The Earth Is Not an Ecosystem

In 1966, at the age of twenty, I joined the Canadian University Service Overseas (CUSO), one of the many volunteer organizations that sprang up in the 1960's to promote "international development."  Outside of Canada, and often within Canada as…

In 1966, at the age of twenty, I joined the Canadian University Service Overseas (CUSO), one of the many volunteer organizations that sprang up in the 1960's to promote "international development."  Outside of Canada, and often within Canada as well, the easiest way to identify CUSO was as "the Canadian Peace Corps" — after the civilian "army" created by John Kennedy to help nations, as he said,  "struggling for economic and social progress."  Most industrialized countries had such an organization, and their volunteers often flocked together during those years.  At the time I joined CUSO I had little attachment to the idea of development, and little knowledge of it.  I was impelled more by a romantic image of India, which had begun when I read Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge, and I thought that CUSO might help me to get there.  In the event, there was no place for me in India, but I was offered a situation in Sarawak, one of the eastern provinces of Malaysia which lies along the northwestern coast of the Island of Borneo.  I accepted and was plunged willy-nilly into the world of development.. 

Two years later, back in Canada, I began to associate with a group of "returned volunteers" whose experiences had made them, like me, increasingly quizzical about the idea of development.  We were not alone.  By the end of the 1960's — the "development decade," as the U.N. had proclaimed it — development had begun to appear to a lot of people as a neo-colonial undertaking.  Fundamental economic relationships between rich and poor remained unequal and exploitative, and dribs and drabs of"development assistance" seemed more like sugar coating than real justice.  More adventurous currents of thought questioned the very idea of development, as a one-size-fits-all blueprint for "modern" societies.   Pre-eminent among these more adventurous thinkers, for me, was Ivan Illich, then the presiding spirit of the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico.   In 1968 in Chicago, he lectured to another group of volunteers, the Conference on Inter-American Student Projects, and advised them to come to Latin America as students, if they would, but not as helpers or, in his words, "demonstration models for high service consumption."  This lecture spoke to me and, around it, my own nascent criticisms of development began to coalesce — the beginning of a relationship that continues to occupy me to this day, fifteen years after Illich's death.   In 1970, my friends and I brought him to Toronto, along with many other critics of the. development crusade, for a big "teach-in" called "Crisis in Development."

Eighteen years later I prevailed on Illich to do a series of interviews with me for Ideas. They were broadcast early in 1989 under the name "Part Moon, Part Travelling Salesman: Conversations with Ivan Illich", and you can find them on this page under "Illich."  The interviews were recorded in State College Pennsylvania, the home of the Pennsylvania State University, where lllich then gave a weekly lecture series during the fall term.  When I arrived there, I found him immersed in an on-going consultation with friends and colleagues called, bluntly, "After Development, What?"   This meeting was one of several such gatherings that would eventually lead to the publication of The Development Dictionary (Zed Books, 1992).  This was an attempt, in the words of its editor Wolfgang Sachs, to write an "obituary" for the "age of development,"  in the form of a series of essays on keywords in the development discourse.  As I got to know Illich better, and was drawn into his world, I would join this attempt to find a way of speaking of livelihood "after development."  The result was several radio series, which I now want to present on this site.

The first of these, "The Earth is Not an Ecosystem," was broadcast on Ideas in 1992, the year many of the world's leaders gathered with great fanfare in Rio De Janeiro to redefine economic progress as "sustainable development" at the so-called Earth Summit.  In the same year, a group of representatives of grass-roots organizations from around world met in Orford, Quebec under the auspices of the Montreal-based InterCulture Institute.  The institute's, for me, invaluable journal, also called InterCulture, had for years been a voice for those who challenged the very idea of a monolithic, universally valid process called development and an advocate of what might be called deep pluralism.   In Orford, alternatives to development rather than "sustainable development" comprised the agenda.  One of InterCulture's main inspiration, the Hindu/Spanish priest and philosopher, Raimon Panikkar, was there.  So were several of the people I had first met at the "After Development, What?" meetings in State College in 1988, including, notably, Gustavo Estava from Mexico and Majid Rahnema from Iran.  

The line-up of the six programmes is as follows:

Part One - Raimon Panikkar and Nick Hildyard;  Part Two - David Tuchschneider and Tierno Kane; Part Three - Gustavo Estava;  Part Four - Smithu Kothari;  Part Five - Majid Rahnema;  Part Six - Didiji (Swadhayaya), Majid Rahnema, and R.K. Srivastava.

The image above is from an altarpiece by the medieval painter Meister Bertrand, now displayed in the Kunsthalle of Hamburg, where I fell under its spell.  Its Christian cosmology is just one many possible examples of the ways in which the earth can be imagined as something other than an ecosystem.

Plastic Words

In his book Deschooling Society (1971), Ivan Illich briefly alluded to a class of words "so flexible that they cease to be useful."  "Like an amoeba," he said, "they fit into almost any interstice of the language."  Two years later, in Tools for Conviviality, Illich wrote that language had come to "reflect the monopoly of the industrial mode of production over perception and motivation."   He urged " rediscovery of language" as a personal and poetic medium.  But Illich made no detailed analysis of how language had been industrialized.  Then, in 1981, he became one of the first group of fellows at the new Wissenschaftkolleg, or Institute for Advanced Studies in Berlin.  Among his colleagues was Uwe Pörksen, a professor of German literature from the University of Freiburg.  The two became friends, and one of the things they discussed was the empty word husks that Illich had first called amoebas.  Pörksen renamed them plastic words and undertook a detailed study of the phenomenon,  Seven years later in 1988, he published Plastikwörter: Die Sprache einer Internationalen Diktatur (The Language of an International Dictatorship.)

