“Time is life.”
With these three words, Karma
Tshiteem, Secretary of the Bhutan Gross National Happiness Commission, ended his
brief description of Bhutan’s
distinctive approach to economic development. It caught my attention
because of the striking contrast to our common Western phrase, “Time is money.”
The event I was attending was a small
international gathering primarily of indigenous environmental leaders. I was
privileged to be among the few nonindigenous writer-activists invited to join
them.
Tshiteem was seated to my left. Winona
LaDuke, program director of Honor the Earth and a celebrated Native
American environmental author and activist, was on my right. Tom
Goldtooth, global environmental leader and executive director of the
Indigenous Environmental Network, sat directly across from me. Next to him was Pablo Solón, former Bolivian Ambassador to the United Nations. Pablo was a
principal driver behind the 2010
World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth
in Cochabamba, Bolivia.
We were there to share perspectives on the work of
building green economies based on the principles of indigenous wisdom. Several
of the participants are involved in bringing an indigenous voice to the Rio+20
Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in June—the 20-year
follow-up to the 1992 UN Earth Summit.
Our venue was Pocantico, the former New York
estate of John D Rockefeller, the legendary icon of ruthless capitalist
expansion and extraction. We enjoyed the irony of meeting in the setting of
this grand estate in our search for a different path.
A Prophetic Choice
On the plane I had read LaDuke’s report Launching
a Green Economy for Brown People. Its opening paragraph set the frame
for our discussions:
“Ojibwe prophecies speak of a time
during the seventh fire when our people will have a choice between two paths.
The first path is well-worn and scorched. The second path is new and green. It
is our choice as communities and as individuals how we will proceed.”
Recognizing the need for a new path, indigenous
peoples around the world are revisiting the wisdom teachings of their
respective traditions as a guide to their survival in a world dominated by
institutional forces that have long sought to wipe those teachings from our collective
memory.
We, the peoples of modern Western societies, face the
same choice referred to in the prophecy. Some among us are realizing that we,
too, have much to learn from the traditional indigenous understanding of what
Goldtooth referred to as “The Original
Instructions.”
Our deliberations at Pocantico brought into sharp
relief the contrast between money-centered Western and life-centered indigenous
views of the proper purpose and structure of a high-performing economy.
The Original Instructions call us to recognize Earth
as our living mother and to honor and care for her as she cares for us. In the
West we have forsaken the Original Instructions in favor of an economic theory
that calls us to treat Earth’s resources as saleable commodities.
Rio +20
A number of the Pocantico participants were involved
in negotiations leading up to Rio+20, a UN global environmental conference commemorating
the 20th anniversary of 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro,
Brazil. They informed us that the
document being prepared for approval by the world’s governments in Rio will
fall far short of identifying and addressing the source of global
environmental failure. Rather it will recommend that to save our Earth mother,
we must put an estimated price on her waters, soils, air, forests, fisheries, and gene pool
and offer them all for sale on the thoroughly disproven theory that whomever is able to pay the highest price for her will have a natural incentive to care
for her.
In the 1990s I was deeply involved in the global
resistance against multilateral trade agreements through which global
corporations sought free reign to colonize the world’s natural resources,
markets, and technology. The 1999 Seattle World Trade Organization protest
focused global attention on this assault against the human future. The massive
demonstrations that followed all around the world largely stymied the use of multilateral
agreements to circumvent democracy and popular sovereignty in a global drive to
divide up control of the world’s markets and resources among the ruling
corporate oligopolies.
During our Pocantico conference it became evident
that corporate interests have concluded that the best current hope for
advancing their agenda is to play on the world’s concern for the environment, using multilateral environmental agreements as their new vehicle to get local
communities and national governments to relinquish control of the natural
wealth within their borders.
As alert citizen groups are pointing out, the
proposals being advanced would result in the ultimate commodification and financialization
of nature for the short-term benefit of the same global profiteers who
created the mortgage bubble that brought down much of the global economy in
2008.
Herman Daly, the father of ecological economics, has
aptly observed, “There is something
fundamentally wrong in treating the Earth as if it were a business in
liquidation.” If Rio+20 goes according
to the apparent Wall Street plan, it will lay the groundwork for Earth’s
ultimate going out of business sale.
