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IN 1992, A MAN who was working in Papua New Guinea asked if he could drop by my house in Vancouver. Shortly after he arrived, Nick Fogg asked to go to the bathroom and stayed there for an inordinately long time, audibly ill. When he emerged, gray and weak, he told me he was having a malarial flare-up. Nevertheless, he managed to ask me whether I'd be interested in visiting the South Pacific country.
Nick worked for CUSO (formerly Canadian University Services Overseas and still known by the old acronym), a nongovernmental international developmental organization, and despite his alarming condition, I was immediately interested because I'd heard so much about the island nation from Richard Longley, the main researcher for the television series Science Magazine.
Richard was trained in England as a botanist and had taught for a number of years in Papua New Guinea. Long before I became involved in the TV program The Nature of Things, he was the contact person for CBC producer Nancy Archibald when she made a film there for that series. Richard eventually moved to Toronto, where he was hired to do research for the new series Science Magazine. In that capacity, he visited the University of British Columbia, where he interviewed me, and later I ended up being asked to host the show.
I had seen Nancy's program on Papua New Guinea, which showed some of the incredible variety of people and animals living on the island of New Guinea north of Australia. To bird-watchers, Papua New Guinea is famous for its fabled birds of paradise. I was thrilled with Nick's invitation, and I made the visit to Papua New Guinea in 1993. It is an awesome place, more than 80 percent of it covered with high mountains and deep valleys. At one point we flew into a large valley, where I could see five airstrips carved into the hills within a six-mile radius; the villages they serve are only a few minutes apart by air, but the valleys and dense forest between them take days to cover on foot. The isolation imposed by the rugged terrain has resulted in a profusion of cultures and over seven hundred languages, about 45 percent of the world's total.
Not long ago, neighboring tribes raided each other and practiced cannibalism, which perpetuated a terrible disease called kuru, for years thought to be hereditary. Famed population geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote a paper in Science magazine describing kuru as a disease caused by a dominant gene. However, Stanley Prusiner had earned a Nobel Prize in 1997 by showing that kuru was caused by a “slow virus” related to the prions causing BSE (mad cow disease) and the human counterpart, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Kuru, or “laughing disease,” was so named because its victims suffered facial muscle contractions that gave the appearance of a grotesque smile.
Kuru was transmitted primarily to children and women, who tended to be given the highly infective brains to eat while the men ate the preferred muscles, which carried far fewer of the causative agents. Christianity had ended the cannibalism and intertribal wars, and although I didn't like the way the religion had come to dominate Papua New Guinean cultures, it was hard to decry the abolition of the killing.
Party greeting me at the airport in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea
Nick had arranged for Indigenous Environment Watch, a group of native and nonnative environmentalists, to issue a formal invitation, which I immediately accepted, and the next time I was visiting Australia I flew in to Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea. When my plane landed and taxied toward the terminal, I peered out to see a crowd of children holding up flags and a large sign of welcome. “Must be a politician or someone important,” I remarked to my seatmate.
Imagine my surprise when the plane stopped and I saw that the sign said “Welcome Doctor Suzuki”! As I walked from the plane to the airport terminal, a man painted yellow and wearing an elaborate feather headdress, boars' teeth piercing his nose and hanging from his neck, and a grass skirt, and a bare-breasted woman who was also elaborately painted, greeted me and, dancing, led me to a room where I was waved through customs without a question. Then I was led to a car and whisked into town. Wow, wish I were met like that everywhere. It was just a hint of what was to come.
