• Ecosystem health, our health
• Affluence without abundance: the hunter-gatherers --a sound road to health?
• Sketches of personal experience with tree life
• Laos: In the cooking pot - indigenous Katu diet and livelihoods
• The Second People’s Health Assembly

Ecosystem health, our health

The forest is the cradle of biodiversity, that is to say, the origin of life. When the forest is healthy, water springs from it, the air is purer and more fragrant, we can obtain shelter from its many resources, it gives us food, art is expressed in the myriad of colours and hues that are cyclically unfolded and concealed and in the midst of all this beauty and prodigality, it is possible in some way to feel the love that nature shares with all its beings.

We, as individuals of the human species are also part of this ecosystem insofar as we are interrelated with it; not only the indigenous peoples that inhabit the forest, but also the inhabitants of cities, of deserts and hills depend on forests, on the fundamental role they fulfil on the planet. However, at some time in history, processes started taking place that separated us, very often wiping out the memory of the systems’ eco. And thus, we allowed health to stay outside us.

This is why talking about the defence of forests is talking about health. However, it is also pertinent to define what health we are referring to when we talk about health.

Very often health is equated to the absence of disease and the way to achieve it is based on medical care and/or drugs. Thus, when talking about the right to health in general the reference is to the right to have access to medicine – the official and dominating one – and its resources. The indicators register quantitative data – the number of doctors and hospitals per inhabitant, birth, death and nutritional state indicators, descriptions of the distribution of infectious or chronic diseases – in order to measure the health of a population.

In this neo-liberal stage of capitalism we are living in, – like so many other things – health has become merchandise. Laboratories and the pharmaceutical industry grow in the shadow of wars and, brandishing the flag of peace and health, they assault the forest and appropriate the curative properties of its plants and trees, benefiting gratuitously from the knowledge accumulated by the communities through trial and error, generation after generation. The healing properties of forest products, formerly free, have been patented, bottled, labelled and marketed by companies, at a high cost for the consumers.

The indigenous peoples’ concept of health is in general holistic and dynamic. For the Amazonian Matsigenkas from the Urubamba River basin in Peru, health is being healthy and feeling well and in this, physical health is only one of the elements. For them “being healthy” reflects aspects of life that western science could separate into biological, environmental, social and psychological aspects and not only bio-medical ones. Affected by the Camisea Gas Project -a group of consortia devoted to the exploitation and transportation of gas in the Urubamba River basin (see WRM bulletin No. 62)- the Matsigenkas relate the worsening of their state of health to the new anxieties and social conflicts that have arisen with the “development” of the area (the repeated efforts since the beginning of the eighties to find and exploit hydrocarbons), the dramatic social changes that have taken place and the effort to maintain their values and their ways of life.

In Mexico, for the Mixes of Santo Domingo de Tepuxtepec, for the Zapotecos of San Juan Tabaá, for the Chatinos of Nopala, the energies of nature are understood as having an influence and being responsible for the health of the surroundings and the community – consequently, of individuals too. Their culture is deeply related to nature, understood simultaneously as the natural and supernatural worlds. For them, the hill is their life; the trees are brothers; the forest is a place to respect; flowers and plants are sources of help to cure; water is the blood that nurtures their fields; the rocks are protection and strength; the sun is the father of life; the earth is the mother who gives what is necessary to live. Around these images of surroundings are all the spiritual elements inherited from their forefathers and learnt as children in the bosom of their families and their community. When all this is in balance, there is health - that is the way they see it.

One of the definitions of the World Health Organization states “Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing and not only the absence of illness or disease.” This is a concept that implies a major step forward with respect to the limitation that equated health with access to medical care. However, it is worth asking what State puts this into practice in its health policies. And, up to what point, do the policies and positions of WHO itself represent a vision in which the absence of disease is inextricably united to economic, political and socio-cultural factors?

On the other hand, the WHO definition offers a general framework that can be acceptable to many cultures, but it does not cover the specific habitats and health traditions of the Planet’s diverse cultures. For example, the concept of mental health varies. For many indigenous peoples, persons who hear the spirits talk are looked at with reverence and live with the community. However, in western and urban culture, they are qualified as schizophrenic, medicated and perhaps confined to a psychiatric institution.

When meeting for the first time, the indigenous peoples of various cultures are amazed because they share the same basic originating culture, in spite of the fact that they have major differences. They consider that what makes them different from the dominating western society is a relationship with nature, in which they are not outside it but a comprehensive part of it, together with the notion that there can be no economic interest above the need to preserve ecosystems because the bonanza of the present cannot be achieved through the desolation of the future.

