Summer 1996 - Issue Number 36
Over two decades, Helena Norberg-Hodge witnessed the onslaught of modernization on communities in Ladakh, an area in northern India on the Tibetan Plateau. In the following essay, she questions the inevitability of urbanization and other trends leading to a "monoculture"world, and proposes a radical change in direction.
WHEN I FIRST CAME TO LEH IN 1975, it was a lovely town. It had only two paved streets, and a motor vehicle was a rare sight. Cows were the most likely cause of congestion. The air was crystal clear, so clear that the snow peaks on the far side of the valley, 30 kilometres away, seemed close enough to touch. Five minutes' walk in every direction from the town centre were barley fields, dotted with large farmhouses. Though it was a district capital of 5,000 people, Leh had the feeling of a village; everyone knew and greeted each other.
For the last two decades I have watched this town turn into an urban sprawl. Soulless, cell-like "housing colonies" have eaten into the green fields and spread into the dusty desert, punctuated not by trees but by electricity poles. Flaking paint, rusting metal, broken glass and discarded plastic rubbish are now part of the scenery. Billboards advertise cigarettes and powdered milk.
For centuries, Leh was rooted in a sustainable economy. It was part of a virtually cashless society where everyone seemed to have enough--enough to eat, enough leisure time, beautiful possessions, abundant energy, a wealth of social connections and irrepressible joie de vivre. The Ladakhi were rich in skills that enabled them to live comfortably in a dry, fierce mountain landscape, to grow barley at 3,600 metres and manage yaks and other animals at even higher elevations. People knew how to build houses with their own hands from materials of their immediate surroundings. While some people made a living from trade with the outside world, most economic activity was based on local resources.
But the twin forces of Western-style development and globalization are transforming Leh into a centre with very different economic foundations. The building of a road connecting the town with the outside world has hooked Ladakh up to the global economy, with economic activity concentrated in the capital. All the elements of modem living have been introduced there: electricity, paid employment, government offices, the district's only gas station, hospital and movie theatre, the better schools, two banks, even a football stadium. Development in Ladakh, as elsewhere, has worked like a whirlpool, pulling people relentlessly into the centre. The population of Leh has more than doubled, and the rural population has diminished as young people move to the city in search of education and jobs.
In Leh these days, people produce almost nothing for themselves: food, clothing and building materials all have to be transported into town by a constant caravan of polluting trucks, in some cases from as far away as the South of India. Even water has to be trucked in, often at the expense of the surrounding countryside, where essential irrigation systems are being depleted.
The unrelenting sweep of modemization and globalization that is fueling the growth of cities and breaking down the core of rural communities in Ladakh is affecting cultures and communities everywhere. Demographic experts lead us to believe that nearly two-thirds of the world's population will be urban by the year 2025, as if it were some kind of natural evolutionary progression. Such assumptions are exceedingly dangerous, for they imply that it is a process completely beyond anyone's control.
Today's modern megalopolises remain largely unexamined and unquestioned, and are qualitatively distinct from what we know of past cities. What is too easily forgotten is that the majority of the world's people today, particularly in Asia and Africa, are still on the land. Ignoring them -- speaking as if people are urbanized as part of the human condition -- is a dangerous misconception, one that is helping to fuel the process of urbanization itself.
Before this occurs, we owe it to ourselves and to future generations to examine the forces that support globalization and urbanization -- in all their complexity -- and begin to shift our direction away from global dependence and toward stronger communities and local economies.
The trend toward centralizing resources in large urban areas is alarming for many reasons. First, the shift of economic and political power from rural areas has meant a concomitant loss of self-respect among rural populations. In small communities today, people are often living on the periphery, while power -- and even what we call "culture" -- is centralized somewhere else. The psychological damage of not being recognized, seen or valued for one's uniqueness is immense. And the few remaining cultures that have, over millennia, developed the traditional wisdom we need at this time of planetary crisis are dying quick deaths.
Second, urban centres around the world are extremely resource-intensive. The large-scale, centralized systems they require are almost always more stressful to the environment than small-scale, diversified, locally-adapted production. Food and water, building materials and energy must all be transported great distances via vast energy-consuming infrastructures; their concentrated wastes must be hauled away again in trucks and barges, or incinerated at great costs to the environment. In cities' identical glass and steel towers with windows that never open, even air to breath must be provided by fans and pumps, driven by nonrenewable energy. From the most affluent sections of Paris to the slums of Calcutta, urban populations depend on transport for their food, so that every kilogram consumed is accompanied by several kilograms of petroleum consumption, as well as significant amounts of pollution and waste.
While there is growing recognition of the destructive effects of economic globalization, the conviction that the solutions lie with localizing economic activity is far less widespread. In the North, where we have mostly been separated from the land and from each other, we have large steps to take.
The grassroots actions that are springing up around the world in reaction to globalization are inspiring: "buy-local" campaigns that help local businesses survive even when pitted against heavily subsidized corporate competitors; farmers' markets, which in New York City alone add several million dollars annually to the income of farmers in nearby counties; "eco-villages" that rely on renewable energy and are seeking to develop more cooperative local economies; and Local Exchange Trading Systems, where people who were once "unemployed" and therefore useless" are bartering services and becoming valued for their knowledge and skills.
Yet for these local initiatives to succeed on a wide scale, they need to be accompanied by a thorough rethinking of public spending and policy changes at the national and international levels. How, for example, can grassroots participatory democracy be strengthened unless limits return to a local context in education if monocultural media images continue to bombard children in every corner of the planet? How can efforts to promote the use of locally-available renewable energy resources compete against massive subsidies for huge dams and nuclear power plants?
The policy changes that would allow more community-based economies to flourish will certainly elicit objections. Some will claim that the promotion of decentralization is "social engineering" involving serious dislocations in the lives of many people. While it is true that some disruption would inevitably accompany a shift toward the whole societies are being swept up by these same forces and encouraged to abandon their languages, their foods and their architectural styles for a standardized monoculture.
Others will interpret financial incentives for more localized production as "subsidies". But these incentives should be seen as alternatives to current subsides for globalization -- for transportation, communications and energy infrastructures, and for education and research and development in the technologies of large-scale production. Moving in the direction of the local will actually cost less than what we are now spending to move towards the global.
These kinds of changes will inevitably require shifts at the personal level as well. They will mean challenging many of the assumptions about "progress" and "development" that many of us were brought up with and that are at the core of Western culture. They will also mean rediscovering the deep psychological benefits of being embedded in community. In the South, the majority of people still get their spiritual, cultural and economic strength from a connection to the place where they live. It is in this respect that the North can learn from the South. For ultimately we are talking about a spiritual awakening that comes from making a connection to other human beings and to the natural world.
For the last 21 years, Swedish linguist Helena Norberg-Hodge has spent half of each year in Ladakh, working with local people to protect their culture and environment from the effects of rapid modernization. For this work she was awarded the 1986 Right Livelihood Award, also known as the Alternative Nobel Prize. Ms. Hodge is the author of Ancient Futures: Learning From Ladakh (Sierra Club Books, 1992) and director of the Ladakh Project, which she founded in 1978, and its parent organization, the International Society for Ecology and Culture, in Bristol, UK.
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