Strangely Like Gulag

By Suprabha Seshan / Journal of the Krishnamurti Schools

A slightly different version of this piece first appeared in Local Futures: Economics of Happiness.  Thanks to all for their permission and assistance in republishing.

We were not meant for this. We were meant to live and love and play and work and even hate more simply and directly. It is only through outrageous violence that we come to see this absurdity as normal, or to not see it at all. Each new child has his eyes torn out so he will not see, his ears removed so he will not hear, his tongue ripped out so he will not speak, his mind juiced so he will not think, and his nerves scraped so he will not feel. Then he is released into a world broken into two: others like himself, and those to be used. He will never realize that he still has all his senses, if only he will use them. If you mention to him that he still has ears, he will not hear you. If he hears, he will not think. Perhaps most dangerously of all, if he thinks he will not feel. And so on, again.

–Derrick Jensen, The Culture of Make Believe

Every morning between 8:00 and 9:00 am in this upwardly-mobile-yet backward district, the country-roads are full of children commuting to school, hoisting bags laden with what they believe is the wisdom and know-how of modern culture. They are going for vidyabhyaasam (education, or more literally speaking, ‘the exercise of knowledge’), and they go to the keepers of this knowledge, to teachers in schools. Everyone (parents, children, the state and society) deems this to be good and necessary.

For many years, I’ve been observing more and more of my rural and tribal neighbours pack their children off to school. While I’ve long been a champion of equal opportunities (including equal wages), I’m now starting to believe that a dark and dangerous psychic predicament is falling upon this land, in part aided by the simultaneous entry of television into village homes, and a slew of fickle government policies, in the bid for progress, modernity and the end of poverty.

I’ve been observing how self-reliance and land-based sustenance have been, more or less, replaced by a mobile populace commuting daily in the hope of finding skills, knowledge, support, wisdom and security elsewhere. I believe that the notion that the ‘other is better’ than self and home, that this ‘other’ can be acquired through hard work, enterprise, subsidies and bank loans which constitute progress, that everyone is now entitled to this ‘other’, is here in our midst.

Since mental and social strife are also increasing (in the form of various disorders and illnesses), perhaps this version of modernity, underneath all the glitter and promise, needs some examination. Is it for instance, instilling aspirations that can never be truly fulfilled? Is it exchanging one type of poverty for another? What happens to family and community relations once the young leave? Where do these children go on to, once schooled?

The subsidiary thesis of this essay is that modern education serves a version of Gulag, by forcing our young to suffer unspeakable conditions at an early age, by compelling them to do school work and home work for a greater part of their day. By sustaining this over long periods, at the most crucial time in their vulnerable years, it breaks them, to refashion them into a pliable workforce. By the end of schooling, the young are yoked, through fear and the promise of salvation if they succeed. If they fail, as indeed most do, they are consigned to lesser destinies. This arduous entrainment, under enforced routine and vigilance, is essential for the great global workplace, and can only happen with various forms of rewards, promises, threats, violence and incarceration.

Incarceration (both voluntary and involuntary), when sustained and normalized, leads to a range of issues—shutdown, frustration, disorder, escape, split psychologies, helplessness, dissociation, physical ailments and phobias. These can be seen amongst children, prisoners, slaves, caged and beaten animals, controlled peoples.

The primary thesis of this essay is that the psychic predicament just outlined goes hand in hand with the destruction of life, with the catastrophic end of the biosphere.

I am the resident environmental educator of the Gurukula Botanical Sanctuary, a tiny conservation centre in a rural setting at the edge of a forest in Kerala. My work is to enable educational processes ranging from the short-term single encounter to entire curricula based on nature. While my friends and I teach mainly about plants and animals and the tropical forest environment, our mission is to grow a culture based on nature. We believe this to be of paramount importance in the coming decades—to create places of resilience, where plants, animals and humans have a chance of surviving the ecological holocaust that is upon us all.

Image: the blooming of the Titan Arum, the world’s largest unbranched inflorescence, more than 3 meters in height. Ananda Banerjee, Live Mint

Image: the blooming of the Titan Arum, the world’s largest unbranched inflorescence, more than 3 meters in height. Ananda Banerjee, Live Mint

A DIY manual for starting schools in a new land might read:

First persuade, seduce, bribe or devastate the people. Break up their society, their beliefs, and their ways of life. Take over their rivers, and their forest. Do this by hook or crook. Or use plain force, no pretence. Convince them that it’s for their own good; even better, work on the young. Instil the idea that you have something supremely better to offer.

Draw them into the concrete jungle, into the cyber machine, into the factorial workplace, into the idea of the good life in the shining city. At all times control their food and water; this instills fear and compliance. Then, sever their allegiance to their bodies and psyches; hook them to the machine.

Be the mighty provider.

Evicted populations, trans-located communities, weakened land-based cultures, migrant workforces need to be dealt with; they need to be fed, watered, educated, employed, treated, housed and kept docile with entertainment. You have them when you’ve sold them the idea of choice while you’ve closed all the exit points, and they eat what you supply. Enter a new species of human bred on petroleum-driven food, petroleum-driven water, petroleum-driven health, petroleum-driven culture, petroleum-driven mind. The trademark of this taxon? Supreme entitlement.

Little bodies I’ve known, bodies tumbling, climbing, swimming, running, now sit still for long hours, with book/notebook/pencil in hand, in thrall, if not of the authority at the far end of the classroom, then of their fantasies. Little minds I’ve known, curious, aware, sensitive, attuned to the lives of creatures, rivers, land and each other thrown into the maw of the global machine, to be carried away to faraway lands and cities.

The word teacher comes with hefty lessons. The young are given thoughts, ideas and behaviours to follow or imitate, and to believe without question, to accept without dispute, and to ignore the call of their own bodies. By the end of schooling students take the following to be truths—everything comes with a price tag; it’s possible to have an economy without an ecology; the earth is irrelevant; other humans are irrelevant; life is a matter of goods, gadgets, cash transactions and services.

It’s a rare teacher who hugs a child, a rare school where children spend more time playing than sitting at desks; a rare home, and a rare community that does not send its children away to the cold vigilant ‘care’ of ever-distant adults of varying backgrounds and temperaments, teaching ever-distant things, for the sake of progress and human betterment.

This sending away, for many children, experienced variously as severance, uprooting or exile, is done with good intention, and full conviction. Indeed, the state of most homes, and most communities, is pretty bleak. Adults send their young ones away, to be saved mostly from themselves, from lives of mental, social or physical penury.

