any more). Remember the president telling us shortly after 9/11 to buy more things? To keep the economy growing. We do our patriotic duty, we consume, making WalMart the richest company in the world.
Our culture's motto is MORE. More things, more money, more power.
Isn't it obvious that that is an impossible goal? Certainly unsustainable. In an ecology where everything is connected to everything else, if one being, or one species, accumulates "more" (of anything) over a long period of time, other beings
or species must get less. The total of what there is (whatever "it" is) is finite.
More for some, means less for everyone else. That has never worked on this planet. When everything is related to everything else, there is a balance, a harmony.
And shifting the balance all to one side, simple cannot be done. Oh, sure, in the short run. But the result is always an even shorter redress of the balance.
Warring Terra is even more short-sighted than meeting terror with more terror, violence
with more violence. This planet does not work that way.
"In fighting nature, Man can win every battle except the last." Thor Heyerdahl.
note from the editor; Robert Wolff is an elder who has had the special experience of having lived with and been embraced by an indigienous tribe, in the nether lands of Malysia, which has since disappeared, wiped out by civilization and modernity. Please give Robert a warm welcome, using the comments below the article. I hope to see more articles from him, imparting his unique perspective. I first learned of him from his book, Original Wisdom
Rob Kall
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