Ancient Futures by Helena Norberg-Hodge

My great reading buddy Mary lent me this book after sharing it with our book club. I hadn't had a chance to read it, but I enjoyed her enthusiasm for it and borrowed it after our meeting in the park. It is an amazing book that challenged my thinking about helping people in "developing" countries. I have always been skeptical of the negative influence the so-called developed world has on others, but I thought there was a contribution that could be made, or at least an exchange. Now I'm not so sure. This author powerfully describes the destruction of the contentment and health of the Ladakhi people have experienced as they enter the "modern" world. Here's a quote from page 196:

• In the past few decades we have seen a narrowing of vision--in effect, an insidious dumbing down of society--at the same time as economic activity has globalized. As we become further removed from the sources of sustanence and other needs, it becomes increasingly difficult to see our impact on the rest of the world. How do we know that the food we buy hasn't been grown with slave labor, using toxic herbicides and fungicides? Because of the huge scale of the economic system, even those who want to do good can unknowingly participate in activites that have brutal and destructive effects.

And from page 195:

• The so-called global village--hailed by government and industry as uniting all nations in pursuit of the fruits of the global economy--is in fact a highly volatile monoculture based on on community or connection to palce but on universal consumerism.

And from page 194:

• Beyond these widely recognized problems, another crisis is only now beginning to be acknowledged. This is the human suffering--the psychological and spiritual poverty--of people pushed to produce and consume at an ever-accelerating rate. The resulting stress and time pressures are proving almost unbearable...

This book is powerful because the author describes in great detail the life of the Ladakhi people and one can see what a hard and yet satisfying life it is. Then she describes the effects of the developing world on the people in this isolated area and it's heart-rending. In the Afterword, quoted above, she brings it all together in a way that made me wonder at the wisdom of even offering medical care to developing countries. If a life is hard, healthy, and self-sustaining, it doesn't make sense to interfere. She also describes policies that are having a negative effect on these countries. It all reminded me of what I see very close to home--life on our Lakota Indian Reservations.

To me, this is another voice in the cry for more local living in smaller communities. I think of big high schools and how kids are lost there. I think of our urban cities and how people feel lost there. Living in smaller communites with food produced nearby seems to work on so many levels! Another connection I am thinking about is how in my church, we have a built-in mechanism to stay small and local--wards are divided when they get too big, and they are based on geography so one is always with one's closest neighbors. This makes sense!