SPECIAL REPORT: GLOBALIZATION
Sometimes the relentless march of progress hits a wall. Matthew Yeomans tours the four corners of the unwired world.
Globalization has come to symbolize the ideals and the evils of modern progress. It's the dream of a unified world without war and physical borders, and it's the nightmare of people stripped of identity. It's the desire for one economy without barriers to trade, and it's the dread of a world reduced to one giant sweatshop. And more and more, globalization is a coy code word for the power that propels it - a US-dominated economic and cultural juggernaut that reaches virtually every corner of the planet.
In his 1989 novel, The Storyteller, Mario Vargas Llosa wrote about a Peruvian Indian tribe, the Machiguengas. They were known as "the men that walked" because, when faced with danger from the outside world - first from Spanish conquistadors and later the Western rubber barons - they retreated farther into the rain forest. Increasingly, however, running away is not an option. By definition, globalization is everywhere; there are few places to hide. So rather than retreating, some communities remain and resist.
The Taliban notoriously created an elaborate regime of social regulation that walled its people off from the West. But there are plenty of less extreme groups seeking to insulate themselves. Opposition to the erosion of age-old values is apparent in protests at Genoa and Seattle. It is demonstrated by French farmers irate over imported hormone-treated beef. It is expressed by Bedouin families in the Sahara who are losing their sons to cities and by Latin American mom-and-pop companies whose futures are tied to the whims of the US stock market. From Mennonite communities in Pennsylvania to the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, cultures are defining how much of modernity they will and won't let in.
What follows is a journey to explore this resistance, to put faces on the range of complaints we conveniently lump together as anti-globalization. The first destination is the Ethiopian city of Lalibela, the spiritual home of the country's Orthodox church. Untouched for centuries, Lalibela is flirting with the modern world in the form of tourism while still hoping to maintain the city's sacred character. The next stop is Hawaii and the island of Niihau, where the locals have chosen to live closed off from the world. The third foray is to Ecuador, where the Shuar and Achuar communities have banned oil companies from drilling on their lands. And last, we head to Italy, where the growing Slow Cities movement is curbing the Western onslaught right at the center of it all.
__LALIBELA, ETHIOPIA __
__KEEPING THE FAITH __
High in the Lasta mountains of Northern Ethiopia, Lalibela has been hidden for 800 years. In the 10th century, its king drew on the lessons of Jerusalem's fate and vowed to embody the Christian Scriptures in something that couldn't be destroyed - 11 new churches hewn from solid rock.
King Lalibela's churches, carved into the mountainside, still stand - some sunken 36 feet into the ground. And little else has changed: The city is still largely locked in the medieval era of its religious founding. This is partly due to poverty - Lalibela is one of the poorest parts of one of the poorest countries in the world. But Lalibela also clings to the past by design.
Twenty-six million Ethiopian Orthodox Christians - just less than half the country's population - consider the site their spiritual home. Pilgrims have been making the journey here for centuries, drawn by its timeless sanctity. But now they are increasingly joined by outsiders: Some 15,000 foreign tourists made it to Lalibela last year, each paying 100 birr (about $10, or a tenth of the average Ethiopian's annual income) to enter the churches. With the money comes both the opportunity and pressure for development. Some Lalibelans already have paved roads, electricity, and running water, and many others would like the same.
But the politically powerful priests and monks of Lalibela - who dress in traditional white robes and conduct services in Ge'ez, the linguistic forerunner to Amharic, Ethiopia's national language - resist much of the change. They worry that the sons of Lalibela's clergy - who automatically enter the church, training as deacons from age 7 or 8 before being ordained as teenagers - will be lured away from holy work by Western promises. Leaders object to the increasing presence of Western visitors, the new airport, proposed hotels, and a growing taste for satellite television. Devoted to spiritual practices that have inspired millions of Christians, Lalibela's priests unstintingly guard their Eastern faith, along with the ornamental crosses and ancient tablets that have remained in the city for centuries.
But it gets harder all the time: The very qualities the leaders are trying to preserve are those that make Lalibela attractive to tourists, and all that they bring with them.
__NIIHAU, HAWAII __
__THE FORBIDDEN ISLAND __
Seventeen miles off the coast of Kauai lies the small island of Niihau. Like the rest of Hawaii, the Forbidden Island, as it has come to be known, is part of the United States. Its roughly 200 residents pay taxes and vote in elections; some serve in the US military. But there integration ends: Niihau has no telephones, no running water, no paved roads, and only four cars. The islanders have radios and some own TVs and VCRs, but even then connection to the outside world is difficult. The island has no electrical grid. Residents rely on gas generators and solar power.