Pörksen argued that plastic words are not merely the clichés, slogans and hackneyed expressions against which commentators like George Orwell ("Politics and the English Language") or James Thurber ("The Psychosemanticist Will See You Now, Mr. Thurber") had railed.  They form a distinct class, numbering not many more than thirty or forty.  The list includes obviously puffed up words like communication, sexuality, and information, but also less obtrusive terms like problem, factor, and role.  Together, Pörksen says, they compose a Lego-like, modular lingo which bulldozes all the merely local and historical features of language and paves the way to the shining city of universal development.  

I learned of Pörksen's work from Illich, when I went to State College, Pennsylvania to record interviews with Illich in 1988.  At the time, it had briefly become the playful custom in his household to ostentatiously clear one's throat whenever one found it necessary to pronounce a plastic word.  I was intrigued and eager to present Pörksen's research to my Canadian radio audience, but there were several problems: his book wasn't translated, I didn't speak German, and Pörksen had only limited English.  My German-born wife, Jutta Mason, solved the first problem by making a rough translation of the German text, and, in time, as we got to know each other, Uwe agreed to attempt the interview.  It was recorded in Barbara Duden's house in Bremen in 1992.  Jutta joined us, to boost Uwe's confidence and help with translation as needed, but, in the event, the occasion seemed to inspire a rudimentary but powerful eloquence in Uwe, and no translation was needed.

The edited interview, which follows, was broadcast on Ideas early in 1993.  Jutta's translation also became the basis for an English edition, pictured above, of Plastic Words.  Uwe came and stayed with us for a week in Toronto, and he and Jutta and I together worked over the English text, until it was ready for publication by the Penn State Press in 1995.  Good reviews never led to much of a readership for a book that I think deserves to be better known, but it remains available.

Turning Points in Public Broadcasting: The CBC at 50

The immediate occasion for this series was the CBC's 50th anniversary in 1986.   Public broadcasting in Canada had actually begun four years before the date we were celebrating, with the creation of the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission (CRBC) by the Conservative government of R.B. Bennett in 1932.  But this first attempt was criticized by the the Liberal opposition — for political bias— and by the Radio League, the popular organization that had lobbied for its creation — for poor programming.  When Mackenzie King's Liberals replaced the Conservatives in 1936, they reorganized the public broadcaster as a crown corporation with a supposedly "arms length" relationship to the government of the day.  They called their new creation the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation — the "corpse," as it was sometimes later jokingly known — and it made its first broadcast, from a transmitter in Watrous, Saskatchewan, on Nov. 2, 1936.  The 50th anniversary gave me a welcome chance to review some of its history and to interview many of the pioneers who had built, first, the radio service, and then, after 1952, the country's first television network.   The series began with an exploration of the origins of public broadcasting in Canada.  Luckily, while living in Ottawa in 1978, I had recorded an interview with Graham Spry, one of the leaders of the campaign to establish a public broadcaster in the late 1920's and early 1930's.  Graham died in 1983, and, having this interview was invaluable to me in constructing this first episode.  The second show dealt with the so-called golden age of radio, when the CBC became Canada's first truly national cultural institution.  The third was about the beginnings of television , the epochal Radio Canada strike of 1959, and the battle over Preview Commentary, a radio commentary which was cancelled, in 1959, as a result of political pressure from by the Diefenbaker government, and then reinstated under strong counter-pressure from its producers and the public.   The fourth was entirely devoted to the story of This Hour Has Seven Days, the wildly popular current affairs programme that the CBC cancelled in 1966.   The final episode concerned the regulation of public broadcasting in Canada, initially the task of the CBC itself, but, after the Conservative government of John Diefenbaker reformed the CBC and allowed private television broadcasting in 1958, the job of the Board of Broadcast Governors (BBG), and then, from 1968 to the present, Canadian Television and Radio Commission (CRTC).  This last programme was twice partially reconstructed to create a more up-to-day conclusion when the series was re-broadcast in 1996, for the 60th anniversary, and again in 2006, for the 70th, but here I have included the original 1986 ending.

Some of the material was drawn from the archives, where Ken Puley, as always, was an invaluable help, but happily, in 1986, a lot of the people who built the CBC were still alive and willing to reminisce with me.  Here is a list of those I was able to interview:

#1 - Harry Boyle, Graham Spry, Frank Peers, Michael Nolan, Orville Shugg, and James Finlay

#2 - Neil Morrison, Lister Sinclair, Harry Boyle, Davidson Dunton, Orville Shugg, Marjorie McEnaney, Helen Carscallen, Alan Thomas, Frank Peers, Bernard Trotter, and Robert Fulford

#3 - Fernand Quirion, Jean Louis Roux, Alphonse Ouimet, Robert Fulford, Lister Sinclair, Barbara Fairbairn, Frank Peers, and Gordon Cullingham

#4 - Hugh Gauntlett, Patrick Watson, Alphonse Ouimet, Laurier Lapierre, Douglas Leiterman, Reeves Haggan, Warner Troyer, Helen Carscallen, Eric Koch, Roy Faibish, and Peter Campbell

#5 Harry Boyle, Graham Spry, Frank Peers, Davidson Dunton, Alphonse Ouimet, Robert Fulford, Eugene Forsey, Herschel Hardin, Laurent Picard, Hugh Gauntlett, and Al Johnson