A little aside from the usual discussion of development, but I have been thinking quite a bit about a Ted talk. Richard Preston talks about the Redwoods of the pacific northwest. I have always held a fascination with those behemoth wooden monsters, and on a recent visit to the west coast, I even had the privilege of seeing some of them. What stood out for me about the talk was a piece about the East Coast Hemlock trees, which are a distant relative of the Redwood. Currently, the East Coast Hemlock's are being threatened with extinction by an invasive beetle. In some areas, the beetle has destroyed 90% of the population of Hemlocks.
What struck me as interesting was an earlier part of the Preston's talk, where he discussed how only 4% of the Redwood population still remains from just 50 years ago. Intensive logging and human contact have destroyed the majority of Redwood forests. Now, I was just thinking, if I was a beetle, reading this information for the first time, wouldn't I think that humans were the more invasive species?
What is worse is that humans have the ability to make a choice. We can decide whether or not to destroy or save a species. For the hemlock situation, we view the beetle as invasive and the hemlock as the victim. We feel obligated to help the hemlock, to rescue it from the threat of extinction. However, what if in the process of saving the hemlock population, we bring the threat of extinction to the beetle population. The situation is further complicated because most likely, humans were the ones who inadvertently introduced the beetle population into the eco-system!
In a sense, the battle between beetles and hemlocks is very similar to development work. In any given country, there are the powerful and powerless--the poor and the rich. Cultures around the world are threatened and face extinction. For example, the culture and knowledge of Ayurvedic medicine has faced near extinction at the hands of western medicine. Tibetan culture faces extinction at the hands of Han Chinese. When is it our role to choose who wins and who loses in these battles? Are there any real 'winners' or 'losers'?
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2 comments:
That, my friend, is a serious metaphor. Well played. Way to knock us off the trail in the beginning by saying that your post was not about development, and then way to pull the blindfold off with the analogy. Excellent.
What you wrote about humans having a choice is an interesting tangent.
Not long ago, I wrote about the "choice" aspect too, in relation to redwoods and logging. What I pointed out, was that thousands of people made the choice to purchase and expect the redwood lumber.
I referred to those people as the one ones who fueled the machine - the machine being the loggers and logging. So basically, the whole operation was funded by many of the rest of people in society. It was not just the loggers, but all of them put together.
Cheers,
MDV
Oregon
Largest and Tallest Coast Redwood Trees
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