At school the attention-commanding teacher spawns inevitably a secret second life for the child, open eyes with still bodies, and minds ranging far and free. ‘The split’ that is now widely recognized to be at the root of social dysfunction and psychopathy is spawned by authority, in other words fear, and mostly in school. Forced bodies, forced behaviours and forced thoughts. Deviance is the only way out.

The Left, the fringe, the rebels and the spiritually-minded have clearly outlined how schools breed factory workers, zombies and psychopaths. I’d like to propose that schooling is necessary for building a hierarchy of egos by destroying the individual’s inherence in community through an insidiously brutal system of reward and punishment normalised in the name of education and social advancement. This hierarchy of egos, with an elite at the top commanding much of the world’s wealth and people, is essential to genocide and ecocide.

Today, I’m on a journey with a friend of mine, a Kurchiya tribesman. We’ve just come out of a forest to a town bursting with tourist operations, shops selling trinkets, hippie clothing, foods and multinational beverages. A protest march is spilling onto the streets. I look back towards the jungle, with its thousands of species of living beings, its hills, rivers, valleys, and rain clouds swirling, upswelling. Then my gaze cursorily moves over a famous quote painted on a compound wall, ‘Education is the most powerful weapon with which you can change the world’.

My first thought is that different realities can be juxtaposed in one eye sweep. Second, obviously Mandela was not a pacifist. Third, there’s a premise here, that education is a positive thing, and that there is a shared definition of education. Fourth, Hmmm, that sounds like propaganda, it’s a statement aiming to change the world. Fifth, if the word weapon is being used, surely there’s a war going on, or theft, injustice, or unspeakable violence, and that education is part of militant struggle. My sixth thought is that that quote is now used by liberals, right-wingers, leftists, corporate-types and has over two million hits on Google! Just goes to show how great quotes can be co-opted to serve any agenda!

Are the following true or false, or just inconvenient?

Modern education serves the corporate mindset, which serves a psychopathic mind-set that is behind planetary destruction.

Modern education feeds young minds and bodies into the industrial machine. It does this, overtly or covertly, by destroying traditional forms of community and replacing them with notions of the global workforce, the global market. By doing this it ends up serving forces of capitalism, industrialism, and a system that rewards the elite.

Increasingly, modern education is predicated on authoritarian expertise, as well as what Lewis Mumford called authoritarian technics. These are indispensable to the dominant culture.

Modern education fetishizes abstraction. It rewards adepts of abstraction and standardization. By starting this early in life, the body becomes subservient to concept and clock, to the virtual, the distant and the measurable.

The standards set by modern education are impossible to achieve for a greater part of humanity. These are set by the dominant culture against its own people, let alone other cultures and traditions, and require a failure system, thereby providing the labour for industry. In other words, modern schooling fractures the individual in a number of irreparable ways, in the name of progress and human betterment.

The fractures are complex, and many: the child from sustained intimate body contact with mother, with family, and from neighbours; the child’s mind from it’s body, from the natural environment, common/community sense, the land-base; the real from the abstract; from the multi-dimensional, to the two, and the virtual; from local history to the distant and someone else’s future or past (presented as if it’s ‘ours’); the child from the organic; the child from wholeness, towards a fragmentedness (to a state of continual defensiveness); the child from magic, oral histories, gleaming cosmologies, peopled and alive to facts derived by unknown people and machines; the child from living beings to inanimate things; the child from rootedness and sense of place; the child from natural, cyclical, expansive time.

Through the process of indoctrination, enculturation, socialisation and a belief that the children are tabula rasa, and need to be filled, a splitting is achieved in a slow and deliberate way.

Life is thus reduced to a matter of negotiating between split worlds, split mind-bodies, split communities, split realities, split values, split responsibilities, split knowledge domains, split geographies (this is home, that is school), split identities, split loyalties.

How can a little human being possibly tolerate this?

R D Laing wrote:

In order to rationalize our industrial-military complex, we have to destroy our capacity to see clearly any more what is in front of, and to imagine what is beyond, our noses. Long before a thermonuclear war can come about, we have had to lay waste to our own sanity. We begin with the children. It is imperative to catch them in time. Without the most thorough and rapid brainwashing their dirty minds would see through our dirty tricks. Children are not yet fools, but we shall turn them into imbeciles like ourselves, with high IQs, if possible.

Is it a stretch of imagination that school life is a continuous process of disintegration and estrangement? By the end of formative education, study after study guarantees that few remain with healthy levels of self-esteem and self-worth, including the ones who worked hard, and proved to themselves that they could achieve their goals and desires. How many students leave school with vibrant connections to communities that they will contribute to, as it has contributed to them? How many are comfortable in their skins? How many remain ‘whole’? The subtext for graduates of schooling goes thus—her body is better than mine, their body type is better than our body type; his mind is better than mine; their minds are better than ours. Their culture is better than mine—television says it’s so.

My friend, a superlative tracker, now raises his children on a diet of Animal Planet and Discovery channels, homework, white rice, white sugar. No jungle meat, no walks on the wild side. I ask him if he intends to teach his jungle craft to his children, for what use would it be if they can’t hunt anymore, if there are bans on collecting wild medicinal plants. He says he will, that he wants his children to know healing with plants, and the ways of animals, but that he also wants them to go to school. Vidyabhyaasam is a good and necessary thing, he too declares. I ask him about Kurchiya vidyabhyaasam. He misunderstands me and says they have no schools. I ask him how they teach their young. He replies that girls and boys are socialized to become responsible members of their community, with different sets of instructions for either sex, offered by elders in the community or their parents, through a variety of rituals, celebrations, guidance and tasks. Children start early to follow adults. Boys, for instance, have bows made for them when they are very small, just to play with, and then they start accompanying the men to the forest, where there is a lot to learn about every animal, and about the forest.

I figured out today that at any given moment in this decade, approximately two billion humans are at school- (and university-) going age. Whether they receive an education or not, that’s two billion human bodies in preparation for industrial capitalism’s greatest venture—converting the living body of the planet into profit through manufacturing goods and services.

The math itself is not hard, it’s far from cognitively challenging. Assuming that most of them get to the tenth standard, at any given point in time 200 million are either graduating or failing to graduate. Those failing to graduate will end up in factories, slums, the streets, the military, and of course detention facilities.

Those graduating will go on to higher education. Assuming that 10 per cent go on for higher education, twenty million are in universities. After three years of college, approximately seven million graduate or fail to graduate. Those failing to graduate go to factories. Those graduating go on for PhDs, and most of them will serve the corporate research agenda. It is guaranteed that all will serve the dominant culture in one way or another; all will serve the industrial production system. As will my Kurchiya friend’s children, assuming that the world’s still here when they reach adulthood.