Papua New Guinea had been claimed by a succession of countries during the colonial period of the nineteenth century, from Holland and Britain to Germany and Australia, and received full independence from Australia only in 1975. Real European contact with the establishment of permanent European outposts and diplomatic relations goes back little more than a century, and many tribes had been contacted by white people only within the past few decades. In Port Moresby, I met an anthropologist named Nicholas Faraclas, who had worked and taught at the University of Papua New Guinea for many years. He has a great affection for the people and in 1997 wrote one of the most powerful pieces about them that I've read. Here is part of what he said:
Imagine a society where there is no hunger, homelessness or unemployment, and where in times of need, individuals can rest assured that their community will make available to them every resource at its disposal. Imagine a society where decision makers rule only when the need arises, and then only by consultation, consensus and the consent of the community. Imagine a society where women have control over their means of production and reproduction, where housework is minimal and childcare is available 24 hours a day on demand. Imagine a society where there is little or no crime and where community conflicts are settled by sophisticated resolution procedures based on compensation to aggrieved parties for damages, with no recourse to concepts of guilt or punishment. Imagine a society. . . in which the mere fact that a person exists is cause for celebration and a deep sense of responsibility to maintain and share that existence.
Such a place is not fiction, says Faraclas:
When the first colonisers came to the island of New Guinea, they did not find one society that exactly fit the above description. Instead, they found over one thousand distinct language groups and many more distinct societies, the majority of which approximated closely the above description, but each in its own particular way. These were not perfect societies. They had many problems. But after some one hundred years of “northern development”. . . nearly all of the real developmental gains achieved over the past 40,000 years by the indigenous peoples of the island have been seriously eroded, while almost all of the original problems have gotten worse and have been added to a rapidly growing list of new imported problems. (“Critical literacy and control in the new world order,” in Constructing Critical Literacies, edited by Sandy Muspratt, Allan Luke and Peter Freebody)
Nick Fogg had arranged for me to be flown to remote areas in the mountains and on the coast to meet people who were living traditionally but were under threat from illegal logging of their land. After staying overnight in Port Moresby, I was flown up into the mountains to Kokoda, where we landed on a grassy field. When the plane taxied to a stop, we were surrounded by a group of men wearing full body paint and spectacular regalia festooned with feathers, shells, and pigs' tusks. I was taller than all of them, but two of the men grabbed my legs and lifted me up on their shoulders. I was taken totally by surprise, and as I tried to twist upright, I threw my back out. I had a camera hanging around my neck and tried to get it into position as I struggled to stay upright without making my back hurt worse.
These two fellows were unbelievably strong and ran—not walked fast, ran—sweating and grunting as the others running along with us drummed and sang. I was bouncing up and down, feeling very, very uncomfortable, suffering jolts of pain up my spine while also trying to take pictures of this unique experience. The men ran all the way to a village about half a mile away, never once indicating I was too heavy or stopping for a rest. It was a wonderful relief to be put down.
In the village was a large outdoor stage where people gathered for meetings and entertainment. An elaborate dance with drumming and singing was performed for me, and then speeches were given in pidgin, which Nick translated for me. The people understood what the logging of the forest meant, a loss of their identity and traditions, but they also needed money for medicine and clothing like T-shirts and shorts. I gave a speech about what was happening around the world and how precious the forest was to this community. I emphasized that the people must retain control over their land and develop a community economic strategy that would allow them to generate an income without destroying their surroundings. I gave the speech in sentences that Nick translated into pidgin. The speech seemed to go over well, and I stayed overnight in a structure that was built above the ground on posts. Even there, what was impressive was the commonality of our humanity—these were people with whom I could laugh, eat, and communicate—yet I couldn't imagine the way they looked out at the world; culturally, it was as if we came from different parts of the universe.
Nick had arranged for a visit to a series of remote villages, which we reached by boat, plane, or jeep. Each village I visited entertained me with performances and plays the people had made. One play portrayed the arrival of Europeans, and the caricatures of the aliens were sidesplittingly funny. The performers were dressed in homemade costumes, and the white man was depicted as a clown, ordering the locals around and not having a clue about the tricks being played on him. I found it hilarious that the pompous visitor was so full of his own self-importance while the Papua New Guineans simply humored him, knowing he was a fool.
In one village, the inhabitants lined up to greet me after I had passed through a gate made of branches and leaves, signifying I had been welcomed onto their land. I shook hands along the line until I reached a young man who was covered from head to foot with what looked to me like a white fungal growth. I took a deep breath and shook his hand, assuming that whatever it was on his body must not be readily transmissible or he wouldn't have been there. Fortunately, my hand didn't develop any tropical rot and fall off.
