J.D.
Phillips
End
Notes
Wabash
Magazine
Fall,
2006
Is wilderness essential? What about economic opportunity and
self-determination? And how should we think about it when these two
compete, as they do in the Amazon Basin? I live in Indiana; I grew up
in Iowa and Nebraska. So I am from one of the most developed and
radically reshaped tracts of land in the entire world. There is no
wilderness left where I come from. None. There hasn’t been for
generations. We destroyed all of it. How can I—the economic beneficiary
of my culture’s mastery and domination of this land (I even worked my
dad’s farm when I was a boy)—muster the moral authority to even wish
that the Amazon’s people not be allowed to reap the economic benefits
that come from cutting more roads in the Amazon, from moving sandbars
to build more bridges across her rivers, from drilling more oil wells
in her virgin varzea forests? Well, I guess I don’t have the moral
authority to wish it; but still, I wish it. I can’t justify myself.
It’s hard not to feel strong, immediate, and
conflicting emotions as you travel through the Amazon Basin. The
landscapes and the wild things are so stunning that at times they even
seem improbable. But the indigenous villages seem dilapidated; the
people, destitute—shabby plywood houses with corrugated metal roofs; no
windows, just holes in the walls; no electricity or running water;
chickens and pigs wandering from hut to hut, wallowing in the mud. Just
think of it! It’s hard for us to make it through two weeks of this
without feeling like risk-taking adventurers, slathered as we are in
DEET, double-fisting malaria pills, arms still smarting from our
pre-trip immunizations, decked out in our latest LL Bean safari gear.
But these people live here, without any of this stuff to hedge their
bets, and in conditions far more “primitive” than the lodges we stay
in, which themselves are more primitive than anything back home.
Ah, so perhaps we should help these people? Yes,
that’s what we’ll do, we decide; we’ll help them. We’ll return next
year on a service-learning trip, a secular mission, if you will. Why
should we do this, I ask? “You just don’t understand, Dr. Phillips,” my
students answer. “We’ve done mission trips before. It feels good to
help other people.” (They are from this remarkable first generation of
students to come of age under the expectation that we will judge them
by their public service record, I remind myself.) So we should help
them so that we might feel good about ourselves? We should use these
people as a means toward the greater end of our own happiness? “Well,
um, these people really need our help; just look at them! If helping
them happens also to make us feel good, so what?” How can you tell they
need, or even want, our help? They seem happy, to me, happier, in fact,
than many of the scowling and rushed folks back home. And the young
people here, in the indigenous communities in the Amazon, seem
downright joyful.
Why do we love our own ways, our own customs, so
much that we think that other people want or need them? Are our ways
really that much better than theirs? Why not consider a
service-learning trip that brings a few of the indigenous people we’ve
met in the jungles back to Indiana, to teach us how to live in the
natural world without destroying it (not all of them want more roads),
to teach us how to be happy like them. Which is the better service
project? Honestly, I don’t know. But I do know that we need to know the
good before we can do the good; so that’s what we’ll work on.
And yet. . . I still have the almost
uncontrollable, visceral (and patronizing) desire to help these people,
commingling uncomfortably with my self-assertive desire for the Amazon
to remain untrammeled wilderness. As I said, I can’t justify myself. So
we traveled all the way to the Amazon—endured her exotic hardships, and
quivering, received her forgiving kiss—just to notice (mind you, just
to notice not to resolve) our own contradictory desires and
unrelenting, even tyrannical, self-assertion? Well, yes, that’s exactly
what we did.