Where will I plant my potatoes? Development and the power to decide

Abstract

“Development” all over the world has been thrust upon unwilling victims. In some cases, well-meaning researchers have tried to engage local owners in “participatory” projects where indigenous knowledge is invited to lead efforts to increase a reliable food supply and provide some of the benefits of a cash economy. Unfortunately, the clear assertions of local people, anthropologists, nongovernmental organizations, and common sense have rarely held out against the power of corporations. In this paper I look at examples, some that bring despair and others that give hope to people trying to maintain not only their identities but also their lives.

Keywords:

• indigenous knowledge
• sustainable development
• ecotourism
• mining
• power

Introduction

Most “development” projects are proposed, managed, and carried out by people who are in positions of power over local people who live in the area where “development” is proposed. It is widely known that development projects usually do not benefit the local people, who are still named by “developers” as the beneficiaries of these projects. In the world of indigenous peoples, who have long been the subject matter of anthropological research, most development has meant that powerful outsiders, “neocolonial” or even “colonial” powers, have come to an area still full of “natural resources” and “developed” them. Resources that have been the foundation of subsistence economies for hundreds or thousands of years and that are viewed as owned, in their undeveloped condition, by the local people who live there.

Central governments often give “developers” permission to negotiate compensation (or not) with local people for these resources, taking a percentage for themselves. “Developers” then begin to change the environment in which local people have survived, usually in three major ways: they extract things (minerals, forests, plants, animals, water); they leave the waste products of their work; or, sometimes, they build infrastructures for tourists to come and see the “unchanged” local environment and people. This has been called “ecotourism”, where part of the objective of the project is to conserve and preserve what is there; as the world becomes increasingly “developed”, some places and local inhabitants are sold and become like the occupants of “zoos” representing “the old days”. Sometimes local people benefit in some ways from these projects, through the genuine interest of outsiders in what they have created; but often they are exploited.

In this paper I consider case studies that manifest these differences, and also show that what matters in the decision-making process is not just what the anticipated outcome of local developments is, but who has the power to decide.

“Sustainability” is a term which has a history of changing meanings (Grober, 2010), and a current pragmatic usage by those who would reduce the damage to the environment and to all living things brought about by survival technologies. Sustainable development, when taken to its logical conclusion, is an oxymoron: sustainability (maintenance) and development (change) work in opposite directions. However, some “developments” also work to restore, conserve, preserve, and enhance, rather than to destroy. Because we see that indigenous peoples have lived in relatively stable subsistence conditions for much longer periods of time than industrial civilization has existed and structured our own societies, we think that indigenous peoples have learned things about their environments and their own living arrangements that we could usefully learn, to the benefit of future life on earth. That is the project in which we are here engaged.

Kuk site, Western Highlands, Papua New Guinea

The Kuk site is a case where a resource in Papua New Guinea, which is important to outsiders, is being developed as a destination for “ecotourists”. It is important because of its place in the history that anthropologists have reconstructed, largely based on archaeological evidence, over the past two centuries. Anthropologists have tended to think of hunting and gathering as a renewable and sustainable survival technique; but it was finally defeated, as other techniques have been, by its own success in permitting a growing population. This is the history of the Kuk site in Papua New Guinea, where evidence was found, in 1971, of the independent invention of horticulture in response to dwindling wild resources and a growing population.

Archaeologist Peter White (1972), and others, found sites in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea showing that it had been a settlement for 40,000 years, a date that has been generally confirmed by the thermoluminescence method (Allen, 1997, p. 23). About 9000 years ago, people who lived in the Western Highlands, where the Kawelke people now live, began to control Kuk swamp, and to plan the planting of the food they ate. This site, first identified in 1969 by Jim Allen (1970), has been excavated and investigated by Jack Golson and his students and colleagues (Golson, 1977, 1997). Golson (1997) tells us that the development of horticulture in the New Guinea Highlands was generated by the reduction of wild flora and fauna, and then by the degradation of soil and forest resources. More generally, Jim Allen (1997, p. 37) wrote that “the various strands of evidence suggest that humans in Melanesia during the Pleistocene had a small but significant impact on the natural distribution of plants and animals”.

