Blog 10 Losing Cultural Diversity

Alex Clute
April 4, 2011
1100 EST

In an article in the Guardian entitled World's Race for Economic Growth Threatens Greeland's Pure, White Wilderness, Stephen Leonard discusses the disappearance of the Inuit culture as a result of receding sea ice and pressure from environmentalists. The Inuits are the indigenous population of Greenland and practice the remnants of a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Many making their living today with halibut fishing. This is accomplished by fishing through holes in the ice, the ice that is melting as a result of global warming. There have also been attempts by environmental groups, though none were named specifically, to limit their way of life. The Inuit themselves ask the question why so much attention is being paid to their way of life, which has far less impact on the planet than large-scale capitalist society.

In a previous article by Leonard, Greenland's Race for Minerals Threaten Culture on the Edge of Extinction, he relates how starving polar bears have been foraging in the trash middens around town and that it now unsafe to leave town without a rifle lest one become lunch for a hungry bear. But what truly has the Inuit concerned is the Greenland's government plan to extract the vast tracts of mineral wealth being laid bare as the glaciers melt and shipped over the newly ice-free polar region to China. Greenland's tiny population of 50,000 will not provide sufficient labor to run these operations, so large number of people will have to be brought in from elsewhere, creating fears in the Inuit that they will be swamped and displaced by the newcomers.

Once again traditional societies will be pushed aside to make way for the wholesale liquidation of the Earth's resources. Now, however, the very process set in motion by human burning of fossil fuels and industrial production is paving the way for further exploitation as the ice melts. All over the world traditional societies are being absorbed into the global monoculture when we should be attempting to learn from them and support them as alternatives to this over consumptive and unsustainable way of life. There is much that can be learned from indigenous people, who have learned to survive in various environments in a fashion that does not exceed to carrying capacity of the environment. This is not to say that indigenous cultures should be held perennially in a state of "pristineness" by paternal institutions, likely residing in the First World. Rather indigenous cultures should be given the choice of what they wish to take away from other cultures. We should recognize that there is much we can learn from indigenous peoples and that we have no right to come along a erase their ways in which they live.