At the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, the leadership for a
new green path came not from global corporations and the official delegates who
aligned with corporate interests, but rather from the representatives of global
civil society who drafted alternative NGO
treaties presenting a people’s vision of a just, sustainable, and
democratic human future. Rio+20 appears destined to repeat that pattern, with
citizen groups already working on People’s
Sustainability Treaties that align with the Original Instructions and give
voice to the vision and values of the rest of us. Hopefully, the resulting
contrast between the corporate and people’s visions of the human future—one
grounded in the contemporary Western worldview and the other in the traditional indigenous worldview—may help us all see more clearly the choice between the two
paths of the Ojibwe prophecy.
Competing Worldviews
Those indigenous people who maintain their cultural
identity view the world through a very different lens than do those of us who
view the world through a Western cultural lens. The implications of the difference
are profound.
The summaries below represent my understanding of
the contrasting Western and indigenous worldviews regarding our perception of time,
relationships, and place. The Western lens leads further down the scorched
Earth path we are currently on. The indigenous lens leads to the path to a
viable and prosperous human future. For clarity, I’ve intentionally emphasized
the differences.
Contemporary
Western Worldview
- Time: Time
is money and plays out in an exponential unidirectional growth in financial
assets, consumption, and the market value of economic activity. Decision-making
properly gives priority to maximizing financial gain to grow the economic pie
and thereby improve the lives of all. Indices like Gross Domestic Product that
assess economic performance based on the rate of flow of money through the
economy and stock price indices like the Dow Jones average that track the value
of financial assets are natural and logical metrics for assessing economic
performance.
- Relationships:
Individual liberty and economic efficiency are paramount and are maximized by
basing human relationships on financial exchanges in which each individual
seeks to maximize his or her individual financial gain. This in turn maximizes
the general well-being and improves the lives of all. Nature exists for the
benefit of humans, who rightfully control and dominate it.
- Place:
Earth is a resource to be owned, valued by the price it will fetch in the
marketplace, and exploited for maximum financial return. Our individual
identity is defined by the brands we consume. Our individual worth is
determined by the price we command in the marketplace and our accumulated
financial assets. We maximize our personal economic efficiency by minimizing our individual connection and
commitment to any place, person, or community and maximizing our readiness to move on when presented with greater
financial opportunity elsewhere. Property rights are properly treated as
individual, total, and freely tradable if the price is right.
The affirmation and celebration of extreme
individualism, instant self-gratification, and alienation from one another and nature
characteristic of the contemporary Western worldview resonates with the
primitive core of the human brain, commonly known as the reptilian brain. This is
the site of our most basic, individualistic, and predatory hide, fight, or
flight survival instincts unmediated by the more highly evolved mammalian brain
that is the source of our human capacity for compassion and bonding and the neocortical
brain where our distinctive human capacity for self-awareness and reason
resides.
Suppressing our capacity for reason, we raise the
pursuit of money to the status of a sacred mission, failing to notice that money
is nothing but a number of no intrinsic value and that we are destroying
the real wealth of people, community, and nature to grow the numbers on
financial asset statements.
The traditional indigenous worldview presents a very
different, what we might call a whole brain, perspective on ourselves and our
relationship to nature.
Traditional Indigenous
Worldview
- Time:
Time is life and is experienced through the rhythms of life’s daily, seasonal,
and generational circular flow. As humans we must be ever mindful of our
responsibility to meet our own needs in ways that assure life’s continued
healthful flow and balance now and for generations to come. The Gross National Happiness Index developed by the nation of Bhutan appropriately assesses
economic performance based on indicators of the health and well-being of people
living in harmonious balance with one another and nature.
- Relationships:
All beings are related and interconnected. It is our individual human duty to
recognize and honor the rights of all beings, including the river, the rock,
and the glacier. Mother Earth provides our means of living. Her bounty is a
gift that we received in common and must share, respect and care for in common.
None among us created that bounty and no one has a right to claim it for their
exclusive personal benefit. We are entitled only to take what we need and bear
a sacred responsibility to give back or share the rest—all the while respecting
the natural balance of creation and the Original Instructions that constitute a
higher law to which all human laws are inherently subordinate.
- Place: Earth is our sacred mother. Each
being has intrinsic value and its rightful place within an interconnected
whole. Our personal and collective connection to our place on Earth is sacred
and inalienable. Individual human identity is linked to and defined by a deep
and enduring relationship to our place and to the vocation through which we
sustain ourselves and fulfill our responsibility to and for the community that
in turn sustains us.
