Ape Rifle

Not too long ago, my housemate decided we should host a dinner at our apartment to celebrate Canadian thanksgiving. Nonchalantly agreeing without paying much regard to exactly what this entailed, I soon found myself designated as the provider of the main event: the poultry dish. Northern Mozambique isn’t exactly known for its plump turkeys, so chicken would have to do. They are easily found on the streets of Pemba, often carried around upside down in bunches as they squawk away. However, word on the street was these chickens would not be sufficiently plump for Thanksgiving purposes, and wouldn’t fare so well if baked in an oven. So down I went to the market with a friend, searching for some plump white chickens. After honking our way through the cacophony of bright sights and loud sounds in his pickup truck, we pulled up to a roadside cage and picked out the three lucky contestants that were to become dinner. Consider it drive-through service of a somewhat different nature.

Of course, these chickens were still a few steps away from being a meal- the fact they were still alive and fully feathered was slightly problematic. My friend’s housekeeper, however, took care of that. In the backyard of his house (many of the homes in Pemba have huge yards with gardens, shacks, cooking spaces and animals), our three chickens met their end courtesy of a sharp blade, bleeding and a decent amount of headless flailing about. “Running around like a chicken with its head caught off” makes a lot more sense to me now. I also learned that to de-feather a chicken, you have to immerse it for 20-30 seconds in hot water to open the pores. The water can’t be boiling; otherwise, the skin will start to cook way before you are ready for that. With the feathers gone the feet and neck can go too (or not), and the guts can be quickly pulled out with a few handfuls. And voila, the chickens are ready to be stuffed and cooked in a gas oven with no temperature gauge, to turn out surprisingly well.

Recently, I’ve been reading The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs and Why Globalization Works by Martin Wolf, two books offering your standard ode to the wonders of economic globalization. Sachs has some interesting things to say about AIDS and malaria, and Wolf has a great chapter refuting globalization as cultural destruction, but in the end I still found myself at odds with much of what was written. Both books entrenched themselves in a surprisingly superficial perspective: ‘western’ countries are wealthy, while the large majority of the planet is poor. Why are these countries poor? Well, because they aren’t western, silly. Be equating wealth and success with its ‘western’ manifestations (industrialization, mass consumption, all your usual economic stats), it becomes sort of hard to discuss other countries without a troubling dose of cultural arrogance getting in the way. The prescriptions for global success are thus somewhat tired, particularly on Mr. Wolf’s side: if all countries become market economies and trade until they drop, then everything will somehow turn out alright. The world’s problems lie in the unfortunate fact that not enough countries are becoming smog-choked, export- processing industrial sprawls. Both authors find themselves awkwardly defending sweatshop-style low cost labour as a necessary first step on the road to the riches of industrialization. You can’t really blame them though; after all, they are economists. And economists have a tendency to confuse historical experience with universally applicable truth- call it the “if it happened there then, well it will happen here now” syndrome.

I’ve also been reading a number of documents on the relationship between poverty, development and the environment. Rather unsurprisingly, the standard approach is to find causality for environmental degradation in the plight of impoverished people, forced to rely directly on natural resources for subsistence. ‘Poor’ people do bad things like cut down trees, clear land for fields and kill wild animals. Since this state of poverty is fueling environmental degradation, the solution is clearly to push for economic growth. If only these people could find something to do besides farming and cutting trees, like maybe open a business and buy more things, then environmental degradation would be reduced. Poor people rely directly on the exploitation of natural resources to survive, and something obviously has to be done about that. But wait- don’t we all rely on the exploitation of natural resources to survive? Last time I checked, I don’t eat computer files for dinner and my home isn’t built out of ideas.

So in case you are wondering what headless chickens, Jeffrey Sachs and poor people cutting down trees have in common, well here’s your answer: being in Mozambique with all sorts of thoughts and experiences swirling around in my head, I can’t help but realize how delusional so many of us are regarding the human condition, our place in the world and our impact in it. The industrialization and modernization processes so celebrated are, in the end, reflections of our desire to remove ourselves from the dirty realities of our lives, to deny our impact on our surroundings by hiding it from view. Modernism, in the end, is about pretending that our world and the ‘natural’ world are two mutually exclusive spheres, and that those who still live in the bush are ‘backward’ and ‘primitive’ people crying out for interstate access and the Wal-Mart shopping experience.

In my usual reality of industrialized mass production, chickens grow in the frozen goods section and vegetable come from a truck. Wood comes from a warehouse, not the forest. Energy comes from a light switch, not a fire. Our consumption of natural resources, our dependence on the world around us, has been processed, shipped and packaged beyond recognition, to the point where many of us have no problem with the notion that we are no long party to this reality. Growing up as an urban Canadian, I had no idea what vegetables looked like in the ground. I never had to see an animal get its throat slit to satisfy my appetite for meat. I’ve never had a power dam flood my land. I’ve never cut down a tree. We are at the end of such long and complex processes of exploitation, production and transportation that disassociation between the final good and where it comes from is effortless, enough to convince us we somehow live ‘outside’ the natural world. Environmental degradation is so much easier when you don’t have to see it.

Needless to say, seeing life in northern Mozambique has me feel quite useless as a human being. It’s a life that is open and unapologetic about its dependence on the world around it for survival, since your average farmer has no complex system whatsoever to fuel his or her subsistence. They are on the frontlines, toiling away on the land. Meanwhile, I depend on massive industrial systems over which I have no control for my own survival. I don’t know how to farm, raise livestock, build a house or make any sort of meal from scratch (and by ‘scratch’ I don’t mean using ingredients bought at a supermarket). If the world economy completely collapses tomorrow, if all the power goes out and never comes back, well I along with hundreds of millions of ‘advanced’ people across the planet would be completely screwed. We’d have no idea where to even start. The price to pay for convenience is complete dependence, and it is a price I have been paying my whole life.