In each village, I was treated generously, feted, and fed traditional foods. In one community, chicken, yams, and other root vegetables had been covered with leaves in a hole and a fire lit on top. Hours later, the meal was excavated and served—delicious.
Everywhere I went, people were spitting. This is disconcerting, because the spit is red from the eating of betel nuts, which also stain and etch cavities in the teeth. Nick told me the nuts—the seeds of betel palm—induce a pleasant buzz, but I was leery and never tried it. I wish I had, but I didn't want to stain my teeth. I was even more worried that to activate the drug in the plant, it has to be combined with a strong alkali that can burn the mouth. I didn't want to do that to my tongue or cheeks.
What you do is chew the nut to make a fibrous paste and then flatten it onto your tongue. The alkali formed by crushed, burned clam-shells is placed onto the bed of betel nut on your tongue. You fold the flattened betel nut around the clamshells, using your tongue and the roof of your mouth so the alkali doesn't burn anything, and then the whole mass is chewed and mixed. The mixture turns red and the active ingredient is created. The big question is, how did people ever figure out such an elaborate process?
Like the Kaiapo in the Amazon, the people in these remote villages were almost completely self-sufficient. The Nature of Things with David Suzuki broadcast a two-part series based on a remarkable exchange between a tribe in Papua New Guinea and a Salish First Nation community in British Columbia. First the Canadian group went to Papua New Guinea for several weeks, and the following year the Papua New Guinea group visited B.C. One of the Papua New Guineans commented that everything they had received while they stayed in B.C.—food, clothing, gifts—had to be bought with money that had to be earned. “When they visited us,” he said, “everything we used came from the land.”
Trying out the drum given to me by people in the Kakoda Mountains in Papua New Guinea
Nevertheless, the products of the industrial economy were visible in every Papua New Guinea village I saw, from metal pots and pans to woven cloth in shirts and pants to radios and chain saws. I kept thinking how different it must have been to go there in the 1950s and 1960s. That's when biologists like the Harvard ant expert E.O. Wilson, and the University of California (Los Angeles) bird authority Jared Diamond had studied in these wild lands. Having become an independent nation, Papua New Guinea must find a source of revenue for the government and bring the benefits of education and medical care to very remote communities. The challenge is to decide whether traditional customs and practices have value in a global economy and, if they do, how to protect them while generating incomes.
Ecotourism seemed to be an obvious potential source of revenue, since millions of people are avid bird-watchers and birds abound in the tropical forests. As well, the surrounding seas are crystal clear and teeming with fish, turtles, and coral. But I couldn't see how development of infrastructure—buildings, water, food, beds, blankets, and so on—and personnel could be organized without a huge disruption in traditional ways. In most villages, I slept above the ground on a platform covered with a floor of branches, and in one lovely location I slept right beside a glistening-white, sandy seashore. There would be enough people willing to rough it as I did, but it would be difficult to ensure there was food and first aid for cuts and infections, bites, and possible accidents.
I had been treated with great honor and respect and given gifts in each village as if I were royalty. After this tour of the villages, I returned to Port Moresby, where Nick had arranged for me to meet environmentalists. Many had fought against logging and mining, but there was great frustration because of the corruption of government officials. I couldn't figure out why people spoke so openly to me of their problems and asked me for advice, until I learned that there was some television reception in the city from Australia and that radio was big in the country. I learned that some of my programs and interviews had already been broadcast in Papua New Guinea.
In a speech in Port Moresby at the university, I suggested that by any objective assessment of natural resources—intact forests, abundant wildlife, clean water and air, rich oceans—Papua New Guineans must rate among the wealthiest people on Earth. The World Bank and transnational corporations were pressing them to adopt their ideas of progress and development; according to them, Papua New Guinea seemed poor. If Papua New Guineans could keep the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) off their backs, I said, they could define what development means to them in a way that fits their culture and thus chart their own way into the future.