Pink Floyd asked “Did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?” in the song Wish You Were Here (1975).

The Kurchiyas were mercenaries in the battle of a Malabar chieftain against the British colonizers. They were fierce rebels and proud fighters. They could read the forest better than you and I can read a book. Now they work for wages, and their children go to school. Once they’ve been educated and urbanised, their bows will be mass-produced for tourist outlets; their elders will recount tales of valour to travellers in homestays, between television commercials; and their amazing bodies will succumb to various forms of civilization-induced diseases like diabetes, hypertension and cancer.

An oft-touted development mandate goes something like this, ‘Get the children in school, the crime rates will drop’. The more I see the effects of modern civilization the more I think, “Get those children in school, make them extensions of the machine, and sure, the living world, the real world, including themselves, will drop.”

Krishnamurti writes in Education and the Significance of Life:

Where there is love there is instantaneous communion with the other, on the same level and at the same time. It is because we ourselves are so dry, empty and without love that we have allowed governments and systems to take over the education of our children and the direction of our lives; but governments want efficient technicians, not human beings, because human beings become dangerous to governments and to organized religions as well. That is why governments and religious organizations seek to control education.

A little more on Gulag, used here metaphorically to lift a veil of denial of a cruel and inhuman system of oppression under our very noses, one that most of us have been through, and even subscribe to. People survived Gulags, the official acronym of the Soviet penitentiary system, one intended to punish, or re-educate criminals, psychopaths, and tens of millions of political dissidents, a system that was promoted as a progressive and educational service to the state, through enforced labour. The conditions were brutal, saturated with death and deprivation, and more than a million died. Likewise, our schools are mostly brutal, saturated with fear, where billions of souls die in their hearts and minds, hardly the stuff of human betterment and progress. How many of us survive our schooling?

Coincidentally, as I do my final edits on this piece, a friend of mine shares an Occupy Wall Street protest movement poster on Facebook that reads:

Feeling sad and depressed? Are you worried? Anxious about the future? Feeling isolated and alone? You might be suffering from CAPITALISM. Symptoms may include homelessness, unemployment, poverty, hunger, feelings of powerlessness, fear, apathy, boredom, cultural decay, loss of identity, selfconsciousness, loss of free speech, incarceration, suicidal or revolutionary thoughts, death.

Krishnamurti also says, “It is no measure of health to be adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”

And what a sick society it is leading to planetary collapse largely through the toxic end-effects of industrial civilization; a society that accepts systemic violence, overt and covert, threatening to destroy human societies and all of nature. What will it take to bring about a sane society in a world run by supremacists? Do current educational practices not serve this dangerous state of affairs? Can education, instead, bring about a new culture? More crucially, is there time left for a different education? How can the young, and the wild, survive this toxic era? In the face of collapse, can different kind of education bring about a new culture, one that is not based on hatred, domination and control (of humans and the environment)? Who is going to do it?

I encounter the dream, materialized, every time I enter Bangalore, through the ever-sprawling new towns of Nagarabhavi, Kengeri and Bidadi. Houses upon houses, tiny cement buildings, endless traffic lines of shiny new cars, smoking rubbish heaps, malls, the gargantuan nevercompleted flyovers. I join the millions who throng the city, where not so long ago, hills and streams and farmland used to be. Little children play cricket on the melting tarmac, pi dogs frolic in the filth, potholes grow treacherous; and the air is thicker, more toxic.

Being a biophiliac, however, I am drawn to bodies, living beings. I see the force of life surging through every attempt to cage, poison or smother it. Something wild and true surviving despite the worst nightmare it finds itself in. A thing that has never known a forest, and does not seek it, and yet is still wild, this play of nature through human bodies, in these creatures of the earth, these children playing cricket, these men and women going about their daily lives, these lungs breathing, these hearts beating. Now seeking a tap, now a bottled drink, a mobile phone, a slightly larger house, more paint on the walls, a uniform, a school bag full of books; an education. Salvation. All in order to find happiness, joy, fulfilment, security. This wild thing mistakenly identifies the source of its life to be the machine, a sleight-of-hand trick achieved through decades of relentless and systematic misdirection.

I place my hope on the fact that tricks can be undone. Like the last remaining wild places on the planet, surely at the core of every being is a fierce and deep awareness of what it’s like to be free.

Suprabha Seshan lives at the Gurukula Botanical Sanctuary, a small plant conservation centre, at the edge of a forest in the hills of Kerala, India. She is an environmental educator and restoration ecologist, an Ashoka Fellow, and winner of the 2006 Whitley Fund for Nature award.

Definition of Civilization

Definition of Civilization

Aric McBay
Originally published at inthewake.org

When some people hear that we want to “end civilization” they initially respond negatively, because of their positive associations with the word “civilization.” This piece is an attempt to clarify, define and describe what I mean by “civilization.”

One dictionary definition1 reads:

civilization

  1. a society in an advanced state of social development (eg, with complex legal and political and religious organizations); “the people slowly progressed from barbarism to civilization” [syn: civilisation]
  2. the social process whereby societies achieve civilization [syn: civilisation]
  3. a particular society at a particular time and place; “early Mayan civilization” [syn: culture, civilisation]
  4. the quality of excellence in thought and manners and taste; “a man of intellectual refinement”; “he is remembered for his generosity and civilization” [syn: refinement, civilisation]

The synonyms include “advancement,” “breeding,” “civility,” “cultivation,” “culture,” “development,” “edification,” “education,” “elevation,” “enlightenment,” “illumination,” “polish,” “progress,” and “refinement”. Of course. As Derrick Jensen asks, “can you imagine writers of dictionaries willingly classifying themselves as members of ‘a low, undeveloped, or backward state of human society’?”

In contrast, the antonyms of “civilization” include “barbarism,” “savagery,” “wilderness,” and “wildness.” These are the words that civilized people use to refer to those they view as being outside of civilization—in particular, indigenous peoples. “Barbarous,” as in “barbarian,” comes from a Greek word, meaning “non-Greek, foreign.” The word “savage” comes from the Latin “silvaticus” meaning “of the woods.” The origins seem harmless enough, but it’s very instructive to see how civilized people have used these words2:

barbarity

  1. The quality of being shockingly cruel and inhumane [syn: atrocity, atrociousness, barbarousness, heinousness]
  2. A brutal barbarous savage act [syn: brutality, barbarism, savagery]

savagery

  1. The quality or condition of being savage.
  2. An act of violent cruelty.
  3. Savage behavior or nature; barbarity.

These associations of cruelty with the uncivilized are, however, in glaring opposition to the historical record of interactions between civilized and indigenous peoples.

