The tigers are coming, but hold on for some context.
Contrasting world views is an important underlying factor in the sharp political divisions in the US today. Republicans call this "the culture wars." There
are lots of factors to consider, but let's look narrowly at one very important one: differences in people's idea of the relationship between humans and nature.
John Vaillant, in his book
Tiger: True Story of Vengeance and Survival (here's a previous post on that book), looks at how differing world views clash in the frontiers of the Russian Far East. His book focuses on the survival of wild tigers, but the process is repeated all over the world with different species and different indigenous peoples.
The modern world came about when humans began to apply science to most human activities including the economy. With science, it was believed, humans were no longer at the mercy of nature. Using science, humans could now
control, even conquer nature.
Science has enabled humans to create what in previous times would have been considered miracles. Free enterprise enabled us to make and sell the amazing feats of science. We became gods who could rearrange nature to suit us. But there have been terrible side effects. So let's go to Vaillant's Russian Far East - near Kharbarovsk - to see the contrasting views on nature and humans.
"Prior
to the arrival of Chinese gold miners and Russian settlers, there
appeared to be minimum conflict between humans and tigers in what is now
Primorye. Game was abundant, human populations were relatively small,
and there was plenty of room for all in the vast temperate jungles of
coastal Manchuria. Furthermore, the Manchus, Udeghe, Nania, and Orochi,
all of whom are Tunguisic peoples long habituated to living with
tigers, knew their place; they were animists who held tigers in the
highest regard and did their best to stay out of their way. But when
Russian colonists began arriving in the seventeenth century, these
carefully managed agreements began to break down. People in Krasny Yar
still tell stories about the first time their grandparents saw Russians:
huge creatures covered in red hair with blue eyes and skin as pale as a
dead man’s." (141)
Earlier in
the book he wrote about how the indigenous populations in other parts of the world - like the Bushmen in the Kalahari desert - who had similar relationships with lions. He also makes comparisons between the Russian Far East and the conquest of North
America.
"Some of these
newcomers were Orthodox missionaries and though they were unarmed, their
rigid convictions took a serious toll on native society. The word
“shaman” is a Tungusic word, and in the Far East in the mid-nineteenth
century, shamanism had reached a highly evolved state. For shamans and
their followers who truly believed in the gods they served and in the
powers they wielded, to have them disdained by missionaries and swept
into irrelevance by foreign governments and technology was psychically
devastating - a catastrophic loss of power and status comparable to that
experience by the Russian nobility when the Bolsheviks came to power.
(141-142)
Anyone familiar with Alaska Native history
is familiar with stories of Native drumming and dancing being banned and kids having their mouths washed out with soap for speaking their
own languages at school. And I can't help think that part of today's cultural wars are due to the same sense of loss of power and sense of entitlement by those Americans who are threatened by the rapid changes in the world today.
In
Primorye, this traumatic process continued into the 1950s. The Udeghe
author Alexander Konchuga is descended from a line of shamans and
shamankas, and he grew up in their company. “Local authorities did not
prohibit it,” he explained. “The attitude was, if you’re drumming at
night, that’s your business. But the officials in the regional centers
were against it and, in 1955, when I was still a student, some militia
came to my cousin’s grandmother. Someone must have snitched on her and
told them she was a shamanka because they took away her drums and burned
them She couldn’t take it and she hanged herself.” The drum is the
membrane through which the shaman communicates with, and travels to, the
spirit world. For the shaman, the drum is a vital organ and life is
inconceivable without it.
Along
with spiritual and social disruption came dramatic changes in the
environment. One Nanai story collected around 1915 begins, “Once upon a
time, before the Russians burned the forests down . . .” (142)
It wasn't until the arrival of foreign settlers with livestock
that tiger problems arose. Vaillant met and interviewed Valery Yankovsky and writes about the history of settlement with a focuses on the Yankovsky family.
“.
. . the Yankovsky family hadn’t lived in their new home a year before
they registered their first losses. Between 1889 and 1920, tigers
killed scores of the Yankovskys’ animals - everything from dogs to
cattle. Once a tiger dragged one of their hired men from his horse.