My remarks were covered by the media, and on my last night in Port Moresby, I received a note in my room from Ajay Chibber, World Bank division chief for Indonesia and the Pacific Islands. He had heard a broadcast of some of my remarks about the World Bank and was most upset; he said I was completely misinformed and demanded to see me to set me straight.
At six o'clock the next morning, I met Chibber and Pirouz HamidianRad, a senior economist in the East Asia department of the World Bank. Chibber waded right in and said, “You and I are well off. We don't have the right to deny the poor people of the world an opportunity to improve their lives.” I agreed, but I asked who is really “poor” and how we define “improvement.” I suggested that the World Bank was forcing the so-called developing world to accept its definitions, that global economics overvalues human capital while ignoring the services of the natural world as “externalities.” That's why forests and rivers, for example, which have provided a living for people for millennia, have economic value as defined by people like Chibber only when humans “develop” them by cutting down the trees or damming the rivers. I suggested there are other ways of measuring wealth and progress, to which Chibber retorted, “People around the world are better off now than they have ever been. There's more food than ever before in history, and it's because of economic development.”
Chibber's statement encapsulated the belief that has concentrated wealth in a few hands while creating ecological degradation and poverty for many from Sarawak in Malaysia to Brazil to Kenya. I told him that leading scientists were warning about ecological disaster, to which he responded: “Scientists said twenty years ago there would be a major famine and large numbers of people would die. It never happened. They often exaggerate.” So he wrote off scientists as lacking credibility. I wrote about him in a column, which I later included in my book Time to Change, and was gratified to learn years later that he had been removed from his position after my visit, though he went on to other World Bank posts.
Typical regalia
The problem with groups like the IMF and World Bank is that everything is viewed through the perceptual lens of economics. Where people and communities have lived well through subsistence agriculture, fishing, and forestry for thousands of years, revenues are not generated for governments or corporations. By economics measures, countries that subsist traditionally become “developing” or “back-ward” and therefore “poor.” An example of the consequence of conventional economic “progress” is described by Richard J. Barnet and John Cavanagh in Global Dreams: Imperial Corporations and the New World Order: “Sabritos [the Mexican subsidiary of Frito-Lay, owned by PepsiCo] buys potatoes in Mexico, cuts them up and puts them in a bag. Then they sell the potato chips for a hundred times what they paid the farmer for the potatoes.”
After I returned to Canada, I soon received another invitation to Papua New Guinea, this time from women in a town called Wewak in East Sepik province. They were concerned about the loss of their forests and rivers and asked if I would visit. I am a sucker, and so I arranged to go to Papua New Guinea again on my next trip to Australia, in 1994. On that trip, I met Meg Taylor, a remarkable lawyer who later became the Papua New Guinean ambassador to the United States, Mexico, and Canada. She straddles two domains, traditional Papua New Guinea and the aggressive world of industry. I could sense the pull of each sphere on her, which perhaps reflected her background. Meg's mother was a Papua New Guinean, and her father was an Australian, the first white man to cross the island of New Guinea on foot; it is hard to imagine the difficulties he must have encountered, given that each valley is so cut off from the next that all evolved different languages and cultures. Meg remains a force in Papua New Guinea, but she has to weave her way between the traditional values of the country's cultures and the economic demands of industrialized nations.
In East Sepik, the women were desperate to retain their cultural and traditional ways and were upset because some of the chiefs were being lured by alcohol, women, and bribes to sign away their timber for a pittance. The money from cutting the trees wasn't reaching the ordinary people, and the forests were being stripped. I could only offer them suggestions on how communities might develop small-scale economies and relate to them the impact that I had seen Western economic development have on aboriginal people in Canada, Australia, and Brazil.
I was intrigued by Papua New Guinea, because it has one of the largest intact tropical rain forests left on the planet and is still occupied by the indigenous people who own the forests by law. The question is what will happen in the coming years. I promised to help by sending money from a fund I had set up in Australia from the profits of my books there. The women didn't ask for much, but they wanted a chance to develop markets for their traditional products.