So this is why I am deeply uneasy with the prescriptions espoused by people such as Sachs and Wolf, that somehow the way to make things better is to include ever more people, billions even, in this tangled web of industrial denial and environmental distance. By buying into the system’s own hype, that we can better the planet by further alienating ourselves from our place within it, economic globalization becomes the ultimate force for good as it strives to separate people from the effects of their choices and consumptive patterns by thousands of kilometers. Not seeing the animal you are eating slaughtered is pretty good, but not seeing a landscape fouled by your electronics is even better.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not espousing eco-fanaticism. I’m not preaching a planet-wide return to the countryside- that would be pretty difficult, seeing as the world is busy piling into cities and this year has become majority urban for the first time ever. However, I’ve been thinking that there must be more of a happy middle ground somewhere, a real third way between life that is “nasty, short and brutish” in the bush and a life spent paving our planet with concrete and killing ourselves with chemicals, pollution and cancer while pretending we are somehow making things better. People need to benefit from the positive outcomes of industrialization- think health, knowledge, communication- while also becoming more aware of the consequences of our consumptives choices and action. If I want to eat meat, I should be confronted with the fact that means animals dying. If I want to buy lots of stuff at IKEA, I should be aware this means that somewhere, some forest has got to go.

Modern industrialism might certainly have delivered us great benefits, I can’t deny that, but it doesn’t mean we have to blindly run ourselves into the ground following it through to its logical conclusion. The problem with our current industrialization style is, at its root, it is a slave to the “bigger, better, more complex” mentality. But who says things can’t get simpler? Why can’t we use the technological innovations that industrialization and modernization have provided us so far to change course? Why can’t more ‘rich’ people try to grow vegetables on their property? Or raise animals? Why can’t we strive to have more energy independent homes, rather than plugging into massive power grids that ravage the environment on a grand scale? Are we so scared of our own world that we try to escape it this much?

Maybe in the end we are just lazy. Maybe we are just so entangled in a reality of alienating mass production that we can’t even think of alternatives without throwing labels such as “tree hugger” or “communist” around. But I like to hold out the hope that things can change, that we can get past this obsession with progress as a process of bigger, better and further, more cement and more steel. Of course, there might be more than a few delays to this transformation in human thinking, with countries such as China and India partying like it’s 1959 and happily driving hundreds of millions more people into smog-choked worlds of highways, supermarkets and the cement-happy life. It’s hard to blame them, though: as ‘westerners’ we haven’t exactly been any good example, happily driving these exercises in hyper industrialization through our obsessive need for cheap consumption and by celebrating them as “economic miracles” because, finally, some people in that damned Third World have decided to get their act together and become more like us.

I can’t be responsible for economic policy in India and China, but I can be responsible for myself. And personally, I want to feel less useless, less dependent. As cliché as it sounds, I wanted to be more connected to the reality of the planet that sustains me. I don’t want to lead a brutally hard life farming and dying young, and yet I don’t want to be completely clueless about what supports my survival, fundamentally ignorant the basic ingredients of life. I should learn to grow something in my backyard, maybe get involved in scaling down energy systems to a household/neighbourhood level as a fascinating line of work. I should learn how to kill a chicken and de-feather it properly. Because maybe if I start to see the consequences of my lifestyle more clearly, I will change for the better and be less destructive to both myself and others. Environmental degradation comes about not because people are mean or careless, but simply because we are ignorant. We value a system of production in which those who affect the greatest environmental change know the least about it. In our increasingly packaged reality, it is often difficult to even fathom that, somewhere down the line, everything still comes from the earth. But it does.

And maybe then I will realize why the tendency to blame poverty for environmental degradation borders on the ridiculous at best and the knowingly dishonest at worst, steeped as it is in the politics of denial where ‘economic growth’ is the answer before any question is even asked. It’s much easier to blame the ‘poor’ than to confront the problem inherent in the lifestyles of the rich and developed. At least the former face up to the consequences of their survival and offer no excuses; meanwhile, millions of us shirk responsibility, hiding behind massive industrial machines that sanitize our lives and shelter us from the nasty stuff. Sure, ‘poor’ people cut down trees and alter eco-systems (even nice looking ones, at that). But have I not done the same, even significantly more so? Has my life not being responsible for the felling of hundreds of trees, and the exploitation of god knows how many other resources? The only difference is I’ve had the luxury of someone else doing it for me, somewhere else, so I can pretend it doesn’t happen or that I’m not responsible for it.

So hopefully, by seeing chickens run around with their heads cut off, rolling my eyes at the usual line from western economists and realizing that a rural Mozambican just trying to survive doesn’t a fraction the effect on this planet that my bloated lifestyle does, I’m slowly learning to be a better human being. Maybe I’m learning that positive change entails our lifestyles meeting halfway. The technological innovation that supports mine coupled with the simplicity and greater self-reliance of theirs. And if it’s already too late, if greed and mindless growth take the day and our whole industrial system eventually crashes down on itself, well I guess that’s my problem and not theirs. While I’m trying to figure out how to eat an iPod, chances are they will still be farming away.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 20th, 2006 at 1:51 am and is filed under Globalization, Musings on Life, Southern Africa. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.