In western societies, or in societies that have been invaded and impregnated by their dominating vision, “developmentism” places human beings outside Nature and even against it and health problems are addressed by fragmented science, increasingly backing commercial interests and parading a dominating attitude.

The recovery of ecosystem thinking, thinking in function of the health of the ecosystems, enables us to understand that peoples’ health and life are related with the health of all the ecosystem’s components: soil, water, flora, fauna, air and of course, human beings, with their social, political, economic and environmental relationships. This notion of interrelationship produces ethics that are different from those of the dominating system, ethics that respect life. And also a rationale that obliges the focus of policies, strategies and plans to be centred on ecosystem health.

By Raquel Núñez, WRM, e-mail: raquelnu@wrm.org.uy, based on information from: “Salud de los ecosistemas. Un pensamiento articulador”, Julio Monsalvo, http://www.altaalegremia.com.ar/; “La salud de los pueblos indígenas y el Proyecto de Gas de Camisea”, Report for AIDESEP, Dora Napolitano, Carolyn Stephens, http://www.lshtm.ac.uk/pehru/communities/camisea-salud.pdf; Medicine Keepers: Issues in Indigenous Health, Lori A. Colomeda and Eberhard R. Wenzel, http://www.ldb.org/indheal.htm

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Affluence without abundance: the hunter-gatherers --a sound road to health?

In an attempt to build or recall a holistic vision of health as a balanced condition where the joy of living can emerge, it may be relevant to think over different sorts of living –very different from the allegedly advanced western modern life: hunter-gatherers, for example.

Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it, the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's - in which all the people's material wants were easily satisfied.

There are two possible courses to affluence: wants may be "easily satisfied" either by producing much or desiring little.

The familiar conception based on the concept of market economies states that human beings’ wants are great, not to say infinite, whereas their means are limited, although they can be improved. Thus, the gap between means and ends can be narrowed by industrial productivity, at least to the point that "urgent goods" become plentiful. But there is also a road to affluence which states that human material wants are finite and few, and technical means unchanging but on the whole adequate. Adopting this strategy, a people can enjoy an unparalleled material plenty - with a low “standard of living” from a Western viewpoint.

The traditional dismal view of the hunters' fix goes back to the time Adam Smith was writing, and probably to a time before anyone was writing. Maybe it was one of the first distinctly neolithic prejudices. Current low opinions of the hunting-gathering economy need not be laid to neolithic ethnocentrism. The existing business economy will promote the same dim conclusions about the hunting life.

Is it so paradoxical to contend that hunters have affluent economies, their utmost lack of possessions notwithstanding? Modern capitalist societies, however richly endowed, dedicate themselves to the proposition of scarcity. Inadequacy of economic means is the first principle of the world's wealthiest peoples. The market-industrial system institutes scarcity, in a manner completely without parallel.

Scarcity is the judgment decreed by the capitalist economy. And it is precisely from this anxious vantage that we look back upon hunters. Yet scarcity is not an intrinsic property of technical means. It is a relation between means and ends. We should entertain the empirical possibility that hunters are in business for their health, a finite objective, and that bow and arrow are adequate to that end.

For most hunters, such affluence without abundance need not be long debated. A more interesting question is why they are content with so few possessions for it is with them a policy, a "matter of principle", and not a misfortune. But are hunters so undemanding of material goods because they are themselves enslaved by a food quest "demanding maximum energy from a maximum number of people", so that no time or effort remains for the provision of other comforts? Some ethnographers testify to the contrary that the food quest is so successful that half the time the people seem not to know what to do with themselves. On the other hand, movement is a condition of this success, more movement in some cases than others, but always enough to rapidly depreciate the satisfactions of property. Of the hunters it is truly said that their wealth is a burden. In their condition of life, goods can become "grievously oppressive".

Mobility and property are in contradiction. That wealth quickly becomes more of an encumbrance than a good thing is apparent even to the outsider.

The hunters, one is tempted to say, are "uneconomic" human beings. At least as concerns non subsistence goods, they are the reverse of that standard caricature immortalised in any General Principles of Economics, page one. Their wants are scarce and their means (in relation) plentiful. Consequently they are "comparatively free of material pressures", have "no sense of possession", show "an undeveloped sense of property", are "completely indifferent to any material pressures", manifest a "lack of interest" in developing their technological equipment.

