The following excerpts precede the beginning of the actual article, Learning From Ladakh that starts below. "It took me a long time to accept that the smiles I saw were real," [Helena Norberg-Hodge] remembers. "Then, in my second year there, while at a wedding, I sat back and observed the guests enjoying themselves. Suddenly I heard myself saying, `Aha, they really are that happy.' Only then did I recognize that I had been walking around with cultural blinders on, convinced that hidden behind the jokes and laughter had to be the same frustration, jealousy, and inadequacy as in my own society." As soon as she dropped her cultural preconceptions, she began finding evidence everywhere of an extraordinary dignity, self-respect, and joie de vivre. Most Ladakhis, she observed, derive contentedness from within and rarely allow external situations to disturb their highly prized equanimity. She tells, for example, of accompanying a traditional "thanka" painter on a trip to Kashmir. Everywhere the two visitors went, people ridiculed the man, poking fun at his "backward" dress and mimicking his language. But much to Norberg-Hodge's amazement, he remained completely unaffected by the abuse and never lost his cheerful, smiling demeanor. When she asked him why he didn't get angry, he replied, in characteristic Ladakhi fashion, "Chi choen?" ("What's the point?") -- meaning, why should I allow my precious peace of mind to be disrupted by such inconsequential circumstances? Eventually, Norberg-Hodge began to realize that this peace of mind in the face of life's inevitable ups and downs was based not only on the teachings of Buddhism, but on a deep sense of belonging instilled in Ladakhis from infancy. "The Ladakhis belong to their place on Earth," she explains. "They are bonded to that place through intimate daily contact, through a knowledge about their immediate environment with its changing seasons, needs, and limitations. . . . As people become fixated on how much money they have, they feel pressured to earn more, the pace of life accelerates -- and one of the first of the scarce natural resources to be depleted is time. In traditional Ladakh, no matter how much work there was to be done, life was lived at a human pace, time was plentiful, and everyone could afford to be patient, explains Norberg-Hodge. Now, "time-saving" technologies and the money economy have turned time into a commodity that can be bought and sold, forcing people to speed up to keep step with machines. As a result, they're spending less time just being with their families and friends, less time engaging in traditional spiritual practices or observing the slow, subtle changes of the natural world around them. As one Ladakhi told Norberg-Hodge, "Machines are dead; you have no relationship with them. When you work with machines, you become like them; you become dead yourself. Technological advances, especially those initiated by distant government decree, have also contributed to feelings of powerlessness, passivity, and even apathy among the once self-sufficient Ladakhis. In traditional villages, when one of the old water-wheels would break down, for example, a group of villagers would set out with tools to fix it. Nowadays, with the introduction of small hydroelectric generators, people no longer have the expertise to repair them -- and anyway, they see such maintenance as the government's responsibility. As knowledge becomes more and more specialized and restricted primarily to experts, the traditional culture, with its indigenous knowledge base, begins to seem increasingly irrelevant. As a result, young Ladakhis begin to wonder whether their elders have anything of value to pass down to them. Contributing to this growing rift between young and old, and between the people and their environment, is the wholesale introduction of Western-style education. When we read that schools are being built in the "developing" world and literacy rates are rising, we tend to assume that the educational experience is having a benign effect on native cultures, explains Norberg-Hodge. In fact, in Ladakh as elsewhere, Western-style schools fill children's heads with global (that is, Eurocentric) knowledge that prepares them to be specialists in a technologically based urban environment. As they spend their impressionable years sitting in classrooms learning faraway facts and figures, rather than working in the fields and pastures under the guidance of family members, they lose touch with the complex, location-specific knowledge and highly developed intuition that has allowed their parents and grandparents to thrive in an austere environment. Unable to use their own resources, unable to function in their own world -- indeed, ashamed of their own traditions which they've been taught to view as inferior -- young Ladakhis have little recourse but to abandon village life and head to the cities in search of work or further "education." (The loss is not only Ladakh's. A recent Time cover story likened the depredation of traditional wisdom worldwide to the burning of the great library in Alexandria, which was the storehouse of the wisdom of the ancient Near East. "Today, with little notice, vast archives of knowledge and expertise are spilling into oblivion," the article laments, "leaving humanity in danger of losing its past and perhaps jeopardizing its future as well.") ----------------------------------------------- Learning From Ladakh by Stephan Bodian Yoga Journal, May/June, 1992 IMAGINE, IF YOU WILL, A CULTURE VIRTUALLY UNTOUCHED BY WESTERN INFLUENCE. The closest parallel in the Americas might be the Indians before the arrival of the conquistadors. In this pristine society, people live in close symbiosis with their environment. They carefully husband the scant resources available to them, use farming practices that sustain the fertility of the land, weave their own