People in the Western Highlands of New Guinea are people known to anthropologists for their neat, well-organized gardens; successful herding of pigs; massive and ritually regulated exchanges of resources; and, since the 1960s, for their successful mastery of the main cash crop of the area, coffee. Their main food crop, for themselves and their pigs (as we know from an abundance of ethnographic literature), is sweet potatoes; but this, as we know from the work of Douglas Yen (1974), is relatively recent. According to Golson (1997, p. 48), “the sweet potato is … superior in poor and agriculturally degraded soils, the latter a significant product of agrarian exploitation over previous millennia”. It has played a significant role in the development of pig herding in the Highlands. The success of the human settlement in this relatively healthy, malaria-free environment led to a population that outgrew the local wild food supply, and then, benefiting from the invention of horticulture, expanded into overcrowding. This generated ongoing raiding and trading between neighbors to manage their social relations and to maintain adequate garden space.

We are led here to conclude that hunting and gathering used up, without replacing, resources, and was, therefore, not sustainable.

This is a very interesting generalization to an anthropologist; but to people who do not regularly puzzle over the invention of agriculture, polished flake tools, and pottery, it is probably nothing to shout about. We, as anthropologists, are surprised to find that horticulture was invented 9000 years ago in the Highlands of New Guinea, because all of our introductory texts list the Fertile Crescent, Mexico, maybe China, India, even West Africa – all places that following agriculture soon had chiefs, at least, if not kings, urban centers, temples, and markets. New Guinea had none of these things. The Highlands continued to be the home of relatively egalitarian clan-based societies, ordered by trading relationships, with some stone tools and some pottery. The population was economically rather than politically integrated. The discovery of evidence for this early development of horticulture was a major new evolutionary signpost to anthropologists and to the archaeologists who worked at Kuk (Denham & Ballard, 2003). Perhaps, “the one thing that capitalism and hunting–gathering have in common is that neither is sustainable” (Prugh, Costanza, & Daly, 2000, p. 66). Change came about when hunting and gathering began to fail. Today, the earth's population, if we are to learn from history, must consider what survival system should follow capitalism.

Two of the archaeologists who worked with Jack Golson at the Kuk site, Drs Joseph Ketan and John Muke, were originally from the Kuk area in the Highlands. They began to talk with local people about “heritage management” and decided to nominate the Kuk site for World Heritage status from UNESCO. They have written (Ketan & Muke, 2001) about their efforts to convince the Highland New Guinea people of the importance of the Kuk site and of the benefits it might bring to them. Ketan and Muke told Kuk residents about the importance of the site for anthropologists, why it is valued by the outside world, and tried to convince them that they, too, should value it. Many, however, did not want to give up their lands for this project. Goimbe, the man who owned most of the land where evidence of early horticulture had been found, had given his permission for the transfer of his resources to the archaeologists. He knew Jack Golson and had told him of his approval, and asked that in return government services (offices and especially an Aid Post) be brought to his area. There was some resistance, however, among other local people about their land being used for government purposes. Ketan and Muke knew that prestige is highly valued in the culture of Highland New Guinea; and therefore, they emphasized that this site marked one of the few places in the world where people had independently invented agriculture. They said that the Kawelke people would become famous for this. Furthermore, this site would bring in tourists, jobs, and money, as well as fame for Papua New Guinea. Ketan and Muke told the people that it is something they should be very proud of, that it showed that their ancestors had been farming there for a long time, for many generations. Some local people seemed puzzled by this argument: “We know that”, they said. “We told you that.” This exchange illustrates how different perspectives on, for example, “a long time”, and different meanings, lead to different values shaped by our culture. Ketan and Muke (2001, p. 147) knew that they needed to continue their “educational efforts”, as they called their work, because, they said, there is no possibility of maintaining the site without local support and participation. Apparently they got some level of local consent, because in 2008 Kuk was designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.