From the internal perspective of the economy, it seems wrong to say that wants are "restricted", desires "restrained", or even that the notion of wealth is "limited". Such phrasings imply in advance an Economic Human Being and a struggle of the hunters against their own worse nature, which is finally then subdued by a cultural vow of poverty. The words imply the renunciation of an acquisitiveness that in reality was never developed, a suppression of desires that were never broached. It is not that hunters and gatherers have curbed their materialistic "impulses"; they simply never made an institution of them."

A good case can be made that hunters and gatherers work less than we do; and, rather than a continuous travail, the food quest is intermittent, leisure abundant, and there is a greater amount of sleep in the daytime per capita per year than in any other condition of society.

The world's most “primitive” people have few possessions, but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Free from market obsessions of scarcity, hunters' economic propensities may be more consistently predicated on abundance than our [Western] own.

A holistic vision of health could well imply probing into the sheer basis of our societies, in a quest not only for health but for healthy societies. In that sense, for many living in modern “affluent” societies, the simple and plain freedom from whatever need may be a sound road to health.

By Raquel Núñez, WRM, E-mail: raquelnu@wrm.org.uy, based on excerpts and adaptations from: “The Original Affluent Society”, Marshall Sahlins, http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html

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Sketches of personal experience with tree life

“We are shown that our life exists with the tree life, that our well-being depends on the well-being of the Vegetable Life …” is what I read over and over again in the “Message to the Western World” sent by the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy -from the northwest of the North American continent- to the United Nations in 1977.

Reading and re-reading this document time and time again causes a sensation of finding myself before a revealing message. Today I would like to share some of the personal experience that was generated by my becoming aware that my welfare, my health, my life itself are all related to the life of trees, to the life of forests.

The mulberry tree in the patio of my home: I relate intensely with this mulberry tree that in my eyes rises high in the patio of my home. I am so young that I do not go to school yet and so I have all that potential that children have “before they are taken” to be tamed through that so-called “formal education.” I live fascinating adventures. I talk to the mulberry tree and it answers me. Sometimes it is the tree that talks to me. It suggests ideas, it shows me marvellous maps drawn on its leaves, it advises me how to make my tree-house among its branches from boxes that I have begged from a man who comes round selling vegetables in a little cart pulled by a mule through the mud streets of the humble neighbourhood of that big city where I live.

Installed among its branches I am very close to the sparrows and hummingbirds. The butterflies are my friends. I feel that the mulberry tree and I vibrate together when I hug its trunk and I grab its branches to climb higher and from there I see a different world.

Now I am not such a child. I am moving to another house wanting to make my own nest. Before leaving I look at the mulberry tree. We don’t say anything…we just look at each other. .

It is the morning of a day following many others on the calendar. It is almost midday. I see that they are taking out the mulberry tree, cut into several pieces. I ask why they have killed it. They tell me that its roots were lifting up the mosaics of a gallery. Something breaks inside me and I feel pain, a lot of pain.

The Western Chaco: we are in 1976. State terrorism has taken over with the power to decide on the life and death of everyone in Argentina. After a quick family council, I decide not to leave the country. In a sort of “internal exile” I move to the Western Chaco with part of my family.

I started working in an institution that was developing a project with the communities of the Toba-Qom originating peoples. I travel inside the Chaco forests with young Qom members. I am amazed by the “Algarrobo” forests.

I discover that trees have a spirit. It is a slow, soft discovery. It is a colossal discovery that teaches me daily sharing with the Qom people. I understand with amazement and happiness that I am beginning to unlearn many things and apprehending others that become the most important and transcendental things in my life.

I perceive the “value” of the “algarrobo” tree. I say the “value” and not the “price” of the “algarrobo”. This differentiation between “value” and “price” is what makes me aware of the essential values of the two cultures that live together in this scenario.

One of these, the dominating one, puts a “price” on everything, subtly obliging the members of the other culture, the dominated Qom, those who value everything, to destroy the native forests, particularly the Algarrobo forests. For this timber has been given a “good price.” A sawmill has been installed and a carpenter’s shop to make furniture. This furniture is not intended for the homes of Qom families but to be sold to the “big city” in the framework of a developmental conception and under the rational of “we are so good that we give work to these poor people.”

I feel pain over this imposition that I see and suffer and feel pain over the murdered algarrobo trees, a pain like I felt when I saw my mulberry tee cut into pieces. And thus this story is woven, my story, learning and unlearning, in a direct and very strong way, what love for plants is.