These are the people whose men once wore amazing penis sheaths of many sizes and shapes, and these, I am sure, would be a tourist attraction. Papua New Guineans are excellent carvers, and if their costumes and feather, shell, and ivory necklaces and armbands could be sustainably made, they would be able to generate an income. I was introduced to a man who had developed a “walkabout” sawmill, a setup so light that a pair of men can carry it into the forest and mill a tree on the spot. The lumber can then be carried out manually, and it is valuable enough to make the effort worthwhile yet have a negligible impact on the forest. I kept remembering those two men who carried me on their shoulders as if I were a feather.
Dressed up to entertain
I felt there were alternatives to simply clearing the entire forest for those trees that have high market value, which is what Malaysian and Japanese companies are doing. We have to find ways of getting the money for that wood directly to the people who live in the forests. The resources belong to them, and they have the greatest stake in exploiting them in such a way that the forest will remain in perpetuity for future generations. If the head offices of the logging or mining operations are in Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur, or New York, profits are drained to them, leaving little but dribs and drabs for the people who will have to eke out a living with what is left.
In Wewak, I was taken by motorboat several miles out to sea to a small island. As we slowed and approached the beach, my hosts pointed into the clear water. Below I could see the carcasses of trees lying on their sides. “Those were once on land,” I was told, “but the water has risen and that's why they are there.” Was it thermal expansion of the water due to global warming, they asked me, but I didn't know. I was taken snorkeling in wonderfully clear and warm waters that were filled with fish, and I was thrilled to follow a large sea turtle that swam below me and gradually sank deeper and deeper until it disappeared. Ecotourism was a pretty sure bet here, I felt.
Throughout my visit, my emphasis was not that the people should stay frozen in the past. They must decide on the importance of their traditions and the attraction of economic growth. One of the pilots of a small plane Nick had arranged for me on my first visit had huge holes in his nose and ears, where he clearly wore large plugs in his off time. In the pilot's seat, his appearance seemed rather incongruous, but Papua New Guineans have computers, video cams, and all the other accoutrements of modern society. The question is whether they will slavishly follow the path of globalization, which is reducing cultural and biological diversity all over the world, or whether they will keep their culture and knowledge as the basis for finding a sustainable future.
William Takaku, environmental activist, artist, and actor,
who starred in the movie Friday with Pierce Brosnan
In my talks, I reiterated the priceless nature of their traditional knowledge, lore painstakingly acquired over thousands of years and, once lost, never recoverable. My message resonated strongly with the young activists I met, but not with the non-Papua New Guineans, who were there for the economic opportunities.
I was scheduled to meet various businesspeople, politicians, and other important folks for a breakfast on my last day. I was placed next to the governor general, a physically imposing Papua New Guinean who had no pretensions and was down to earth in his conversation with me. While he was eating, I looked at his profile and realized I could see through the cartilage of his nose between his nostrils. He must at some time have worn a nosepiece.
I was also scheduled to give a talk that would be broadcast live across Papua New Guinea, a terrific opportunity, because radio was (and is) still the principal means of communication. I gave what must have been an unusual, even radical, speech about the need for the people to decide for themselves what matters most to them and to protect that above all else. They shouldn't allow officials like the World Bank people to set the agenda for them. My talk was met with great enthusiasm.
Unknown to us, as my speech began, an Australian who was in mining in Papua New Guinea became so incensed that he drove to the radio station that was beaming my speech, walked in, and pulled the wires out of the console, stopping the broadcast! Blithely ignorant of this, I went to the airport after the broadcast and left the country. I heard only later that inflamed listeners called in, many saying the expat should be killed, and that he was subsequently kicked out of the country. In April 2005, I attended a conference of Pacific countries on tourism, held in Macao, where a Papua New Guinean came up to me and said, “I was there at your speech that morning.” Apparently it has become legendary.