In 2010, I met a man from the Western Highlands in Wichita, Kansas, where he had come to learn to fix the Cessna planes flown by the missionaries in the Highlands. He told me that some people were not happy about the Kuk site being set aside as a World Heritage Site, one old man, in particular, because he thought: “Where will I plant my potatoes?” This conversation illustrates the strength of different priorities: there is no easy road to “development” or one that everyone wants.

The use and abuse of land and other resources is the central part of stories about outside cultures coming to take over and dominate the places of indigenous peoples, and often the people themselves. Did it make any difference when these people said no? Who has the power to decide when there is a disagreement, as there always is? This is the central question in this paper.

Perhaps the most intractable problem for those who wish to conserve the Kuk site is its continued use for both food and cash crops:

Around 9,000 years ago, the prehistoric farmers of the upper Wahgi valley must have been planting food-crops that were very similar to some of those [planted today] … The archaeological evidence from Kuk suggests that people in this part of the world were cultivating water-loving crops such as taro on swamplands and bananas, yams and leafy vegetables on relatively dry land. Large water-disposal channels, like the modern version in [use], were dug across the swamp to intercept [and disperse] the water coming in. …  (Ketan & Muke, 2001, p. 31)

The area of scientific interest at Kuk is almost covered with coffee and food crops. The important prehistoric phases of swamp agriculture are located beneath the coffee, banana, taro and other crops. [There is a] coffee and banana garden, which is located within the boundaries of the core area of the proposed project. Although the coffee trees … are not mature enough to produce cherries, their economic value would be very similar to trees that have started yielding fruits. (Ketan & Muke, 2001, p. 39)

This is an important point that needs to be considered in negotiations for compensation for loss of crops.

Now that the Kuk site has been made into a World Heritage Site, I am wondering what that old man thinks, where does he plant his potatoes? And does he think that the younger generations, educated in Papua New Guinea and Australian universities, are stealing from him? Or has he accepted a job, or some responsibility, for maintaining the Kuk site? Have tourists started to arrive? If so, what effect has this had on the local community? Jack Golson keeps in close touch (from Canberra) with the folks in Kuk. When I suggested to him that whatever the problems were at Kuk, this would surely be a better development for the people than the highly destructive mining projects in Papua New Guinea. In response, Golson (personal communication, November 2014) wrote as follows:

The Kuk World Heritage nomination has not been the wonderful thing that you imagine in comparison with your mines. Nevertheless it promises well. Most of our work was done on the land of one Kawelke clan, which appeared to the other two to cut them out. As a result it took some time for an acceptable management plan to be negotiated and the fieldwork for that was carried out by people hired by the Australian Heritage Commission to circumvent the local animosities. … [A] local (Australian) travel agent in Mount Hagen, Bob Bates has got interested and has organised locals to clear land for the building of an Interpretation Centre and help with the construction. It should be ready to open next February and he has got a well known local politician and ex-Prime Minister, Paias Wingti, to launch it. Again we do not know how that will go, but the land and the labour have all come from the favoured clan.

Some of the problems and negative consequences of “ecotourism” have been discussed at length, with evidence from sites all over the world, several in use for many years (Berno, 2006; Honey, 2008). The fact that it was a travel agent from Australia who has been helping to develop the Kuk site is easy enough to understand: travel agents are required to plan ecotourism engagements. Consequences include the arrival of outsiders, both from inside and outside of Papua New Guinea: they will need to be fed and housed. They will provide jobs, but they may bring their own labor. They will crowd the space and put pressure on local resources. Eventually they may come “with their hands in their pockets and tell us [the local people] what to do”.¹

This is what has happened many times when communities, with the help of experts and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), have tried to develop ecotourism projects.