There is one explanation for how Niihau has remained isolated from modern society. For nearly 150 years, it has been under the private ownership of a single family, the Robinsons, descendants of Scottish settlers who bought the island from King Kamehameha IV in 1863 for $10,000 in gold. An intensely private family of strict Calvinist Christians, the Robinsons established the social and moral rules that all Niihauans agree to abide by if they want to stay. There is no smoking, no drinking, no adultery. Most important is a rule that's proved to be Niihau's most effective defense - no outsiders can visit Niihau without the Robinsons' permission.
Why do people who live in a nation obsessed with materialism and individual rights accept the strange paternalism of Niihau? The Robinsons are not so much oppressors, says one native, Ilia Beniamina, as they are buffers against a threatening, unfamiliar world. While islanders are free to come and go - and many do, sometimes resettling on neighboring Kauai - most return to the hard but serene life on Niihau, where they can speak the ancient Hawaiian language, live rent free, and tap a ready supply of fish, pig, and sheep. As the island's heir, Keith Robinson, puts it, Niihauans prefer this hideout that long ago "slammed its door."
__MORONA-SANTIAGO, ECUADOR __
__FIGHT FOR THE AMAZON __
Flying over the virgin Amazon rain forest of southeast Ecuador, you see a green carpet that stretches as far as the eye can follow. There are no roads, no trucks, no pollution. This is the homeland of Ecuador's Shuar and Achuar communities, who have lived here for centuries, hunting javarino and guangana, fishing for bocachica, growing yuca and plantains, and using the plants of the forest for their spiritual and medicinal effects.
That almost changed three years ago, when the indigenous people of the Morona-Santiago province came face-to-face with the Atlantic Richfield Company. ARCO had won a drilling concession from the Ecuadoran government. Called Block 24, the concession sits on 500,000 acres of Achuar and Shuar land. Convinced that the company and its successor, Burlington Resources, would poison their rivers, take their land, and destroy their future, the leaders of the Achuar and Shuar fought back. They organized their numerous, far-flung villages into a coalition, and through adept legal maneuvering - and brute force - succeeded in infuriating and eventually thwarting Big Oil. At one point, five people working for ARCO were severely beaten, according to a key activist group in the region. At another point, when ARCO reps flew into the region to state their case, residents formed a human barricade across their grass airstrip. Then, in August 1999, representatives of the indigenous groups sued ARCO - and won. Near the end of 1999, the company sold its concession to Burlington and later pulled out of Ecuador altogether.
Burlington hasn't fared much better. "The company knows," says Juana Sotomayor, a lawyer for the Quito-based Centro de Derechos Económicos y Sociales, "that if the Achuar and Shuar stay together, they are willing to die for their territory."
__SLOW CITIES, ITALY __
__REMAIN CALM __
In 1986, Italian journalist Carlos Petrini founded the Slow Food movement, protesting the arrival of the first McDonald's in Rome and what he presciently identified as the surge of a global fast-food culture. In 1999, Slow Food spawned Slow Cities, a collective of four municipalities: Orvieto in Umbria, Positano on the Amalfi Coast, Bra in Piedmont, and Greve in Chianti. Today, there are 30 Slow Cities, and 40 more towns have requested membership.
What Slow Cities proposes is a design for living aimed at urban centers of fewer than 50,000 people. It's a movement that's saying basta to endless rush hours, drive-through cuisine, and multinational branding. Slow Cities stresses environmental policies that create public green spaces and promote new ways to dispose of garbage. All members share a commitment to restoring older parts of their cities before agreeing to expand into new areas. They discourage chain stores and fast-food franchises as well as the use or production of any genetically modified agriculture.
By building local pride in a town's artisan traditions of cheese-making, ham-curing, or plain old ironwork, Slow Cities hopes to shore up local economies and give residents an alternative to moving to the major cities. Ultimately, it plans to form a network of locales that can compete with the major metropolises in the global economy. To that end, all of the cities agree to work together - often in small subgroups - to find solutions to urban problems.
So far, most Slow Cities initiatives are still being drawn up. But Greve has been successful in building free parking lots on the outskirts of the town center to control traffic; it has persuaded competing cellular phone companies to share just one central antenna; and it has nixed any new building that places a strain on its small-town infrastructure.
Plus it has improved school lunches. Despite higher costs, Slow Cities' schools are countering the junk-food threat by incorporating taste education into lesson plans and serving local cured meats and cheeses in the lunchroom - fighting globalization one antipasto at a time.
