[SustainableTompkins] The Future? What's that?

[Tony Del Plato]

The Future? What's That?
from NYTimes editorial, May 12, 2006

Perhaps you read yesterday's article about members of the Nukak
tribe---nearly 80 of them--- who walked out of the Colombian jungle and
renounced their ancestral ways. Until then, they'd had virtually no contact
with modern civilizalization. What they expect from the future, which seems
to be a problematic concept for them, is almost as unlcear as what led them
to leave Nukak National Park for the outpost of San Jose del Guaviare. That
village is hardly an apotheosis of modernity, but it is nonetheless a
threshold from which there is no going back. Attempts to describe how the
Nukak feel about this transition have been rudimentary. According to
witnesses, they say they are happy about it.

None of which explain the bittersweet feel this story leaves in the reader's
mind. We have no clearer idea what it would mean to live a subsistence life
in the Colombian jungle than the Nukak have of living even on the fringes of
the modern world. 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 suggests 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.

-- 
"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a
revolutionary act."
George Orwell.