[I]t is difficult for community-based ecotourism to take hold and expand without strong government support. … [N]ational governments frequently stifle rural initiatives, hand out lucrative contracts to politically or economically powerful elites, and cede to the private sector or local park officials development responsibilities – construction of roads, wells, schools, and the like, traditionally carried by the state. (Honey, 2008, p. 445)

The privatization of public resources is a worldwide phenomenon: in developed industrialized countries, the State still protects the private property of its wealthy to middle-class citizens, but the property of those who struggle may very well be seized for “community purposes” when some private developer or the State itself wants the land. We have seen the terrible destruction of museums that protected ancient artifacts and treasured heritage, where governments have been unable to protect public property from powerful outsiders.

The people of New Guinea are not likely to let this happen to them without the more powerful people feeling strong resistance that cannot be ignored. This resistance is seen particularly against the extractive industries that have taken land – with permission from the government but not from the people who own the land, and who plant their potatoes there.

Some researchers have cautioned against ecotourism projects that do not require potential tourists to be educated about the culture and environment they intend to visit within the Global Village, and the possible consequences for the local people:

Only then can responsible tourists be encouraged to step into the most threatened environments delicately, encounter the most marginal of economies humbly, or witness the most spiritual of rituals reverently, and finally, contribute to the success of tourism and sustainable development. (Carr, 1995, p. 122)

Participation

Everyone who works with development (e.g. Chambers, 2008; Cohen, 1998; Dei, 2014; Grenier, 1998; Shizha & Abdi, 2014) knows now what applied anthropologists learned very quickly after World War II: there is no success without local consultation and consent, and assistance at every level. A well-known theory derived from this insight was named “Action Anthropology” by its inventor, Sol Tax. In 1948, he and his students at the University of Chicago said that rather than imposing our own wishes on local people, we anthropologists should help them carry out their own projects (Stapp, 2012). Some developers have paid far more attention to what local people want than others. Powerful mining corporations have shown little interest in what the locals think or whether they suffer, although there are some exceptions.

Grasberg mine, Freeport Mining Company: West Papua

A well-known example of a mine that devastated local people and continues to avoid meeting any of their demands, is the Freeport Mining Company of New Orleans. In 1967, this corporation settled into West Papua (then Irian Jaya), recognized by the United Nations (UN) as part of Indonesia since 1963 (Elmslie, 2002; Kirksey, 2012). The local people had been promised independence by the Dutch colonial government, before it was unceremoniously driven out by the Indonesian military. At first, the mine was guarded by only a few military officers, but as the resistance became more powerful, the military swelled in numbers, from a few to a few thousand (Kirksey, 2012). The Indonesian government, however sympathetic they may have been to the Papuan people, had run out of space in Indonesia and wealth: they needed to spread their population out and required the wealth from the mines, and now from oil palm plantations, in West Papua (Billings, 1998; Elmslie, 2002; Kirksey, 2012).

The Grasberg mine has devastated villages and garden land, a large land area, and river water, which is filled with cyanide, copper, and other tailings from gold mining (Elmslie, 2004, pp. 149–150).

The traditional people of the area, the Amungme in the mountains, and the Kamoro in the lowlands, have been affected, Freeport admits, but have also derived benefits from the mine in the form of medical services, educational opportunities and employment. The Amungme and Kamoro people dispute this, claiming that they have almost no benefits from the mine; rather that it has been the bane of their existence bringing an unwanted military presence into their lives, together with oppression and dispossession. According to Tom Beanal, Amungme elder and spokesman  …  “The people don't want the mine. We feel our land has been stolen from us.” (Elmslie, 2004, p. 150)

Tom Beanal led a lawsuit filed on behalf of the Amungme, and others, in a court in New Orleans. Six years later, the case was finally thrown out as it was decided that the American-owned mine did not have any legal standing in the court (Billings, 1998).

