Silence . . . and The End of Self-Sustaining Existence

Two Items from today's NY Times editorials:

The Times had an editorial today relating to yesterday's fascinating page 1 story about nearly 80 members of the Nukak hunter-gatherer tribe who walked out the jungle and "renounced their ancestral ways." It's unclear why they left -- perhaps the jungle had become less habitable because of coca farmers or marxist guerrillas. As the Times editorilized: "In one sense there has never been a better time for a people like the Nukak to leave the wild. They'll find medical care, sustenance and a genuine attempt at cultural respect that would have been impossible years ago. Yet the fact that they're leaving suggest how much their world -- and ours - has been impaired. . . .The Nukak have every right to make this decision for themselves. But it's hard to escape the feeling that their self sustaining existence -- which went almost entirely unnoticed by the rest of the world -- was holding something open for us, something that has now been lost." (See also a multi-media presentation of the story here.)

A separate editorial concerning former Times executive editor Abe Rosenthal who died this week quoted him: "When something is going on, silence is a lie."

Comments

[Stephen Filler]

There's lots of interesting stuff floating around the blogosphere about the Nukak and the NY Times article, including Evolution Shift's musings about the Times quote that one of the Nukak's said: “The future, what’s that?” http://www.evolutionshift.com/blog/2006/05/12/a-truly-great-question/

There can really be no doubt that the Nukak saw the future in the jungle and they knew it was bleak -- that's why people move. As the Times said, they left probably because of the encroachments of the rest of the world - the coca growers, the marxist guerillas.

As some of the last hunter gatherers disappear from the earth, we realize from this story a loss of self sufficiency and independence — not just for the Nukak, but for all of us. Our biosphere is shrinking, our people more interdependent — and the need, and therefore the opportunity, to work together to revitalize the planet, our jungle, have never been greater.