Learning from Indigenous People
Indonesian tropical rainforests are bursting with life. Not only do millions of species of plants and animals live in rainforests, but also many indigenous people or natives still live as their ancestors did many years before them in the rainforests for thousands of years harmoniously. They call the rainforest their home.
Dayak Kenyah Leppo’Ke, Kenyah Oma Lung, and Kenyah Leppo’Ndang depend on the rain forest for food and other uses. They have strong ties to the land and the forest. Because the rain forest is important for their culture, so they want to take care of it. They benefit from the land without doing harm to the plants and animals. They share food with others. When Dayak people catch big fish, they will share with their neighbors and families.
Komoro men in Papua, in the east of Indonesia, always move from coastal area to the mountain area and back again from mountain area to coastal area with their family including children. They want to show to the children sago trees in the mountain area as sources for carbohydrates and fishes in coastal areas as sources for proteins. Komoro children do not go to schools like ours; the forest is their schools.
Indigenous people, everywhere in the world, value and respect nature highly because they are part of it. They believe that plants and animals have a right to unfolding and self-realization. They have the right to live. Through countless ages, this belief has been expressed religiously and philosophically.
For example, the people of Siberut, in the island about 100 kilometers off Sumatera’s west coast, have traditional religion called Arat Sabulungan. According to the belief, all being, objects, and even natural phenomena have a soul or simagre, and that all animated and unanimated objects have emanation called bajou. This is a form of respect to nature philosophy.
But global biodiversity is being lost at a rate many times higher than that of natural extinction due to land conversion, climate change, pollution, unsustainable harvesting of natural resources, and the introduction of exotic species. About 24 percent (1,130) of mammals and 12 percent (1,183) of bird species are currently regarded as globally threatened.
There has been immersed change in both human and environmental conditions over the past 30 years. An exponentially increasing, and irreversible environmental deterioration or devastation perpetuated through firmly established ways of production and consumption.
The Earth is dominated by a society that progress or development been measured by the rate of energy consumption and the acquisition and accumulation of material objects. The politicians and energy experts of developed countries (and then been followed by developing countries’) speak of exponentially increasing energy needs as though they were human needs, and not simply demands on the market.
We can see transparently through everyday economic and political news in media. The deep-seated roots of the production and consumption ideology can be traced in all existing industrial states, but perhaps most clearly in the rich Western countries.
This environmental crisis can inspire a new renaissance; new social forms for co-existence together with a high level of culturally integrated technology, economic progress (with less interference), and a less restricted experience of life. The crisis of life conditions on Earth could help us choose a new path with new criteria for progress, efficiency, and rational action.
There should be an ideological change. The ideological change is mainly that of appreciating life quality (dwelling in the situation of intrinsic value) rather than adhering to a high standard of living.
We need types of society and communities in which one delights in the value-creative aspects of equilibrium rather than the glorification of value-neutral growth, in which being together with other living beings is more important than exploiting or killing them. So-called simply, lower, or primitive species of plants and animals contribute essentially to the richness and diversity of life. They have value in themselves and are not merely steps toward the so-called higher or rational life forms, human.
Present ideology tends to value things (including animals or plants) because they are scarce and because they have market value. There is prestige in vast consumption and waste society, to mention only one of many relevant factors.
Many people contend that greater productivity is valuable because it increases the general level of material affluence. Value is widely considered beneficial to well-being.
Therefore, we need a change in production and consumption patterns, a change in the way that we value things. But some people (politicians, governments, companies, rich people) have not been able, and partly not even willing, to change the way of production and consumption. These are secured by the inertia of the dominant paradigm of growth, progress, and standard of living. This paradigm, manifest as firm attitudes and habits are powerful agencies preventing large-scale, long-range changes. Changes have to be from the inside and from the outside, all in one.
Yes, when circumstances force people with a high quality of life to retreat to a mere high standard, the transition can be painful and dangerous for their self-respect. A person can free himself or herself from the profit and consumption consciousness, in spite of the non-stop pressure from the mode of production, which depends upon such mentality. Without a change in consciousness, the ecological movement is experienced as a never-ending list of reminders.
We can learn from indigenous people how to value our own life and nature.
Harry Surjadi is an independent science journalist based in Jakarta. He is the Southeast Asia Regional Coordinator, Rainforest Journalism Fund of the Pulitzer Center and the founder of The Society of Indonesian Science Journalists (SISJ).
This piece was originally published in his blog on February 2019.