The Amungme and others have carried on a protest movement, widespread among people from the tribal area (guerillas) and educated people from the town (students), asking for their independence, merdeka, like that which their neighbors across the mountains in Papua New Guinea have enjoyed since 1975. Instead, West Papuans have suffered, and continue to suffer, arrests, torture, assassinations, discrimination, displacement from large areas of their own land, and so far, the refusal by the UN to reconsider the so-called “free choice” vote of 1967 – an event whereby a few West Papuans were forced to vote to allow Indonesia to permanently annex West Papua as part of Indonesia. As a result, the local people now suffer from a tragedy that has afflicted their attempts to obtain justice: abandonment by their leaders, including Tom Beanal, who gave up and joined the oppressors (Kirksey, 2012, p. 213). However, younger leaders of merdeka grew and have continued to build their movement (pp. 201–204). They had high hopes when President Bush's presidency ended and President Obama took over, but

people with direct links to human rights abuses in Indonesia were appointed to Obama's cabinet, millions in U.S. taxpayer dollars continued to flow as aid for the Indonesian military, and the U.S. embassy supported business as usual at the Freeport mine. (p. 207)

Many people still support the movement for independence. It has been consistently supported by the Christian missions in West Papua, who have been there since the days when it was a Dutch colony; and it is now supported by a strong human rights movement in Indonesia (see the Elsham and TAPOL websites and Kirksey, 2012) and the rest of the world. Since 1963, a coalition in support of West Papua has grown among the Pacific islands and throughout Australia, New Zealand, and Europe, as the Province of West Papua, formerly Irian Jaya, has grown as a local movement demanding independence, merdeka, from Indonesia. The Robert Kennedy Center at Harvard issued a report on human rights abuses (Abrash, 2001, 2002) which details the history of growing devastation and militarization of Freeport's occupation.

The Indonesian government continues to ignore the wishes of the people of West Papua, which are really quite easy to understand: they do not want their land stolen by other peoples’ “development” projects. And yet the Indonesian government very recently publicized the difficulties they were having in getting investors for their “economic development zones” in West Papua: land which a whole world full of human rights organizations see as acquired by fraudulent “free choice” votes demanded by the UN.

Porgera gold mine, Papua New Guinea

Porgera began operations in 1991. It is owned by the Porgera Joint Venture, a group that includes Placer Dome, a transnational mining company with headquarters in Vancouver, Canada, the national government of Papua New Guinea, the provincial government of Enga (where the mine is), and the local landowners. Several sources describe the Ipili, the local “clan”, as fluid, without identifying a single group of people, and therefore impossible to define exactly as a landowning group. After the mine began producing, migrants began to gather hopes of benefiting from its riches. The crowding and conflicts that developed were typical of mining operations. The company resettled some people, but others did not want to move. The most predictable damage was done by uncontrolled tailings, including rock and cyanide, dumped into the river and carried downstream, polluting land over many miles and rendering it unfit for cultivation. People have died, not only from the pollution but from another cause that has become a common characteristic in development projects: the security forces, who sometimes kill local people. Several anthropologists have studied this situation, one of whom was Alex Golub, who said he tried to avoid taking any political position on the mine based on general opinions about mines and people because he wanted to make an independent evaluation. However, by the time he had published his book, he concluded with this statement:

[I]t became increasingly impossible for me to straddle both sides of the divide between The Ipili and The Mine. Company executives grew increasingly dismissive of Ipili people. In one widely quoted comment, a Barrick [the company that bought out Placer] executive remarked that rape was “a cultural habit” in Porgera … Ipili activists seemed to be spending more and more time traveling abroad to meetings and less and less time finding concrete solutions for their local communities. (Golub, 2014, p. 211)

Golub reports that in recent work among the Ipili:

It's all there: the environmental damage, the mine's security guards who shot and killed trespassers, a subsistence crisis that was bad in the 1990s and intolerable in the 2000s, and crippling social disorder caused by massive migration from outside the valley. (Golub, 2014, p. 211)

What Golub says of the Ipili is probably true for all the mines in Papua New Guinea; and perhaps, all mines everywhere.