Let us take one of the most famous examples of “contact” between civilized and indigenous peoples. When Christopher Columbus first arrived in the “Americas” he noted that he was impressed by the indigenous peoples, writing in his journal that they had a “naked innocence … They are very gentle without knowing what evil is, without killing, without stealing.”

And so he decided “they will make excellent servants.”

In 1493, with the permission of the Spanish Crown, he appointed himself “viceroy and governor” of the Caribbean and the Americas. He installed himself on the island now divided between Haiti and the Dominican republic and began to systematically enslave and exterminate the indigenous population. (The Taino population of the island was not civilized, in contrast to the civilized Inca who the conquistadors also invaded in Central America.) Within three years he had managed to reduce the indigenous population from eight million to three million. By 1514 only 22,000 of the indigenous population remained, and after 1542 they were considered extinct.3

The tribute system, instituted by [Columbus] sometime in 1495, was a simple and brutal way of fulfilling the Spanish lust for gold while acknowledging the Spanish distaste for labor. Every Taino over the age of fourteen had to supply the rulers with a hawk’s bell of gold every three months (or, in gold-deficient areas, twenty-five pounds of spun cotton; those who did were given a token to wear around their necks as proof that they had made their payment; those did not were … “punished” – by having their hands cut off … and [being] left to bleed to death.4

More than 10,000 people were killed this way during Columbus’ time as governor. On countless occasions, these civilized invaders engaged in torture, rape, and massacres. The Spaniards

… made bets as to who would slit a man in two, or cut off his head at one blow; or they opened up his bowels. They tore the babes from their mother’s breast by their feet and dashed their heads against the rocks … They spitted the bodies of other babes, together with their mothers and all who were before them, on their swords.5

On another occasion:

A Spaniard … suddenly drew his sword. Then the whole hundred drew theirs and began to rip open the bellies, to cut and kill – men, women, children and old folk, all of whom were seated off guard and frightened … And within two credos, not a man of them there remains alive. The Spaniards enter the large house nearby, for this was happening at its door, and in the same way, with cuts and stabs, began to kill as many as were found there, so that a stream of blood was running, as if a number of cows had perished.6

This pattern of one-way, unprovoked, inexcusable cruelty and viciousness occurred in countless interactions between civilized and indigenous people through history.

wetiko

This phenomena is well-documented in excellent books including Ward Churchill’s A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present, Kirkpatrick Sale’s The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy, and Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West. Farley Mowat’s books, especially Walking on the Land, The Deer People, and The Desperate People document this as well with an emphasis on the northern and arctic regions of North America.

There is also good information in Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and Voices of a People’s History of the United States. Eduardo Galeando’s incredible Memory of Fire trilogy covers this topic as well, with an emphasis on Latin America (this epic trilogy reviews numerous related injustices and revolts). Jack D Forbes’ book Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism and Terrorism is highly recommended. You can also find information in Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, although I often disagree with the author’s premises and approach.

The same kind of attacks civilized people committed against indigenous peoples were also consistently perpetrated against non-human animal and plant species, who were wiped out (often deliberately) even when civilized people didn’t need them for food; simply as blood-sport. For further readings on this, check out great books like Farley Mowat’s extensive and crushing Sea of Slaughter, or Clive Ponting’s A Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations (which also examines precivilized history and European colonialism).

With this history of atrocity in mind, we should (if we haven’t already) cease using the propaganda definitions of civilized as “good” and uncivilized as “bad” and seek a more accurate and useful definition. Anthropologists and other thinkers have come up with a number of somewhat less biased definitions of civilization.

Nineteenth century English anthropologist E B Tylor defined civilization as life in cities that is organized by government and facilitated by scribes (which means the use of writing). In these societies, he noted, there is a resource “surplus”, which can be traded or taken (though war or exploitation) which allows for specialization in the cities.

Derrick Jensen, having recognized the serious flaws in the popular, dictionary definition of civilization, writes:

I would define a civilization much more precisely, and I believe more usefully, as a culture – that is, a complex of stories, institutions, and artifacts – that both leads to and emerges from the growth of cities (civilization, see civil: from civis, meaning citizen, from latin civitatis, meaning state or city), with cities being defined – so as to distinguish them from camps, villages, and so on – as people living more or less permanently in one place in densities high enough to require the routine importation of food and other necessities of life.

Jensen also observes that because cities need to import these necessities of life and to grow, they must also create systems for the perpetual centralization of resources, yielding “an increasing region of unsustainability surrounded by an increasingly exploited countryside.”

global-warming-information-kids

Contemporary anthropologist John H Bodley writes: “The principle function of civilization is to organize overlapping social networks of ideological, political, economic, and military power that differentially benefit privileged households.”7 In other words, in civilization institutions like churches, corporations and militaries exist and are used to funnel resources and power to the rulers and the elite.

The twentieth century historian and sociologist Lewis Mumford wrote one of my favourite and most cutting and succinct definitions of civilization. He uses the term civilization

… to denote the group of institutions that first took form under kingship. Its chief features, constant in varying proportions throughout history, are the centralization of political power, the separation of classes, the lifetime division of labor, the mechanization of production, the magnification of military power, the economic exploitation of the weak, and the universal introduction of slavery and forced labor for both industrial and military purposes.8

Taking various anthropological and historical definitions into account, we can come up with some common properties of civilizations (as opposed to indigenous groups).

  • People live in permanent settlements, and a significant number of them in cities.
  • The society depends on large-scale agriculture (which is needed to support dense, non-food-growing urban populations).
  • The society has rulers and some form of “aristocracy” with centralized political, economic, and military power, who exist by exploiting the mass of people.
  • The elite (and possibly others) use writing and numbers to keep track of commodities, the spoils of war, and so on.
  • There is slavery and forced labour either by the direct use of physical violence, or by economic coercion and violence (through which people are systematically deprived of choices outside the wage economy).
  • There are large armies and institutionalized warfare.
  • Production is mechanized, either through physical machines or the use of humans as though they were machines (this point will be expanded on in other writings here soon).
  • Large, complex institutions exist to mediate and control the behaviour of people, through as their learning and worldview (schools and churches), as well as their relationships with each other, with the unknown, and with the nature world (churches and organized religion).