In
the eyes of the Russian settlers, tigers were simply four-legged
bandits, and the Yankovskys retaliated accordingly. Unlike the animist
Udeghe who were native to the region, or the Chinese and Korean
Buddhists who pioneered there, the Christian Russians behaved like
owners as opposed to inhabiters. As with lion-human relations in the
Kalahari, the breakdown began in earnest with the introduction of
domestic animals. But it wasn’t just the animals, it was the attitude
that went with them. These newcomers arrived as entitled conquerors with
no understanding of, or particular interest in, the local culture -
human or otherwise. Like their New World counterparts across the
Pacific, theirs, too, was a manifest destiny: they had a mandate, in many cases from the czar himself, and they took an Orthodox, Old Testament approach to both property and predators. (148) (emphasis added)
So similar to whites moving into Indian country in North American, and Westerners colonizing much of the world. There was a sense of their superiority. Manifest destiny. They had better weapons, better ships, and better science created technology, not to mention religion. Many truly believed they were entitled to take over, because of their perceived superiority, and some - particularly the missionaries - believed their presence would "help the natives."
Vaillant compares Yankovsky world view to that of an indigenous inhabitant of the region.
“.
. .Even a hundred years later, Ivan Dunkai’s son Vasily’s description
of his relationship to the local tigers stands in stark contrast to a
Russian settler’s. “You know, there are two hunters in the taiga: a
man and a tiger,” he explained in March 2007. “As professional
hunters, we respect each other: he chooses his path and I choose mine.
Sometimes our paths intersect, but we do not intrude on each other in
any way. The taiga is his home; he is the master. I am also a master
in my own home, but he lives in the taiga all the time; I don’t.”
This
disparity between the Yankovskys and the Dunkais is traceable to a
fundamental conflict - not just between Russians and indigenous peoples,
but with tigers - around the role of human beings in the natural
world. In Primorye, ambitious Russian homesteaders operated under the
assumption that they had been granted dominion over the land - just as
God had granted it to Noah, the original homesteader:
1. Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth
2. And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth
Implicit
in these lines from Genesis 9 is the belief that there is no room for
two on the forest throne. And yet, in a different context, these words
could apply as easily to tigers as they do to humans. In so many
words, God puts the earth and all its creatures at their disposal:
3. Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things. (150)
. . .It is only in the past two hundred years
- out of two million - that humans have seriously contested the tiger’s
claim to the forest and all it contains. As adaptable as tigers are,
they have not evolved to accommodate this latest change in their
environment, and this lack of flexibility, when combined with armed,
entitled humans and domestic animals, is a recipe for disaster. (151)
The
past two hundred years. The onset of the modern world in which science
was applied to human enterprise and the market system, articulated by
Adam Smith in 1776, began to develop into the industrial revolution.
Mitt Romney seems clearly entrenched in the modern ideal of science helping humans conquer nature, which has led to globe
threatening development.
Romney referred to this period this week in his talk at the Clinton Global Initiative:
The best example of the good free enterprise can do for the developing
world is the example of the developed world itself. My friend Arthur
Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute has pointed out that before
the year 1800, living standards in the West were appalling. A person
born in the eighteenth century lived essentially as his
great-great-grandfather had. Life was filled with disease and danger.
But starting in 1800, the West began two centuries of free enterprise
and trade. Living standards rose. Literacy spread. Health improved. In
our own country, between 1820 and 1998, real per capita GDP increased
twenty-two-fold. (emphasis added)
While modern medicine and agriculture have improved the lives of many, and living conditions of Europe and the United States improved greatly, those European nations had colonies around the world that gave them cheap resources and labor. The US, itself a colony before it broke off from England, took advantage of the enormous wealth of North America by displacing the indigenous populations and exploiting the resources, with slave labor, with waves and waves of immigrant labor, and with imported, cheap Asian labor.
Also, the world population has increased from a
billion in 1804 to over 7 billion in 2012. Yet despite the improvements Romney cites the
World Food Programme reports that:
10.9 million children under five die in developing countries each year. Malnutrition and hunger-related diseases cause 60 percent of the deaths;
Actually another of their statistics shows that the number of
hungry people in the world today is almost as high as the total world population in 1804. So, there is probably much more suffering in the world today than 200 years ago.