Panguna: Bougainville, Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea

One group of local people took a step that few have been able, or willing, to: they brought power to and from the people in a very direct way. When all requests and demands failed, when attempts to get the Bougainville Panguna Copper Mining Co. to compensate them adequately, or else leave Bougainville and restore their garden lands, fell on deaf ears, people felt that there was nothing left for them but direct action. They took some of the dynamite, to which they had access, and blew up the mine. They destroyed it so thoroughly that the company decided it was not worth trying to re-open. That was in 1989.

The terribly sad part of this story is that a civil war followed, between people on different sides of various issues, primarily over the struggle for available land and resources, now greatly diminished by the mine. It is estimated that 10,000–20,000 people died.

Nonetheless, recently there has been talk among mine owners of re-opening the mine, and some suggestion that local people want the mine restored. However, reporters who interviewed local people found no support in 2014 for a return of the mine:

A survey of Bougainville villagers has revealed strong opposition to the proposed reopening of the mine which was at the centre of the island's decade-long civil war  …  The Jubilee Australia research foundation conducted the survey in 10 villages or hamlets around the Panguna mine at the end of 2013, and found “near universal” opposition to the reopening, as well as unhappiness and mistrust of the consultation process. (Davidson, 2014)

While most of the people remain against it, some of the elite are listening more favorably to talk of its reopening. Once again, it is a case of the elite needing cash from the companies that extract local resources. The elite, after all, no longer plant their own potatoes or live on salaries. They buy their food in town.

Lihir mine

In 1995, after 10 years of preparation and 13 years after the gold deposit was first identified in 1982, gold production began on Lihir, a small island just north of New Ireland, the latter just north of New Guinea, and part of the independent country of Papua New Guinea. A public offering was launched in 1995, and the first gold was produced in 1997 (Lihir Gold Times, 1998).

This mine has been more successful than most in maintaining relatively good relations with local people and minimizing proximate environmental damage (Billings, 2002a; Hemer, 2001; Kirsch, 2014, pp. 48–49; Lihir Gold Times, 1998). However, people on the east coast of New Ireland, which faces Lihir, told me in 1998 that social relations had been severely damaged because some people had been relocated and compensated, while others had not. Naturally, this had created various kinds of inequality in a fiercely egalitarian society (Haque, 2006; Hemer, 2001, pp. 181, 191).

Ok Tedi, Papua New Guinea

The Ok Tedi mine in the Star mountains of the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea has been producing gold, and pollution, since 1984, and copper since 1987 (Kirsch, 2006, p. 15). In 1992, local people, mainly Yonggom leaders, told anthropologist Stuart Kirsch that land and resources had been lost along the Ok Tedi and Fly rivers, where tailings from the mine poured unrestricted (pp. 17–18). Aided by the work of the German Lutheran Church and several conservation NGOs, a lawsuit was filed on behalf of 30,000 indigenous plaintiffs against mine owner BHP and the Ok Tedi mine for “negligence resulting in a loss of amenity”; which, in this case, meant the loss of the subsistence economy of the people along the rivers (p. 20). It was settled out of court in 1996 for what looked like a large amount of money and, more importantly, with a commitment to provide the best possible form of tailings containment along the rivers (p. 21). By 1999, the mine management concluded that none of the proposed technologies of containment would substantially reverse the environmental damage already done or prevent more. However, subsequent evaluations by other stakeholders disagreed, and the plaintiffs went back to court to charge BHP with breach of contract (p. 23). BHP subsequently withdrew from the mine, leaving its 52% of shares in a trust fund that will “support development projects in Papua New Guinea”. However, since the mine would have to keep operating and polluting in order to bring money into the trust fund, this was hardly an equitable move. Basically, the mine operator cut and ran without paying up what the courts had decided it should pay. Another lawsuit was filed and this legal action was settled out of court in 2004, without any provision for cleaning up the environment or reducing its impact (p. 24).

