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.
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.