In the country of my interior silences: it is the beginning of the nineties…I am in the south of Chile on the Isla de los Ciervos. It is private property belonging to Don Giorgio who lives in Italy and once a year visits the Island. Don Giorgio does not want the Island to be contaminated. For example, the water is supplied to the dwelling by gravity. No motors are used. Don Alonso and his 17 year-old son, “Patito” are the only inhabitants.

We are very cordially received and taken along paths where enormous trees are columns holding up a continuous canopy of branches. From time to time the canopy opens and the sky presents us with its varied hues an infinity of blues, while the leaves dance with lights and shadows. Cascades of coigue trees with their strong red colouring, sparks of life, illuminate this Temple of Nature. Flowers of all colours peek out from the moss, between the branches and trunks, spilling their perfume and adorning this happy sanctuary of life in all its splendour.

We walk in silence. This silence enables us to enjoy the choral symphony of songs and murmurs of birds and rivers that slide along, fertilizing the land. The soil talks to me. The soil is alive. The elasticity of this soil, covered in a carpet of moss, ferns, leaves, and petals invites me to share its vital vibrations. My intuition tells me that I am barely beginning to understand the dialogue of the Originating Peoples with Mother Earth. Suddenly I find two enormous trees, two formidable columns that share the same roots. I am absorbed by something I had never seen before. Patito sees that I am overwhelmed. With a smile he approaches me and says “See? They both share the same root! For me, here underground, all the roots are shared…”

Here, in the country of my interior silences, in my bodies I listen again to what “Patito” told me. I relive the impact of his words. I relive my feelings of solidarity with life, my feelings of belonging, all us beings belong to each other. We are Nature. We “inter-are”, a beautiful new word that tells me that I am in the other - that I am in all living beings.

The wealth of cultural biodiversity teaches me to unlearn and to apprehend. Life has given me to get to know various Originating Peoples’ cultures. I discover that they all have something in common: they feel they belong to Nature. They all feel this belonging, all…except western culture. I become aware that I was born and bred in a culture with an anthropocentric paradigm that gives priority to “man” (the macho man) as a superior being. From these cultures I understand that the centre is in life, in every form of life, that its paradigm is bio-centric. In this paradigm centred on life is the one in which today, I feel that I am in the world.

The child who was wise talking with his mulberry tree was taken to “school” and to many schools…however… I feel that this wise mulberry tree has had a lot to do with this child never letting the flame of rebelliousness die, they were never able to tame him and thus he came, with his pores wide open to find the wisdom of the Peoples that have always been here, that live in harmony, cooperate, with an ethic of solidarity.

Today I feel-think that I am a Forest and that my health, my whole life, is thanks to tree life.

By Julio Monsalvo, e-mail: alta_alegremia@yahoo.com.ar

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Laos: In the cooking pot - indigenous Katu diet and livelihoods

Like many other Indigenous Peoples, the Katu in Laos depend on the forests for their livelihoods. Living in the heavily forested Annamite Mountains near the Vietnamese border, the Katu in Laos practise shifting cultivation and hunt and gather much of their food, fibres, medicines and building materials in the forest. Until recently, that is.

A new study of four Katu villages in Sekong province in the southeast of Laos describes the impacts that a deteriorating environment and restrictions on traditional livelihoods are having on Katu people's diets, health, culture and livelihoods.

Jutta Krahn, a nutritionist at the Department of World Food Economics at Bonn University in Germany, spent two years documenting exactly what the Katu eat. Two of the villages she looked at, Ban Tham Deng and Ban Thong Kai in Kaleum district, are surrounded by forest. The other two, Ban Kandon Mai and Ban Nongbong in Thateng district, are near roads in severely degraded forest but with access to markets and governmental services.

Krahn recorded about 700 plants and animals that were part of the Katu's traditional diet. Her research showed that in the early 1960s the Katu ate a varied range of fruit, vegetables and wild meat which met their nutritional requirements. Today, the Katu eat more rice but less wild meat, root and tuber crops, and less starchy "filling foods" like coarse grains and maize.

Traditional preparation and flavouring techniques are disappearing, which leads to reduced nutrients in food. For example, explains Krahn, the Katu traditionally cooked small animals or birds by mashing the meat with all the bones and cartilage in a bamboo tube which they simmered over the fire. "This kind of minced meat contains a lot of calcium and iron. If you prepare the same food in another way the minerals would not be as easily absorbed."