Despite the frequent failure of lawsuits against powerful mining companies and other corporations, Kirsch (2014) thinks it is worthwhile:

It is illusory to imagine that corporations will ever be entirely transparent or accountable, despite their virtuous claims to social responsibility and sustainability. However, this does not mean that resistance is futile. … [M]aking these dilemmas apparent allows for their negotiation in new forms, opening up the possibilities for change. By revealing the problems caused by contemporary corporations, oppositional movements and critique represent one of the primary defenses against the negative consequences of unrestrained capitalism. (p. 224)

We have a much fuller account of this case of mining exploitation than we do of most thanks to anthropologist Stuart Kirsch, who began his fieldwork in 1986 (Kirsch, 2006, p. xi) and has continued to return to this area over the years. He stated “[I] viewed my participation in the campaign against the mine as a ‘logical extension of the commitment to reciprocity that underlies the practice of anthropology’” (Kirsch, 2002, p. 178; cited in Kirsch, 2014, p. 11).

Kirsch has been engaged in Action Anthropology whereby he has continued his journey with the Yonggom people and the Ok Tedi mining area. In 2014, he wrote about the strategies through which mining companies manipulate and present the results of scientific research: “Their primary objective is to continue externalizing the costs of production onto communities and the environment by delaying recognition of their destructive environmental impacts. They also seek to avoid reputational risks and the threat of external regulation.” However, “scholars from the natural and social sciences can make constructive interventions into these processes” (Kirsch, 2014, p. 155).

Although some social scientists seem to occupy themselves with philosophy, and some still even believe they are being “objective”, many anthropologists feel that in their own field situations they should try to help the local people, when they can, with practical actions (Colfer, 2008, p. 273; Kirksey, 2012).

There is still much to do together with the people along the Ok Tedi River: “For the Yonggom and their neighbors, their astonishing international campaign and stunning legal victory did not achieve everything they had been fighting for” because the mining company was able to not fulfill its legal commitments (Kirsch, 2014, p. 233). It should be noted that no one was charged with failure to obey a court ruling and no one went to jail.

Mining and capitalism

The relationship between capitalism and environmental destruction was studied by a variety of scholars, as well as by the UN in the 1970s:

[A] group of eminent scientists and concerned citizens gathered in Rome to look at the global environmental crisis that was expanding at an alarming rate. This group, later to be known as the Club of Rome, produced a comprehensive report on the state of the natural environment. This report emphasized that the industrial society was going to exceed most of the ecological limits within a matter of decades, if it continued to promote the kind of economic growth witnessed in the 1960s and 1970s. (Topfer, 2006, p. iii)

It would seem, then, that “the one thing that capitalism and hunting–gathering have in common is that neither is sustainable” (Prugh et al., 2000, p. 66).

However, the Club of Rome did not look into all the dimensions of sustainability that are now clear to most scholars, and that call for a different perspective on sustainability:

[S]ince the initial sustainability principles were devised in efforts to improve on those of conventional economic development, which were primarily conceived to achieve economic growth without appropriate consideration of other development dimensions, a call to revisit the underlying premises of sustainable development should aim at unraveling ongoing processes of unsustainable activities while ascertaining holistic strategies to overcome recurring challenges locally and worldwide. (Mudacumura, Mebratu, & Shamsul Haque, 2006, p. vii)

Conclusion: capitalism, mining, and change

Some scholars, including Kirsch, have gone beyond conclusions for single mines to underlying causes, most notably, capitalism (Kirsch, 2014, p. 233):

The fundamental dilemmas of contemporary capitalism cannot be resolved; they are part of the dialectical relationship between corporations and their critics that inevitably leads to new forms of contestation on both sides.

The foundation for this condition, as Kirsch (2014, pp. 233–234) defines it, is “a neoliberal era of global capitalism in which corporations rival states in wealth and power”.

Kirsch points out that mining or some other kind of exploitation of non-renewable resources is necessary to support the economic system spread around the world: which cannot, in the end, be sustained. Psychologists and others have noted the strong relationship between capitalism and cultures patterned by individualistic institutions (Schmuck & Schultz, 2002; Triandis, 1995).

