Ancient Futures: Lessons from Ladakh for a Globalizing World Book

I fell in love with the Ladakhi way of life in the first part of this book. It was so elating to read about a place where "there is neither waste nor pollution, a society in which crime is virtually nonexistent, communities are healthy and strong, and a teenage boy is never embarrassed to be gentle and affectionate with his mother or grandmother." As I read about the wonderful dwellings that were both beautiful and perfectly suited to the environment, the way families naturally helped each other in working each other's fields and sharing in respective joys and sorrows, how the people made everything they needed with their own hands, reused every scrap, their food and clothing was by its very nature organic and unpolluted and despite (or, because) of all this hard work they had plenty of leisure time, integrated between the generations and were healthy and strong well into their old age... one thought was running through my head: "I've finally found a utopia!"

This notion was crushed by the second part, because the book is just as much about the change brought to Ladakh by international development, modelled after the Western promise of success. In reality, what it brought was poverty, pollution, isolation, crime, depression, distrust and lack.

The author writes in the epilogue: "I have become convinced that we need to decentralize our political and economic structures and broaden our approach to knowledge if we are to find our way to a more balanced and sane society." I am convinced, too. Perhaps I was a believe before I ever picked up the book and Helena Norberg-Hodge just put words to my ideals, backed up by research and first-hand experience. However, I certainly gleaned a lot of depth into the process of Westernizing and centralizing development from this keen study.

I highlighted many passages and will consider the suggested reading list for my future book adventures. Here are a few phrases that really hit home:

"Mainstream Western thinkers from Adam Smith to Freud and today's academics tend to universalize what is in fact Western or industrial experience. Explicitly or implicitly, they assume that the traits they describe are a manifestation of human nature, rather than a product of industrial culture. This tendency to generalize from Western experience becomes almost inevitable as Western culture reaches out from Europe and North America to influence all the earth's people."

"Development is all too often a euphemism for exploitation, a new colonialism. The forces of development and modernization have pulled most people away from a sure subsistence and got them to chase after an illusion, only to fall flat on their faces, materially impoverished and psychologically disoriented. A majority are turned into slum dwellers--having left the land and their local economy to end up in the shadow of an urban dream that can never be realized."

"Development planners can pretend that everyone will be able to live like a New Yorker as long as they ignore the fact that natural resources are limited. There has been a long-standing debate on this point between economists and environmentalists. Economists and technical optimists assume that we will be able to invent our way out of any resource shortage, that science will somehow stretch the earth's bounty ad infinitum. Such a view is a denial of the fact that the natural world has limits that are beyond our power to change and conveniently circumvents the need for a redistribution of wealth. A change in the global economy is not necesssary if you believe there will always be more and more to go around. The peoples of the Third World have only to get "educated" and step into the global market to one day live exactly as their big brothers in the industrialized countries."


This is a book with a very certain point of view, but rather than being a demonizing or anguished piece, it's a call to see "progress" for what it truly is and choose for yourself, perhaps joining in promoting a return to ancient values that depend on the inter-connectedness of human beings with each other and the natural world.