There is good reason why the
wisdom at the heart of the traditional indigenous worldview strikes a deep and
appealing chord in the human psyche. Modern science is now telling us what
indigenous wisdom keepers have known and taught across countless generations.
We humans evolved over millions of years to live and prosper in community with
one another and nature. Our happiness and sense of well-being depend in
substantial measure on our connection to nature and a caring community. Science
now acknowledges that the Original Instructions are, in effect, genetically
encoded into the more highly evolved mammalian and human centers of our brain.
What we of the Western worldview embrace as progress
is best understood from an evolutionary perspective as a regression to a more
primitive state of awareness. Our Western separation from nature—from life—has
allowed us to greatly deepen human understanding of the inner mechanics of
life. It has, however, alienated us from our understanding of life’s purpose;
life’s capacity for non-mechanical self-direction, adaptation, and resilience;
and what is truly sacred. We are just beginning to wake up to the
self-deflating truth that to find our way to the path of the new green future,
we must turn for guidance to the indigenous keepers of the original instructions
who have survived the brutally invasive cultural and institutional forces of
Westernization.
The New Green Path
Consistent with the Ojibwe prophecy, a reawakening to
our true human nature is sweeping through both indigenous and nonindigenous
societies. For millennia, the wisdom keepers of indigenous societies kept alive
the deep wisdom of their traditional indigenous worldview and passed down their
understanding of the Original Instructions from generation to generation to be
available to us all at this time of prophetic choice.
This does not suggest a return to the traditional
predominantly hunter-gatherer indigenous ways of living and organizing. That is
not an option. Quite apart from personal life-style preferences, traditional
indigenous institutions and technologies that served well in simpler times,
will not meet the needs of a globally interconnected population of 7 billion
people in a resource constrained world.
To find our way on the new green path of the Ojibwe
prophecy, we need a worldview that builds on a foundation of indigenous wisdom,
while selectively updating and adapting it to the realities of a densely
populated world and the need for selective and responsible application of
appropriately-adapted modern technologies and institutional forms. The result
might be something like this:
- Time: We will
recognize that time is life and is experienced both through the spiral of
life’s circular flow and the trajectory of its evolutionary unfolding across
generations toward ever greater capacity and possibility. We will honor life,
not money, as the proper standard of value, understand that individual worth is
inherent in the gift of life, and accept as a sacred duty our responsibility to
assure life’s continued healthful flow and balance now and for generations to
come. We will evaluate the performance of our economies by
indicators of life’s health and vitality.
- Relationships: We will
recognize that individual rights and responsibilities are inseparably linked
and will rediscover and renew our deep sense of connection to one another and
Earth based on mutual caring and sharing.
- Place: We will
recognize that the biosphere is our natural mutual heritage, the foundation of
life, and beyond price. We will discover that identity based on place and
community has greater meaning and is more satisfying than identity based on
personal financial assets and the brands we consume. We will acknowledge that
we receive the gifts of nature in common and that nature’s bounty is best managed
by the peoples of place-based communities who have a natural interest in
assuring the continuous flow of this bounty from generation to generation with
no loss in the vitality, productivity, and resilience of Earth’s natural
systems.
Our deliberations at Pocantico focused on the efforts
of indigenous peoples to forge new economies within their territories based on
the wisdom of the Original Instructions. Their efforts can be an essential
source of inspiration and instruction for those of us long separated from our
indigenous roots and the wisdom of the indigenous worldview. For indigenous
people to serve this role to the greater benefit of us all, it is essential
that we of the world’s nonindigenous societies honor their right to hold and
manage their lands and resources consistent with their traditional teachings
and practices. Therefore, we must stand beside our indigenous brothers and
sisters in their struggle to prevent outside interests from gaining control of
what remains of their lands and resources.
More broadly, we must reject any proposal that supports
the further commodification and financialization of nature and call on the United Nations to initiate the drafting of a new framework that begins with a recognition that life is the foundation and proper measure of value, nature is sacred and not for sale, and stable place-based communities are the natural and proper stewards of Earth's natural bounty.
Together
we can choose the prophesied new green path to a secure and prosperous living
future for ourselves and for all the world’s children for all the many
generations to come.
David Korten is the co-founder and board chair of YES! Magazine, the author of Agenda for a New Economy, the
Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community, and the international best
seller When Corporations Rule the World. He is
co-chair of the New Economy
Working Group, a founding board member of
the Business Alliance for Local Living
Economies, president of the Living
Economies Forum, and a member of The
Club of Rome.
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