What can indigenous people do to confront this seemingly overwhelming power? How can their knowledge of local ecological conditions and of procedures to sustain resources, as well as their knowledge of social relationships that maintain viable societies within which people can survive, have any power in conflict with these major forces that destroy? Some indigenous scholars have faith in the strength of their own cultures:

Culture … has the potential to subvert imperialism. It did it yesterday in Africa when people were subjugated, dehumanized by the West, and it can still do it today to destabilize Euro-American globalism.

Others point directly to the abilities of indigenous people to produce their own development in their own styles:

With indigenous science as a starting point, national policy must embark upon a new development approach that builds on small-scale and home-grown industries using indigenous technologies in a culturally-sustainable development manner (Lebakeng, 2010), e.g. local artisans, vocational skills, traditional pharmacology, primary health care, rural development and adult education. This development framework is intended to counteract the prism of a market-oriented economics. (Dei, 2014, p. 26)

These African indigenous scholars know well that there are mountains to move in order to stand up to capitalism. Capitalism is secured in all aspects of modern cultures. That is why those who study psychology claim the changes toward sustainability must be profound and at every level: cognitive, emotional, motivational, as well as economic, technical, and political (Schmuck & Schultz, 2002). These psychologists see the positive prospects for indigenous development on their own terms.

[R]ecognizing human dignity entails acknowledging the main beliefs and values to which individuals pay most attention. Such recognition may further individual self-respect and resistance to exploitation and domination, thus offering real meaning to other values that make people's lives more productive in their communities. (Gouveia, 2002, pp. 152–153)

One anthropologist working in Indonesia in the 1980s both in the villages and also with the Bank of Indonesia, made an important contribution to a locally envisioned development project. S. Ann Dunham saw that micro-financing (Gow, 2006) would enable village craftsmen and blacksmiths to go on making krisses and other more mundane tools which were wanted for work by village people, but also by their urban compatriots as souvenirs and symbols of pride from their culture. These artifacts were also popular with tourists. Dunham saw that it was not only not necessary but also counter-productive for the bank to give people large loans to convert to the factory production of tools that lacked any value for tourists or for historically oriented Indonesians. This would only rob the local people of the value of their considerable skills and also would make village industry unsustainable. We might never have seen the publication of Dunham's work if her son, Barack Obama, had not become President of the USA (Dunham, 2009).

Development and the power to decide

In the end it is the local people who will or will not make the changes we all need toward sustainability of the earth and its inhabitants. Kirsch reminds us to “cherish the hope provided” by the activists in and around the Ok Tedi mine, who have never given up their struggle (Kirsch, 2014, p. 234). And the people of West Papua, who despite being brutalized, tortured, jailed, and murdered, with the support of the UN, since they were seized in 1963 by Indonesia, have never given up the struggle for merdeka (independence). And surely the Bougainville people, who have suffered so much from the presence of the Panguna mine, yet will not allow the return of this destructive “development”. These folks provide a model and a challenge for the “civilized” world, which has been the major enemy of sustainability in nature.

Who has power? Local people have power, sometimes indirectly, otherwise directly in action. Indigenous stories have power: identification of space as a sacred place, or as polluted and dangerous, or as the place of ancestors, or simply the place where potatoes have always been planted; these indigenous mappings sanction local actions which might otherwise seem inexplicable (Billings, 2002b; Rocheleau, 2005). Indigenous knowledge of subsistence strategies has given local people in New Guinea the power to survive for 40,000 years. They will not give up now.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 In the film Twilight of the Dreaming, about Australian Aborigines who live in a reserve and have been given responsibility for the Kakadu National Park near Darwin, some of the local rock art is shown. One drawing appears to be a stick figure with his hands apparently pressed against his upper legs. An old Aboriginal man of the area interpreted the drawing for the narrator of the film: “One day, strangers came here: and soon, these strangers, with their hands in their pockets, told us what to do.”