On legacy and time

Time is several things. It can be a measure of experience. The more we go through, the more time we feel has passed. The two weeks my class and I spent in Detroit felt like two months, because the sum of the experiences was tremendous. On the other hand, time might mean something very different for the Hadza in Tanzania, who lead hunter-gatherer lives. Michael Finkel, a journalist who spent time with the Hadza, met up with them in the following way. (I love this story.)

"Merely getting this far, to a traditional Hadza encampment, is not an easy task. Year's aren't the only unit of time the Hadza do not keep close track of  - they also ignore hours and days and weeks and months.n The Hadza language (Hadzane) doesn't have numbers past three or four. Making an appointment can be a tricky matter. But I had contacted the owner of a tourist camp not far outside the Hadza territory to see if he could arrange for me to spend time with a remote Hadza group. While on a camping trip in the bush, the owner came across Onwas (the eldest member of the group) and asked him, in Swahili, if I might visit. The Hadza tend to be gregarious people, and Onwas readily agreed. He said I'd be the first foreigner to ever visit the camp. He promised to send this son to a particular tree at the edge of the bush to meet me when I was scheduled to arrive, in three weeks.


Sure enough, three weeks later, when my interpreter and I arrived by Land Rover in the bush, there was Onwas's son Ngoala waiting for us. Apparently, Onwas had noted stages of the moon, and when he felt enough time had past, he sent his son to the tree. I asked Ngoala if he'd waited for a long time for me. 'No,' he said. 'Only a few days.'"

The Hadza have been living in the same place for tens of thousands of years, and are successfully living there right now. Does this have anything to do with how they perceive time?

What about when we are gone, those of us embedded in this degrading culture? What do we leave behind? Will our time on this Earth have mattered? Will our individual lives have mattered? What does time mean in this case? There seem to be two components of our legacy - a physical component, and a less physical, but more emotional and spiritual component. The physical component is comprised of things like trash and non-degradables, buildings and art. The emotional and spiritual component is comprised of what we strove to do with our lives, the impacts of our words and deeds.

When it comes down to it, what do we want to leave behind? I would hope that once we are gone, our physical impacts on this Earth should be as little as possible. Any imprint of our physical existence should decay quickly, or just not be there at all. Trash then becomes a massive problem. And anthropogenic climate change is a physical legacy, too. I would hope that where we once tread, only flowers return year after year, no toxicity, no degradation. What about the emotional and spiritual legacy? I would hope that the good work we do on this Earth, our words and our deeds, have a longer decay time than our physical legacy. But first and foremost, our work must be good, our deeds must be good, our thoughts and actions must be good.

What came first and the wisdom from the world

I hope to tie together a few threads of thought with this post today. I mentioned in a couple of posts (here and here) the fallacies and deficiencies of the current framework of "sustainability" thinking. What the dominant framework does is the following - it puts "economic" sustainability on the same footing as "social" sustainability and "environmental" sustainability. The global North, i.e. the agenda-setter and dominant rhetorical force, has successfully morphed the concept of "sustainability" to mean "sustainable development," the foundation of which are these deeply ingrained notions of what "economy" means (and you can read about that in those posts I've linked). At the very heart of this "economy" is the notion of technology, and the new. The new has come thick and fast in our world, and not a month goes by without us being bombarded with advertisements and images of what other people think is "good" for us. New knowledge is being successfully marketed and turned into products so that people can make money. In fact, it is this notion of new knowledge that the global North, and increasingly the large nations in the global South, thinks will get us out of this "sustainability" bind. But, with this new knowledge has come constantly increasing environmental degradation and biodiversity loss.


This world existed long before humans arrived on it. Epochs and eons have passed, species have gone extinct, and new forms of life have constantly evolved and appeared. A tree is the outcome of millions of years of slow and steady and constant evolution. A tree is a beautiful example of the outcome of a dynamic equilibrium; the tree has responded to changes happening so slowly that you cannot see them in happening now. These responses are delicately balanced, guaranteeing the survival of the tree. Such is the wisdom of from world. This wisdom stems from the dynamism of population and the unforgiving forces of air, land and water, driven by the sun. This is the wisdom that has led to the adaptation and evolution of rivers, lemurs, bats and snow leopards. With this wisdom, we realise that how these creatures have behaved and evolved has allowed them to fill a role and fill a place, just perfectly. This has inspired the greatest human thinking. Countless people have wondered about nature, and I hope we all have. The wisdom from the world has imprinted on Onwas and the Hadza, who have survived successfully for thousands of years, and are in tune with place and time. Yet with our definition of "economy," we have moved away from this natural wisdom, and are now desperately hoping we can get it back. But this wisdom exists, and is lying dormant. Our "economy" we feel is the best driver of human action, and is the only raison d'etre for human life. Some hope that the "economy," based on new knowledge, can lead to "sustainability." In effect, we have tried to, in a couple thousand years, tried to accomplish what it has taken everything else on Earth much longer to come to - a dynamic equilibrium, constantly evolving, yet inherently sustainable.

The ecologically noble savage

The Hadza appeared in the December 2009 issue of the National Geographic. In the wonderfully scripted article, Michael Finkel writes about one of the surviving hunter-gatherer tribes in Tanzania, the Hadza. This is a group that lives in the present. They do not have words for numbers greater than three, they "work" (i.e. hunt for food) four to six hours a day, and sleep when they want to. Finkel contends that they haven't adopted agriculture because it is so contrary to their present state of mind. Agriculture requires planning, and is inherently future-oriented. Yet, this group has survived for tens of thousands of years, and the Hadza speak an "isolated" language, Hadzane, one that has no relationship to any other language that exists in the world. Everyone eats the catch, and so the group can support no more than thirty or so members. The group is non-hierarchical. Members are free to leave and join other groups, and members of other groups are free to join theirs, but there seems to be population control as a function of the catch. Below are photos (by Martin Schoeller) I grabbed from the National Geographic's website. First is Onwas, the eldest member of the group. Next are some women working with baobab fruit, more important than the catch that men get. Last is Sangu, a young girl in the group. It seems to me that if these so-called "living fossils" are still surviving, tens of thousands of years on, eating bountifully and diversely (more so than say the average American), they have an understanding of their landscape, not only ecologically, but also as conservationists. The Hadza seem to fit almost all of the characteristics of a non-impactful people, or should I say a "non-trashing" people. Without a worry in the world, they don't have control over tomorrow, and don't want to think about tomorrow. If they want honey, they get honey from the beehives. If they want to eat a baboon, they find one, and make full use of it. They have resisted attempts by the government to "educate" them, and give them housing and "normal" jobs. Indeed, people from outside the bush have come to spend time with them during times of famine in Tanzania.

While having a conversation with Melissa last summer, I wondered out loud whether people of the past (or even of the present, like the Hadza) conserve the nature around them. Melissa mentioned that these people, that are potentially a figment of our imaginations, are termed "noble savages." Of course, it is clear these noble savages are/were more in tune with a particular landscape than a non-native, but does this understanding of their complex ecosystem compel them to make sure future generations enjoy the same bounty? We would all like to think so, and think of days when humans were one with nature. However, in the case of Native Americans, it seems like there is no evidence that they were any more conscious of conservation than the Europeans that killed them off. Krech claims that Native Americans were ecologists, but not conservationists. Indeed, the only conservation that did happen was "epiphenomenal," or conservation because people didn't have the means to not conserve. Since natives know (or knew) more about their surroundings, they used less of more, while non-natives used more of less. Yet once technologies from Europe, including guns, were introduced to Native Americans, they started over-harvesting, decimating local animal species, excluding beavers.

What do you think?