Krahn found that the Katu's intake of iron, zinc, calcium, B-vitamins, fat and protein is lower than in the past. Children in all the villages Krahn studied suffered from high levels of stunting and wasting and many were underweight. The introduction of wetland rice production has not replaced the loss of dry rice production in swidden fields. Growing vegetables and fruits has not substituted reduced harvest rates of wild vegetables and fruits.

The Katu living in Ban Tham Deng and Ban Thong Kai have a better diet than those living close to markets. "The villages in the forest had a considerably higher intake of wild meat and also of fruit and vegetables," says Krahn. "In both villages which were close to the market, Ban Nongbong and Ban Kandon Mai, there were families which only had meals twice a day."

The Katu are facing new health problems, including malaria and worm infestations, which they say are much worse than in the past.

Krahn believes that the impacts of the US bombing and spraying of defoliants during the war against Vietnam urgently need further investigation. Katu villagers told her that at the beginning of the war the fish died and floated belly-up in the rivers. They told her of abnormalities with their cattle and mothers whose children had birth defects. Krahn is worried that "dioxins and furans are persistent in the ecosystem. I believe that they are still present."

Logging is rampant in Sekong province, threatening the Katu's forests. In 2002, according to a report by Charles Alton, a UN consultant, and Houmphan Rattanavong, of the Lao National Science Council, a company arrived in Ban Tham Deng with a pile of what seemed to be official documents and started logging. Then loggers came and started cutting Aquilaria trees. Aquilaria trees are highly valued for their resin which is used to produce medicine, incense and perfume. In 1999 to 2000, rattan in Ban Tham Deng was cut "almost to the point of complete destruction" write Alton and Houmphan. In each case, villagers in Ban Tham Deng received nothing.

Krahn suggests a new approach to "food security strategies" in Laos is needed, one which puts more attention on cultural aspects of food and nutrition, as well as the environment.

"My starting point," she says, "would be the different ethnic groups, their food cultures, cuisines and their diet. Because there is no information both the government and the development organisations focus too much on food production, especially wetland rice. I would say that the government and development organisations could balance this by facilitating more research and detailing the food security concepts for the various ethnic groups and different geographical locations."

It's important to look at food quality as well as quantity. Working at the "cooking pot" with Katu women, who are responsible for the health of their family, would bring additional results in terms of optimising nutrient intake, says Krahn.

By Chris Lang, e-mail: chrislang@t-online.de
Jutta Krahn can be contacted at jukrahn@gmx.de A summary of her report on the Katu is available here: http://www.wrm.org.uy/countries/Laos/Katu.html

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The Second People’s Health Assembly

From 17 to 23 July in Cuenca, Ecuador, over 1,300 participants from 80 countries in the five continents met under the slogan of “The voices of the Earth are calling” to analyze global health problems and to draw up health promotion strategies for all. The final declaration at the end of the event identifies neo-liberal policies transferring wealth from the South to the North, from the poor to the rich and from the public sector to the private sector, as the main cause of the worsening of the health conditions of the majority of the world population. Privatization of public assets and “free trade” the brand of neo-liberalism, rely on the World Trade Organization (WTO) and International Financial Institutions to control factors affecting health. In a world where racism, oppression of women, social exclusion, generation of poverty, wars, individualism and increasingly intense and accelerated destruction of the environment prevail, there cannot be health.

The links of health with those other factors led to various poles of discussion being established at the event, inter alia such as: health and the environment, inter-culturality and health, equity and the health of the population, trade and health, health in the hands of the people. Within the issue of health and environment, the World Rainforest Movement (WRM), addressed the link of health with climate change and deforestation.

The Second People’s Health Assembly appealed to the peoples of the world to mobilize themselves and face the assault on the right to health and to defend it through a wide-ranging mass mobilization, linking it with struggles for the right to water, defence of the environment, food sovereignty, gender equality, the right to a decent job and housing and universal education. Through these struggles of resistance, a vision of a socially and economically more just world is proposed, where peace and respect prevail in an intercultural context, incorporating diverse knowledge, where people celebrate life, nature and diversity.

The WRM supports this appeal, which follows the lines that led it to work in the World Social Forum for the integration of social movements that are already building other possible worlds, from themselves and their sovereignty, linking with others.

In our defence of forests, in our resistance to public policies that impact on them (and on us), we support those popular processes that are taking back issues into their own hands, such as community forest management within the Mumbai Forest Initiative (see WRM bulletin No. 78); climate change within the Durban Group (see WRM bulletin No. 89), and health within the People’s Health Assembly.

By Raquel Núñez, WRM, e-mail: raquelnu@wrm.org.uy

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