Anthropologist Stanley Diamond recognized the common thread in all of these attributes when he wrote; “Civilization originates in conquest abroad and repression at home”.9

This common thread is control. Civilization is a culture of control. In civilizations, a small group of people controls a large group of people through the institutions of civilization. If they are beyond the frontier of that civilization, then that control will come in the form of armies and missionaries (be they religious or technical specialists). If the people to be controlled are inside of the cities, inside of civilization, then the control may come through domestic militaries (ie, police). However, it is likely cheaper and less overtly violent to condition of certain types of behaviour through religion, schools or media, and related means, than through the use of outright force (which requires a substantial investment in weapons, surveillance and labour).

That works very effectively in combination with economic and agricultural control. If you control the supply of food and other essentials of life, people have to do what you say or they die. People inside of cities inherently depend on food systems controlled by the rulers to survive, since the (commonly accepted) definition of a city is that the population is dense enough to require the importation of food.

For a higher degree of control, rulers have combined control of food and agriculture with conditioning that reinforces their supremacy. In the dominant, capitalist society, the rich control the supply of food and essentials, and the content of the media and the schools. The schools and workplaces act as a selection process: those who demonstrate their ability to cooperate with those in power by behaving properly and doing what they’re told at work and school have access to higher paying jobs involving less labour. Those who cannot or will not do what they’re told are excluded from easy access to food and essentials (by having access only to menial jobs), and must work very hard to survive, or become poor and/or homeless. People higher on this hierarchy are mostly spared the economic and physical violence imposed on those lower on the hierarchy. A highly rationalized system of exploitation like this helps to increase the efficiency of the system by reducing the chance of resistance or outright rebellion of the populace.

The media’s propaganda systems have most people convinced that this system is somehow “natural” or “necessary”—but of course, it is both completely artificial and a direct result of the actions of those in power (and the inactions of those who believe that they benefit from it, or are prevented from acting through violence or the threat of violence).

In contradiction to the idea that the dominant culture’s way of living is “natural,” human beings lived as small, ecological, participatory, equitable groups for more than 99% of human history. There are a number of excellent books and articles comparing indigenous societies to civilization:

  • Chellis Glendinning’s My Name is Chellis and I’m in Recovery from Western Civilization (Shambhala, 1994). You can read an excerpt of the chapter “A Lesson in Earth Civics.” She has also written several related books, including When Technology Wounds: The Human Consequences of Progress (Morrow, 1990).
  • Marshall Sahlin’s Stone Age Economics (Adline, 1972) is a detailed classic in that same vein. You can read his essay “The Original Affluent Society.”
  • Anthropologist Stanley Diamond’s book In Search of the Primitive: A Critique of Civilization (Transaction Publishers, 1987).
  • Richard Heinberg’s essay “The Primitivist Critique of Civilization.”

These sources show there were healthy, equitable and ecological communities in the past, and that they were the norm for countless generations. It is civilization that is monstrous and aberrant.

Living inside of the controlling environment of civilization is an inherently traumatic experience, although the degree of trauma varies with personal circumstance and the amounts of privilege different people have in society. Derrick Jensen makes this point very well in A Language Older than Words (Context Books, 2000), and Chellis Glendinning covers it as well in My name is Chellis.

Endnotes

1. Definition of “civilization” is from WordNet R 2.0, 2003, Princeton University

2. Definitions of “barbarity” and “savagery” are from The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition, 2000, Houghton Mifflin Company.

3. I owe many of the sources in this section to the research of Ward Churchill. The figure of eight million is from chapter six of Essays in Population History, Vol I by Sherburn F Cook and Woodrow Borah (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971). The figure of three million is from is from a survey at the time by Bartolome de Las Casas covered in J B Thatcher, Christopher Columbus, two volumes (New York: Putnam’s, 1903-1904) Vol 2, page 384 ff. They were considered extinct by the Spanish census at the time, which is summarized in Lewis Hanke’s The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America (Philapelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1947) page 200 ff.

4. Sale, Kirkpatrick. The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1990) page 155.

5. de Las Casas, Bartolome. The Spanish Colonie: Brevisima revacion (New York: University Microfilms Reprint, 1966).

6. de Las Casas, Bartolome. Historia de las Indias, Vol 3, (Mexico City: Fondo Cultura Economica, 1951) chapter 29.

7. Bodley, John H, Cultural Anthropology: Tribes, States and the Global System. Mayfield, Mountain View, California, 2000.

8. Mumford, Lewis. Technics and Human Development, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1966, page 186.

9. Diamond, Stanley, In Search of the Primitive: A Critique of Civilization, Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, 1993, page 1.

Photo by Henry Chen on Unsplash

Northern Nicaragua Coast Crisis

By  / Intercontinental Cry

There is a crisis erupting in Nicaragua’s North Caribbean Autonomous Region that spans across all social and economic boundaries, affecting everything from human rights to ecosystem preservation to climate change. The Indigenous Miskitu and Mayagna Peoples, whose traditional cultural practices are inseparably linked to the environment and who exist at the forefront of imminent climate shifts capable of displacing entire communities, are under attack. The situation is one that world doesn’t  yet know about. It is incumbent upon all of us to change that–to do what we can to empower the Native Peoples of Nicaragua, and stop the destruction.

Settlers are attacking Indigenous communities with automatic firearms, killing, plundering and forcing residents to flee their ancestral lands. Foreign companies have entered the territory illegally and are burning  the region’s precious stronghold of biodiversity and natural resources at an alarmingly rapid rate.

Disturbing reports continually come to light of dozens of killings and kidnappings, particularly of Miskitu Indigenous men and women. Thousands of Indigenous refugees have been forced to flee their communities to the relative safety of more urban areas. With no support services intact to deal with the influx of refugees in the already strained resources of the urban regions, those fleeing the violence continue to suffer a lack of food and lack of medical attention upon arrival. The murderous ‘colonos’ operate with complete impunity. As a result, the attacks continue unrestrained by Nicaraguan law enforcement, contributing to a climate of escalation. There is a real and valid concern regarding the virtual media blackout, in both local and international spheres, where little to no reporting focuses on the critical situation unfolding.

Inhabitants of the Atlantic Coast, or Costeños as they are collectively known to the rest of Nicaragua, represent a unique diversity of ethnic groups including Indigenous Miskitu, Mayagna, and Rama, Garífuna (descended from African slaves and Carib Indians),  English-speaking Creoles (descendants of African slaves), and Mestizos (mixed race Latin Americans descended from European colonizers and Native peoples).

The region was deeply impacted – scarred even –  by the revolutionary war of the 1980’s, when US-backed counter-revolutionaries mounted attacks against the Sandinistas from military bases in Honduras, just across the Coco (Wangki) River.