- 925 million people do not have enough to eat and 98 percent of them live in developing countries. (Source: FAO news release, 14 September 2010)
And during that period, to achieve the physical
standard of living that the most 'developed' countries have, humans
have had to destroy the world's forests and oceans and sky, so that most indigenous populations have been either physically or
culturally annihilated, and untold numbers of animal, bird, and plant
species have gone extinct and more are threatened with extinction at an
even faster rate today. See
Global Issues,
library index,
Forest Transitions, or the
Sustainable Scale Project for details.
Vaillant's
The Tiger details some of that change from living in harmony with nature to the
sense of entitlement and dominance over nature in one small part of the
world.
Mitt Romney
would continue this trend by expanding US businesses into every
possible country where they can continue to exploit the resources to the
detriment of the inhabitants. Romney, like the Russian Czars and the Soviet bosses, sees this as humans' natural dominance over nature and doesn't seem to consider the possibility
that Western colonization and exploitation of African and Asian nations
(where most of today's world poverty exists) might have something to do
with the poverty in those continents today. To him it's simply the lack of free enterprise, not because they were the victims of free enterprise.
Conditions among indigenous
peoples around the world may have been primitive compared to modern
Western standards, but most of those cultures had survived intact over the
millennia and now many, if not most, have been destroyed or are endangered - usually because
their habitats have been devastated by deforestation or other resource
extraction by Western business interests. Romney goes on:
"As the most prosperous nation in history, it is our duty to keep the
engine of prosperity running—to open markets across the globe and to
spread prosperity to all corners of the earth. We should do it because
it’s the right moral course to help others." (emphasis added)
We are, he tells us, the most prosperous nation in history. And so we have a duty to spread the free market system:
To foster work and enterprise in the Middle East and in other developing
countries, I will initiate “Prosperity Pacts.” Working with the private
sector, the program will identify the barriers to investment, trade,
and entrepreneurialism in developing nations. In exchange for removing
those barriers and opening their markets to U.S. investment and trade,
developing nations will receive U.S. assistance packages focused on
developing the institutions of liberty, the rule of law, and property
rights. (emphasis added)
Let's see, i
n order for us to help you, we,
the most prosperous nation in history, require you to open your markets
to our powerful corporations to take your raw materials (forests, oil,
minerals, etc.) with no pesky environmental protections, use your cheaper labor, and sell our products to your citizens.
Explain to me
how the new businesses in these most undeveloped countries are going to
compete with the businesses in the most prosperous nation in history. Tell me how Romney will keep foreign business interests from bribing the local politicians even more blatantly than they do our politicians. How he will keep them from spoiling their environments and setting up horrible working conditions like
in the factory in China Romney bought.
I
want to be clear here. I believe that the free market does unleash
human energy and creativity and allows the growth of wealth. But it's not a panacea. It
comes at a cost. Economists have noted externalities as a failure of free enterprise. These are things like pollution and other side effects businesses do NOT pay for when manufacturing their products, but end up as costs to the society as a whole. As pollution clean up, as health problems, as destroyed forests and cultures.
These externalities are destroying our planet. Free
enterprise, without government controls to make corporations assume the
costs of those externalities, destroys our natural world and those cultures
that don't embrace our economic system.
Romney appears to be the bearer
of the philosophy that destroyed the forests in the Russian Far East.
It's not the philosophy of free enterprise, because the Soviets
destroyed the Russian Far East with the help of the Chinese. Rather it
is
the philosophy that man can conquer nature rather than man must live in
harmony with nature. I'm not excusing Obama in this either, though he does, at least, talk about the need to stop global climate change and protect the environment. But you can't raise enough money to run for national office without the help of all those corporations that want access to foreign markets and easing of government oversight. But Romney seems to believe all this stuff about the great effects of the unbridled market place. Of conquering nature through science. Has he been to Russia lately? Has he inspected the
oil fields of the Amazon? Or in Nigeria?
One
value of Vaillant's book is to show us up close this clash of values in one location in the world. There are many other books that show how
it happened in other locations. In Alaska we see how Russian fur
traders did the same thing to indigenous peoples of our coastal areas as
they almost brought extinction to the sea otter population. And
American whaling ships almost wiped out the whales that summer in Alaska
waters. Elsewhere we see it in the depletion of various Atlantic fish species. And the near extinction of wild tigers.
The
free enterprise system has to be restrained so that its profit doesn't
come from the depletion of the earth's resources. We need world views
that understand that for humans and other living things, to
survive, we must live in harmony with nature.
