knowledge that is available to others to pick and choose from, so they can improve their own lives (some would call this “development”). In addition, the multitude of cultures makes life on Earth extremely rich and varied. The discovery of that variety often leaves an observer with a sense of awe and with a realization that the loss of any culture leaves life less wonderful.
The Yanomami
In the Amazon region of Brazil live the Yanomami. It is believed that the people have lived in this region for thousands of years. The approximately 9,000 Yanomami represent the largest group of indigenous people living in the Americas who still follow hunter‐gatherer methods.25 Although they had very limited contact with other cultures for many years, this changed in the late 1980s when gold was discovered in the Brazilian Amazon region. Thousands of miners flew into the area where the Yanomami lived. The miners brought with them diseases to which the Yanomami had no natural immunity. Amnesty International estimates that from 1988 to 1990 about 1,500 Yanomami died.26 In addition to the malaria that killed many, some Yanomami died from mercury poisoning, which came from eating fish poisoned by the mercury the miners had used in the streams to sift for gold. Others were killed by armed attack. Amnesty International reported: “These attacks are often carried out by private agents, including gunmen hired by land claimants, timber merchants or mining interests. They have gone almost entirely unpunished – in fact, state‐level authorities have even colluded with them.”27
The Yanomamis’ situation became known throughout Brazil and around the world as mining problems persisted. Responding to pressures within Brazil and from some foreign countries (the attention given to Brazil because of the upcoming UN environmental conference probably played a role), the Brazilian government in 1991 set aside for the Yanomami about 36,000 square miles of land. When added to that set aside by Venezuela, which was slightly smaller than the Brazilian grant, this was an amount of land equal to the size of Portugal and the amount anthropologists said the Yanomami needed in order to survive. In 1990, the agency in charge of Indian affairs in the Brazilian government announced that it was forcibly removing all miners from Yanomami lands.28 In 1993, Brazil used its police and military force to forcibly remove 3,000 miners who were still in Yanomami lands. But more recently, mining pressures have resurfaced, with over 10,000 miners invading Yanomami territories in 2019.
What will be the fate of the Yanomami? No one knows, of course, but if history is a guide, one would have to say that their prospects of surviving are not bright. While the actions by the Brazilian and Venezuelan governments to reserve a large amount of land for the use of these people is a hopeful step, disturbing signs exist. The presence of gold in their lands increased tension. Despite some success removing miners in the early parts of this century, by 2011, the nonprofit organization Survival International reported that about 1,000 gold miners were illegally working on Yanomami land. In 2002 the Brazilian army began building more bases along its largely undefended northern border, which crosses Yanomami lands. Some of the soldiers got Yanomami women pregnant and brought venereal diseases.29 In 2009 swine flu hit the Yanomami as did Covid‐19 in 2020. In 2012, Survival International reported a “massacre” of up to 80 Yanomami individuals.30 And in 2018, a measles epidemic further devastated the Yanomami population.31
There is abundant research showing that many indigenous cultures confronted with modern development pressures increasingly find it challenging to preserve their traditional knowledge – such as specialized farming techniques, natural cycles, and natural healing methods and medicines. This can present a threat to their traditional livelihoods and increases dependencies on modern goods, which may have significant cultural, social, and environmental impacts.32 In some cases, when outside companies show up and alter the economic and cultural landscape of traditional cultures, alcoholism and suicide rates and have increased dramatically.
Some people are giving a new respect to previously marginalized cultures of indigenous and tribal peoples. There is a growing recognition that these traditional cultures may have knowledge that humans need if they are going to survive – such as an ability to live in harmony with nature, a concern for future generations, and a knowledge of how to foster a sense of community. Indigenous and tribal peoples in tropical forests have been recognized as possessors of important knowledge regarding medicinal plants and of skills that have enabled them to live in the forests without destroying them. There is also a growing recognition that if we want to preserve the world’s forests and the multitude of species they harbor, we must make it possible for those living in them to survive and thrive without cutting down the trees. If these peoples cannot survive, probably the forests cannot either. If these peoples do survive, they can help protect the forests that are their homes.
Conclusion
If we take in all of the information in this chapter, we begin to have a much more complete vision of development going forward, one better suited to this century and more focused on sustainability than purely on economic growth. The Millennium Development Goals already represented a big departure from the post‐World War II model focused almost exclusively on increasing production and consumption as a means to increase incomes. The twentieth century model assumed more money could get the things desired by development, and it discounted the social and environmental costs of doing so. The Sustainable Development Goals allow for different pathways to get there, and recognize that not every path towards income generation is beneficial for inclusive and sustainable development. Under these goals, sustainable development means everyone has their basic needs met while resources and ecosystems remain intact – a tall order but also quite a necessary one.
Throughout this book, we explore the different dimensions and approaches to development. Because the very notion of development is evolving, and because a diversity of cultures and nations have different visions for progress, we try to minimize the use of terms like “developed” and “developing.” Given how much development has been conflated with GDP growth, we often refer to countries by their wealth classification as opposed to “developed” and “developing,” because those terms are more accurate than assuming development equities to a country’s wealth classification, which is an idea rooted in the last century’s development model.
The term “developing countries” is typically understood to be those countries in which agriculture or mineral resources have a large role in the economy while industrialization, manufacturing and services have a lesser role. The infrastructure (transportation, education, health, and other social services) of these countries is usually less adequate for their needs than infrastructure of the wealthiest 20 percent of countries (aka “developed nations”). At the same time, some of the countries classified as “least developed” (i.e. have the lowest average incomes per capita) are highly developed in culture and many such regions of the world had ancient civilizations with architecture, religion, and philosophy that we still admire, which brings us back to the question of what are we developing towards? And if the answer to this question varies, perhaps we should avoid assuming that 80 percent of the world wants to follow the twentieth century approach for “developing” inequitably and unsustainably. Since many of the less (economically) developed nations are in the southern hemisphere, they are at times referred to as “the South” instead of “developing.”
Even though institutions like the World Bank use wealth to differentiate between “developed” and “developing” countries, they also agree that development is more than economic growth.