In 1987, with the war raging, the Autonomy Statute for the Atlantic Coast was enacted and amended to the Nicaraguan Constitution. The new law recognized the multi-ethnic nature of the communities of the Atlantic coast; and in particular, noted Indigenous peoples’ rights to identity, culture and language. The new Autonomous Regions were divided between the North and the South.

In 2003 the Nicaraguan National Assembly finally passed the Communal Property Regime Law 445 and the Demarcation Law to address Indigenous concerns regarding land demarcation and natural resources after much pressure from international institutions.

Indigenous people have legal ownership to significant portions of their ancestral lands as assured by Nicaraguan law, in addition to the Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention 169 ratified by Nicaragua in 2010 and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People. Yet realities have differed from legalities. Although the Autonomy Agreement recognized collective land holdings, Indigenous people did not actually hold the legal title to their lands for a long time. In recent years, while Indigenous people have been waiting for formal title to be issued to their lands, false titles have been issued in Managua or elsewhere, selling land illegally to settlers from outside the region.  It is a sad reality that although Law 445 calls for the removal of illegal settlers from Indigenous lands, it is increasingly undeniable that the exact opposite has taken place.

Violent conflicts over Indigenous land rights have been increasingly erupting in the remote areas of the Northern Caribbean Autonomous Region.  Since September 2015, the Miskitu settlements of Wangki, Twi-Tasba Raya, and Li Aubra, have come under especially heavy attack. Reports indicate as many as 80 Miskitu men have been killed or kidnapped from these regions alone; while as many as 2,000 refugees fled their homes and communities in fear for their very lives. These particular villages have been hit especially hard by the violent conflict and, despite pleas for help at municipal and national levels, have received no measure of  protection or even investigation, much less prosecution.

Transnational lumber companies siphoning profits from the region’s natural resources have been operating out of nearby Honduras. They are carrying out sophisticated lumbering operations utilizing helicopters and cargo boats to facilitate the rapid export of extracted wood. Nicaragua  is home to the Bosawas Biosphere Reserve, one of the largest tropical rainforests in the Americas, second only to the Amazon. The world can no longer stand by while this stronghold of biodiversity and climate-stabilizing carbon-mitigating forest is sacrificed to next quarter’s profits.

Pleas for help have seemed to fall on deaf ears in the capital city of Managua. The Nicaraguan government has not officially acknowledged any of the most recent and most egregious killings, illegal land occupation or deforestation issues. The socialist central government has not offered any plan for addressing this escalating humanitarian crisis, for providing any gestures of protection to the Indigenous communities under attack nor assistance to the refugees. Many Indigenous to the region cannot help but suspect that human rights violations and land rights violations may be happening with the silent consent of the central Nicaraguan government.

While much attention has been given to the Nicaraguan government’s sale of a concession to a Chinese investment firm for an ill-conceived canal to run through the Southern Caribbean Autonomous Region, virtually no media attention has focused on the current urgent crisis in the Northern Region.

Thousands of illegal settlers have clear cut precious rainforest – indifferent to immediate or long term impacts – and have begun to establish cattle ranches and lumber operations that are completely inappropriate to the ecology of the region. The environmental impact mirrors the destructive patterns playing out in the Amazon Basin.

The Bosawas Biosphere Reserve is located in the North Caribbean Autonomous Region in an area historically occupied by Indigenous Mayagna and Miskitu people.  The reserve has been designated a UNESCO World Heritage site due to its unique ecological and biocultural significance. The negative impacts on this vulnerable area in particular have consequences not only for Nicaragua, but also for the whole planet. Tropical rainforests hold 50 percent more carbon than trees elsewhere. To this end, deforestation of tropical forests actually causes much more carbon to be released. The problems associated with illegal human migration to the region and its effect on the natural ecology and rates of deforestation are grave, with worldwide ecological consequences.

Although there are differences among settler groups, what they have in common is an environmentally destructive cultural mentality. It is not a coincidence that the settler groups who have inflicted the worst environmental destruction have simultaneously inflicted the worst violence against Indigenous Miskitu and Mayagna.

The critical cultural differences between the Native populations and the non-Indigenous settlers can result in vastly different outcomes for the natural environment. These key cultural differences include: property regimes, expansion patterns, agricultural practices and long-term economic strategies. Indigenous communities hold land in common, meaning that they have collective ownership of their territories. Mestizo settlers, on the other hand, exercise a private property model and parcel out land that they have settled and/or seized.

Significant differences in the use and care of livestock can have a major environmental impacts. On average, only 10 percent of Indigenous families have cattle, whereas mestizo settlers average one cow per family. The low cattle count among Indigenous families, along with their nucleated communities, means that cattle are kept within the limits of the village, along with other livestock like pigs. The Indigenous people of the region contain their animals within the perimeter of their communities, whereas crops are planted in wooded areas up to a two-hour radius from community centers.

When mestizo settlers move into the region they re-shape and redistribute the land with the driving purpose of raising cattle and in anticipation of obtaining even more cattle in the future. After clear-cutting invaluable rainforest land, they immediately begin sowing grass seed and other crops. Within one season, their crop fields are converted into more pasture land. Indigenous farmers, on the other hand, will cut back specific plots of rainforest but will only use these plots for a year or two. They then allow them to grow back and move on to another area to develop communal plots. This traditional Indigenous practice of land management allows the rain forest to regenerate and recover —  a sustainable method the Indigenous biostewards of the region have practiced for thousands of years.

On the other hand, mestizo settlers often cause irreversible damage to the rainforest. Settler occupations seem bent on developing as much pasture as possible. If they have the economic means, they raise more cattle and continually increase the herd size. If they do not have the means for raising cattle, they sell this land to settlers who do have cattle. This is the way in which mestizo settlers illegally appropriate traditional Indigenous territory and cash in on the destructive practices they inflict on it soon after. This type of land speculation and ‘economic development’ is almost nonexistent among Indigenous groups, and many view it as a direct challenge to their inherent values. Ironically, many mestizos use this conservative approach to concoct a false narrative that Indigenous people are lazy and undeserving of their vast quantities of land.

Even with growing populations, indigenous communities have a relatively low environmental impact compared to their mestizo non-Indigenous counterparts. The differences in environmental impact and lifestyles between Indigenous and mestizo communities put land tenure and environmental conservation in perspective.

Significant progress towards honoring Indigenous land rights must be a crucial component in the creation of a multi-stakeholder enforced strategy to protect the environmental integrity of the Autonomous Region of Northern Caribbean. It becomes especially critical when considering the overarching role tropical rainforests play in regulating the Earth’s climate.