clothes from the wool of their animals, fashion their own homes from the mud of the Earth. Imagine further that these people live in harmony with one another as well -- sharing the work of the harvest; providing emotional and material support in times of crisis and transition; rearing children in extended families surrounded by relatives and friends of all ages and sexes; defusing potential conflicts with humility, patience, and equanimity. Now imagine that the groundswell of Western-style development breaks across this gentle domain not slowly, over the centuries or even the generations, as happened in South America, for example, or much of Southeast Asia, but quickly, within a few years, in a tidal wave of change. What would be the impact of automobiles, power lines, radio and TV on this delicately balanced, sustainable culture? How would the switch from subsistence living to a money economy affect the intricate fabric of human relationships? What would media images of affluence and aggression do to the people's inherent self-esteem and peace of mind? And what would we, as denizens of the postmodern world, have to learn from this case study about our own uprootedness and anomie, our own loss of community and extended family and intimacy with the Earth, as "progress" has inexorably propelled us into a dubious future? For Helena Norberg-Hodge, these are not hypothetical questions. When the Swedish-born linguist journeyed to Ladakh in the mid-1970s, shortly after the remote country was opened to the West, she had no intention of bearing witness to the destructive impact of modernization. As she watched her adopted culture reluctantly enter the "developing world," however, she found herself chronicling its rapid fall from innocence -- and reflecting on the decline of her own civilization as well. Her insights and tentative answers, which form the argument of her new book, Ancient Futures, are the lessons she invites us to learn from Ladakh. Few places on Earth are less hospitable to human life than Ladakh. Lying in the rain-shadow of the Himalayas, this windswept, high-altitude desert, criss-crossed by giant mountain ranges, is a land of extremes: scorching sun during the brief summer season, temperatures in winter that can drop to forty below. Despite the short growing season and the climatic intensity, however, the Ladakhis have lived, indeed thrived, here for millennia. In small settlements scattered across the landscape, these hardy people (of blended Indian and Tibetan ancestry) have found a way to live sustainably in an austere environment. Channeling snowmelt from the mountains and composting all of their organic wastes, they have successfully raised barley, wheat, a few vegetables, and, at lower altitudes, apricots and walnuts. At the highest elevations, where even barley will not grow, they tend herds of goats and native cattle. At the same time, their culture, which they inherited from Tibet, has thrived with them. During the long winter months, traditional Ladakhis spend much of their time engaged in festivals and ceremonies, which combine Buddhist devotion with the joys of celebration. In summer, they use a rich and subtle knowledge of their environment, gained over centuries of careful observation, to live in balance and harmony with nature. Because resources like fuel and water are extremely scarce, even small children know how to use them with reverence and care, and nothing is ever discarded or wasted. Although situated along a major Asian trade route, the Ladakhis, unlike many other Asian peoples, have never borne the burden or suffered the disruptive influences of colonization. The Himalayas have provided a natural protective barrier, and the forbidding landscape has offered little bounty to potential invaders. While nominally a part of India since the mid 19th century, the Ladakhis have been able until recent years to maintain unbroken the web of intimate relationships, with one another and the natural world, that have allowed their fragile enclave to flourish. When Helena Norberg-Hodge first arrived in Ladakh in 1975 as part of documentary film crew, she knew very little about ecology or traditional cultures or living in harmony with the Earth. Although she had traveled rather extensively in less "developed" parts of the world, she had never bothered to question the conventional wisdom that "progress" is beneficial and that the "Third World" has nothing to lose and everything to gain from modernization. It was merely out of curiosity and a thirst for adventure that she took a sabbatical from her busy life in Paris to journey to this remote, sparsely populated land. But what she found there had an immediate and profound appeal. "Every person I met, without exception, was immensely attractive," she recalls. "There was a deep inner peace and an unquestioning sense of dignity and self-acceptance, which bred a remarkable vitality and joy in living. I had never encountered people like that before in my life. I fell in love immediately." Norberg-Hodge stayed on, ostensibly to collect folk tales, to gather information for a doctoral dissertation in linguistics, and to help compile a Ladakhi-English dictionary. (She was the first Westerner in modern times to master the complex Ladakhi language.) In retrospect, however, she admits it was her fascination with the people and their way of life that held her. She simply could not believe they were as happy as they appeared to be. "It took me a long time to accept that the smiles I saw were real," she remembers. "Then, in my second year there, while at a wedding, I sat back and observed the guests enjoying themselves. Suddenly I heard myself saying, `Aha, they really are that happy.' Only then did I recognize that I had been walking around with cultural blinders on, convinced that hidden behind the jokes and laughter had to be the same