Re: [pf] Fork in the evolution road

by Betsy Barnum

21 December 2000 17:52 UTC

Jill Taylor Bussiere wrote:

>  In 1985,
> Ethiopie's bilateral government aid donors were still talking (at least
> among themselves) of pressuring the government to abondon its teff seed for
> modern high-yielding corn.

Jill, and anyone else who has read The Poisonwood Bible (a novel), doesn't this
remind you of the father's insistence that he was going to teach the backward
Africans how to grow food in gardens? His ways were, of course better--they
obviously knew very little! First he ignored the native woman's effort to tell
him to plant everything in hills, and at the first storm his garden washed away.
Then he replanted his tomatoes and peas and carrots only to find that the
pollinators in the Congo were not interested in these crops, so they didn't
produce any food.

Yet, he was so insistent that his way was the right way, so unwilling (and
unable) to learn from the local practices by which people had been feeding
themselves for thousands of years, as well as unable to understand that he had
anything at all to learn from them, that he finally drove himself crazy!

A microcosm of Western disregard for indigenous culture and knowledge. Would
these Western "experts" see themselves at all in this character, if they read
Kingsolver's book?

Betsy

--
Betsy Barnum
bbarnum@wavetech.net
http://www.geocities.com/RainForest/1624

**************************************
I can think of no greater task for activists today than to study
the reasons why so many common people, surely a majority,
objected to the ratification of the Constitution.

--Jerry Fresia, Toward An American Revolution