The two factors of tropical deforestation and human-induced global warming are inextricably connected. There is a definite consensus in the scientific community that deforestation is one of the innate causes behind global warming. According to the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, “… Between 25 to 30 percent of the greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere each year —1.6 billion tons — are caused by deforestation.” Contributing to deforestation is by definition contributing to global warming.

It’s important to really drive home the compounding effects of the destruction of tropical rainforest: is it is even more damaging to the environment than destruction of other types of forest because of the unique ecology of rainforests. Compared to boreal forests, which are much more expansive, each square hectare of tropical rainforest holds nearly 50 percent more carbon.

The carbon within tropical rainforests is split pretty evenly between soils and flora. When tropical rainforests are clear-cut,massive amounts of carbon are released. Warmer temperatures cause soil to more rapidly decompose.

Tropical forests sequester more carbon because they grow year round and faster than other forest types. When protected and preserved, tropical rainforests are able to actually take in more carbon than they release into the atmosphere, critically reducing the adverse effects of  fossil fuel emissions. To put things in clear perspective, tropical rainforests produce 20 percent of the world’s oxygen and 30 percent of the world’s freshwater.

When tropical forestland is transformed into pasture and overused, it leads to a steady cycle of desertification. Rainforests hold together the soil and ensure that it is saturated with rich nutrients. Over time, cattle grazing on pasture land created by clear-cutting forest will quantifiably weaken the soil. Monsoon seasons that are prevalent in Eastern Nicaragua steadily wash away any topsoil that no longer has forests holding it together or nourishing it. Without trees this lower-level soil cannot adequately absorb water. This further leaves areas more susceptible to flooding and landslides. Manure, fertilizer and pesticide runoff are contaminating and acidifying nearby waterways, killing off flora and fauna that are critical to the integrity of intact forests. During the summer months, this lower-level soil bakes and cracks, slowly developing into desert.

Lest it seem the many and crucial challenges facing the Indigenous people of Nicaragua are insurmountable in the face of such great adversity, Native Miskitu and Mayagna continue to defy the odds and act as trailblazers. Their actions set a prime example of what can be accomplished, even with minimal resources.

Although many of the Native people of Nicaragua are not familiar with the Pan-Indigenous American movement known as Idle No More, their actions are living embodiments of the mantra. They have consistently and repeatedly sought assistance and protection from local and national authorities, yet their pleas for help have fallen on deaf ears. No meaningful action has been taken by any government authority. The problem of Indigenous land rights violations and removal of the settlers has been presented to the OAS (Organization of American States) and the IACHR (Inter-American Court of Human Rights). The issue has even been formally raised at the United Nations Permanent Forums on Indigenous peoples.

NGOs played a supportive role in pressuring the Nicaraguan government to institute necessary jurisprudence in protecting environment and Indigenous land rights; the problem is that the laws are not being respected or enforced. The government continues to ignore the laws both at the national and local level. Mounting anecdotal evidence points to the possibility of corrupt officials contributing to the problem, at virtually every level of government. Through their inexcusable silence and inaction in the face of the escalating crisis, government at all levels is complicit at least in actively undermining Indigenous Peoples’ rights to their legal territories.

This is an ongoing crisis in the Autonomous Region of Northern Caribbean Nicaragua. The Indigenous cultures of the region are inseparably linked to the natural environment. The legal protections for Native people and the rain forest are being flagrantly violated by increasingly violent mestizo colonists (‘colonos’). Government at all levels has proven ineffectual in the face of the crisis. There has been no media coverage of this crisis, the escalation of violence, or the plight of refugees fleeing the areas of conflict.

It’s also important for us to help stop the destruction of the tropical rainforest, which is critically important to all of us. Government inaction in the face of mounting numbers of refugees and killings is morally corrupt and warrants international outcry.

The Indigenous Miskitu and Mayagna are not passive victims, but they are facing a tremendous challenge to address a problem of this magnitude. They are in desperate need of assistance to overcome this crisis.

 

5 WAYS YOU CAN HELP

 

  • It is very important for international media outlets to focus on what is happening in this remote region. Spreading the word through social media will be key to applying international pressure to help the refugees and stop the killing of both the Indigenous people and the rainforest.
  • There is an equal need for conventional media coverage.  To that end, you can reach out to your favorite news outlet and encourage them to take on the story
  • Costa Rica, Mexico, and the U.S. government have issued travel bans to Nicaragua, nevertheless, there is a growing need for humanitarian aid and witnesses to document what’s happening on the ground.
  • If you want to support the Miskitu and Mayagna from home, consider organizing a community event or any kind of online action to make sure the world knows what’s happening.
  • You can also ask the Ortega government to do the right thing, by working with the Miskitu and Mayagna to secure their ancestral territory, addressing the ongoing land theft and responding to the brutal attacks that are being carried out at the hands of the Colonos.
Brazil: Indians’ homes bulldozed, community evicted

Brazil: Indians’ homes bulldozed, community evicted

Featured image: Guarani leader Damiana Cavanha after the eviction from Apy Ka’y.  © Aty Guasu

By Survival International

A video showing a tribal community’s homes being bulldozed, condemning families to live by the side of a major highway, has caused outrage in Brazil.

Almost 100 heavily-armed police officers evicted the Apy Ka’y Guarani community, whose ancestral lands have been destroyed for industrial-scale farming.

The Indians had been forced to live by the side of a highway for ten years, during which eight people were run over and killed, and another died from pesticide poisoning.

In 2013 the community re-occupied a small patch of their ancestral land. They have now been evicted from it again, after a judge granted the landowner’s request for an eviction order, despite having received appeals from the Guarani, from their allies in Brazil, and from thousands of Survival supporters around the world.

The Guarani of Apy Ka’y are now back on the side of the highway.

Another video shows armed police overseeing the eviction of the nine Guarani Kaiowá families. Tribal leader Damiana Cavanha is shown denouncing the eviction, insisting on her people’s right to defend their lives, protect their lands and determine their own futures.

Watch: Damiana denounces eviction

Around 100 federal and military police evicted the Apy Ka’y Guarani community, whose ancestral lands have been destroyed for industrial-scale farming.

Around 100 federal and military police evicted the Apy Ka’y Guarani community, whose ancestral lands have been destroyed for industrial-scale farming.  © Aty Guasu

She said: “We do not accept this. I will stay here, this is my right. We have our rights. It’s not only the white people that have rights, the Guarani Kaiowá and the indigenous peoples also have rights. So many of us have died, so many people have been killed by the gunmen… Let us stay here, we have our Tekoha [ancestral land] and I will return to my Tekoha.”

In June 2016, ranchers’ gunmen attacked another Guarani community at Tey’i Jusu. One man was killed and several others, including a twelve year old boy, severely injured.