frustration, jealousy, and inadequacy as in my own society." As soon as she dropped her cultural preconceptions, she began finding evidence everywhere of an extraordinary dignity, self-respect, and joie de vivre. Most Ladakhis, she observed, derive contentedness from within and rarely allow external situations to disturb their highly prized equanimity. She tells, for example, of accompanying a traditional "thanka" painter on a trip to Kashmir. Everywhere the two visitors went, people ridiculed the man, poking fun at his "backward" dress and mimicking his language. But much to Norberg-Hodge's amazement, he remained completely unaffected by the abuse and never lost his cheerful, smiling demeanor. When she asked him why he didn't get angry, he replied, in characteristic Ladakhi fashion, "Chi choen?" ("What's the point?") -- meaning, why should I allow my precious peace of mind to be disrupted by such inconsequential circumstances? Eventually, Norberg-Hodge began to realize that this peace of mind in the face of life's inevitable ups and downs was based not only on the teachings of Buddhism, but on a deep sense of belonging instilled in Ladakhis from infancy. "The Ladakhis belong to their place on Earth," she explains. "They are bonded to that place through intimate daily contact, through a knowledge about their immediate environment with its changing seasons, needs, and limitations. "Just as importantly, their larger sense of self has something to do with the close, nurturing, long-lasting ties between people. Everyone, including aunts and uncles, monks and nuns, belongs to a highly interdependent, emotionally supportive community. Within this nurturing framework, individuals feel secure enough to become quite free and independent. In particular, Norberg-Hodge was impressed with the diversity of the interactions among people. Rather than relating primarily to age-mates and nuclear family members, as most Western children do, Ladakhis traditionally grow up spending as much time with grandmother or uncle or younger sister as with mother or kids of their own age and sex. The result, according to Norberg-Hodge, is that children, particularly boys, aren't constantly pressured into competing with, and comparing themselves to, their peers. Instead, they learn that a wide range of ways of being in the world, including those that we generally regard as feminine, are accepted and indeed valued. In such a rich interpersonal climate, Norberg-Hodge notes, true individuality flourishes, rather than the limited, stereotyped role alternatives available to most Western children. As they constantly reexperience, in very concrete terms, their interconnectedness with others and with the natural world, Ladakhis are reminded of the essential teachings of Buddhism regarding the inextricable interdependence of all phenomena. The self is perceived not as an isolated, individual entity ultimately alone in an inhospitable universe, but as one small thread embedded in the vast fabric of being. Understandably, in such a culture spirituality is inseparable from everyday life: Buddhist festivals are social as well as religious occasions; people often recite mantras as they work, or even between sentences as they engage in conversation; the shrine room occupies a place of honor in the home; and monasteries play an economic as well as a spiritual role. Indeed, the equanimity fostered by the Ladakhi way of life is, quite felicitously, the very quality most prized by their religious tradition. During her first few years in Ladakh, Norberg-Hodge traveled to remote villages collecting folk tales, mastering the language, and immersing herself in the culture. Many of the people she met had never encountered a Westerner before. Soon she was wearing Ladakhi clothes and answering to a Ladakhi name; some foreigners even took her for a Ladakhi. As she found herself describing her own culture to her curious new friends, Norberg-Hodge began to compare the widespread dissatisfaction, greed, and aggression she had experienced in the West with the contentment and joie de vivre she observed among the Ladakhis. Eventually, she began to question the very premises on which her own civilization was based. Are we all ultimately alone in this world, as our Western cultural heritage seems to suggest -- solitary individuals destined to face difficult or even hostile circumstances with heroic resignation? Or are we, as the Ladakhis believe, inextricably imbedded in an interconnected network of being, to which we owe our existence and to which we ultimately belong? Are technological progress and material gain the inevitable or even desirable goals toward which all cultures must aspire? Or is there a deeper wisdom, and subtler, more spiritual values, to which Ladakh and other traditional cultures have attained and which we in the "developed" world are rapidly losing sight of? As Norberg-Hodge pondered these questions, the Ladakh she had come to know during her travels -- inherently spiritual, ecological, harmonious, with a unique, indigenous wisdom that had evolved slowly over the centuries in response to the characteristics and limitations of the surrounding environment -- was poised on the brink of sudden and disruptive change. After years of isolation, the remote country had became a favorite destination for well-meaning tourists in search of the exotic. Following on the tourists' heels came the incursions of Western-style development. As Norberg-Hodge watched with chagrin, Western culture and technology began to undermine Ladakhi lifeways and sabotage their precious self-esteem. "During the early years of my stay in Ladakh, I visited a particularly beautiful village," she recalls. "Out of curiosity, I asked a young man to show me the poorest house in his village. He thought for a moment and then he said, `We don't have any poor houses here.' Eight years later I visited