Most of the Guarani’s land has been stolen from them. Brazil’s agri-business industry has been trying to keep tribal people away from their territories for decades. They subject them to genocidal violence and racism so they can steal their lands, resources and labor in the name of “progress” and “civilization.”

The situation facing the Guarani is one of the most urgent and horrific humanitarian crises of our time. In April 2016, Survival International launched its “Stop Brazil’s Genocide” campaign to draw the crisis to global attention in the run-up to the Rio 2016 Olympic Games.

Survival’s Director Stephen Corry said: “This is terrible news, and it is tragically all too typical of the appalling situation facing the Guarani in Brazil. We cannot sit idly by and watch the destruction of an entire people. If the Guarani’s legal right to live on their land is not respected and upheld, they will be destroyed.”

Decolonizing My Brown Body

By Terese Mailhot / Indian Country Today Media Network

My auntie says there’s a direct connection between violence against the earth and violence against Indigenous women. I think of my own brown body when she says this, and how it was damaged in childhood and adolescence. My memories feel stolen like the land, stripped like the languages, and entrapped like the bones of our ancestors in government storage.

I’ve spent the last year remembering abuse my father inflicted, and it’s been tough for my brothers, my sister, my babies, and my husband. I spent the morning asking my brother what he can remember, and piecing those fragments to my own. Still, there’s no clear image of the exact chaos my father created. One brother can remember the house turned upside down when he left, another can only remember it might be best to forget, and my loving sister can only say Dad was sadistic. I am unwilling to empathize with him, even though he was emasculated by the government as an Indian man, abused as a child, and institutionalized.

I used to think it was ethnocentric to say Natives didn’t experience abuse before colonialism. I’m on the fence about the topic, still, but I’m willing to make the conceit that sexuality wasn’t contextualized the way it is now as when my nation was thriving. Western construct, the bourgeoisie, and European culture invented the concepts of pedophilia and sexual abuse, so who’s to say that they didn’t also invent the acts. Whether Indigenous children or women experienced sexual violence before colonization is debatable, but I think the debate is sullied by Western thought and colonization, like so many things.

I feel like there’s a direct connection between the memories that feel stolen from me and the land Indigenous people grieve for. Within colonial log transcript, one will find that sexual violence pervaded Indigenous communities as a means to sublimate and de-humanize the people. How could the violence inflicted upon me be removed from this? It feels inherited. I’m not a soft-hearted woman who would say my father hurt women because someone hurt him, but I can say without question that I have been hurt by men because of the historical violence against Indigenous women. Just like the categorization of sexuality sprouted from Western thought, so did sexual violence as a means to colonize. Violence against Indigenous women is too common. The sexualization of Indigenous women is familiar to all North Americans. The “squaw,” and “savage,” imagery remains constant within our society. Colonization was successful in its ability to invite the degradation of our women. It’s practically promoted. One only has to observe the way Indigenous women go missing in Canada to see how prevalent the issue is.

I had panic attacks when I first started remembering. My bones felt immovable, and my eyes felt obscene in the light of day, and my body felt dirty. There’s a connection looming in my mind between the countless artifacts our government and museums have excavated from Indigenous lands and how much my memories feel locked away. The truth of my life, my memory, can’t be found within white institutions like hospitals. It can only be found beneath the iconography and stories of my culture. There’s a story that women where I’m from were given two items when they could speak: a club and a fishing weir. One item to protect, and another to provide. When the girl speaks with her items for the first time, she declares that she has a club and a weir, and asks the world which they want from her. Women where I’m from must protect themselves and provide for the community. After Indian boarding school, our communities stopped practicing the ceremony. Women were left clubless when the club was crucial. Through decolonization, the story has been excavated and a metaphorical club has been given to me.

I stand with my club, and carry the ability to nourish my children, my family, and my community. The connection for me is as irrefutable as my body, which can be broken, subject to discrimination, ignorance and judgment. The connection between my body and my land is one of the few things colonialism couldn’t take from me. As I journey towards reconciliation with my body, I feel like I am no longer invisible, and that I am taking up space within a continuum of historical erasure.

Terese Marie Mailhot is from Seabird Island Indian Band. Her work has been featured in The James Franco Review, The Offing, and Yellow Medicine Review. She’s a student at the Institute of American Indian Arts and she is a Discovery Fellowship recipient.

 

Investigating the Lake Turkana Wind Power Project

Investigating the Lake Turkana Wind Power Project

By Intercontinental Cry

Lake Turkana Wind Power is the largest private investment in Kenya’s history. Danish and international companies and investors have already sunk millions of euros into the project. But they now await a court decision that will determine whether the land on which the turbines will be built was illegally acquired.

Most communities in Lake Turkana approve of the wind power project, but there are claims from the Turkana, Samburu, Rendile and El Molo that the consortium behind the project failed to carry out consultations prior to acquiring land in 2007. The consortium, meanwhile, claims that 3 out of 4 tribes in the project are not Indigenous Peoples. The consortium also denies any wrongdoing, claiming that the plaintiffs in the ongoing court case do not represent the Turkana, Samburu, Rendile and El Molo.

The independent media and research center Danwatch recently visited Northern Kenya to get a closer look at the impacts of Kenya’s largest-ever private investment.

Read the entire Danwatch investigation here

Photo by John McArthur on Unsplash

Update:

Consumers are expected to draw the first electricity from the Turkana wind farm in December next year in a new forecast that could significantly cut energy prices for millions of households.

Lake Turkana Wind Power, the sponsor of the project that is Africa’s biggest wind farm, has announced that 20 megawatts of electricity will be tapped in less than 18 months.

The World Bank, for instance, pulled out its support of the project saying the projected output was too much for the economy to absorb. The Kenyan government, however, stepped in and guaranteed the project against exposure to political risks.

That would mean that the State would be obligated to pay the company for any unforeseen service disruptions presented by political disruptions. World Bank’s fears about excess capacity were informed by the possibility that consumers might pay a higher price per unit to service contractual repayments to the lenders if only a portion was taken up.

But now Wageningen, who was backed by the company Chairman Mugo Kibati, dispelled the fears, saying the risks were non-existent. Wageningen was speaking during a media breakfast meeting in Nairobi yesterday.

Fully mitigated

“All risks have been fully mitigated,” Mr Kibati said. A dozen financiers including the African Development Bank and foreign commercial banks are backing the project with a capital budget of 652 million euros. At that budget, the wind farm is Kenya’s single largest private sector-funded project. A total of 365 wind turbines will be installed over an area covering 40,000 acres in a remote part of Loyangalani District.