the same village again, and I heard the same man saying to a tourist, `Oh, please help us Ladakhis, we are so poor.' Within eight years his perception of his own culture had changed dramatically. From thinking that there was no poverty, he now saw everyone as poor." How could the Ladakhis' self-esteem, which had seemed so unassailable, crumble in a few short years following the advent of Western influence? Norberg-Hodge invites us to imagine how we would respond if Martians with special powers and inexhaustible wealth landed in the streets of San Francisco or New York. Not only do these extraterrestrials appear to enjoy constant leisure, but they spend the equivalent of $50,000 a day. Imagine in particular, she suggests, how difficult it would be to keep impressionable adolescents and young adults from leaving home and following these magical creatures. How boring and insignificant our everyday lives would seem in comparison! The Ladakhis faced an invasion of similar magnitude when Western tourists began descending on their country brandishing cameras and watches, sporting flashy clothing, and spending as much as $100 a day (what a Ladakhi family would spend in a year). The Ladakhis had no idea how much money these foreigners needed to survive back home, nor how many social and psychological ills -- crime, drugs, unemployment, the breakdown of the family, isolation and anomie, stress-related illnesses -- their material affluence had brought them. Nor did the Western tourists -- who responded with horror or pity when told how little a Ladakhi earns -- realize that money played a minimal role in an economy based primarily on cooperation and sustainability and that the true wealth of these seemingly impoverished peasants lay in their peace of mind and the quality of their family and community relations. As they found themselves increasingly enthralled by the apparent leisure and abundance of the West -- and their own lives repeatedly belittled in comparison -- more and more Ladakhis, particularly the young, began to lose their self-respect. In fact, observed Norberg-Hodge, it was this growing sense of shame and inadequacy, fueled by one-dimensional media images of beautiful women and powerful men leading exciting, glamorous lives, that motivated many to abandon their traditional ways and pursue the symbols and perks of modernity. Once they had visited the big city and been further dazzled by the apparent wonders of technological progress, young Ladakhis were even more likely to repudiate the "backward" ways of their parents and grandparents. But shame and loss of self-esteem, though they have eaten away at the roots of Ladakhi culture like an insidious disease, have not been the only corrosive forces assailing this once-robust high-desert flower. In order to prepare the country for Western-style development, the Indian government has introduced roads, irrigation projects, hydroelectric plants, Western-style health care and schools, radio and TV -- what economists call the infrastructure. For most of us here in the West, such changes are seen as beneficial "advances" that help to raise an impoverished country's standard of living, or at the very least as inevitable steps toward entry into the "world economic community." But for Norberg-Hodge, who insists that Ladakh was neither impoverished nor backward but simply a self-sufficient culture following its own unique line of sustainable development, the infrastructure has wreaked havoc on a uniquely balanced and harmonious way of life. "If the Devil himself wanted to cut people off from the Earth and from one another," she says, "he couldn't have thought up a more effective system than the conventional development we are now actively supporting and spreading around the world." Perhaps most insidious of all, according to Norberg-Hodge has been the incursion of a money economy in a region where interactions were formerly based primarily on subsistence living, barter, and mutual aid. As images of material affluence have conditioned Ladakhis to crave what they don't already have, they have begun to feel dissatisfied with a lifestyle that has served them admirably for centuries and to pursue the means to more material ends -- in other words, money. Here in the West we take money for granted; most of us can hardly imagine how we could manage without it. Nor are we usually aware of the ways in which money separates us from one another or from the work of our own hands, though our philosophers, from Karl Marx to Jacob Needleman, have criticized its inordinate power. In the case of Ladakh, the introduction of a money economy has literally driven people apart and cut them off from the Earth, says Norberg-Hodge. Where before, Ladakhis had worked as equals and friends, helping one another by turn, they have gradually begun to measure their work in terms of the money they've been programmed to need, and to expect payment rather than labor in return. Where before, with cooperative labor, farmers had no need for money, the advent of paid labor has forced many to grow food for profit, rather than for themselves and their families, or even to abandon their farms to seek financial gain in the city. The introduction of a money economy has even influenced how people conceive of the delicate balance between themselves and their environment. Villagers who grow their own food can see with their own eyes how much grain their land can produce and how many mouths that grain can feed, and they can limit their population accordingly. But city dwellers, who, like their counterparts throughout the world, believe they can buy food as long as they have enough money, have no motivation to keep the birthrate in check. For this reason, among others, the population of this sparsely inhabited country has for the first time been growing faster than the land can sustain, further stimulating the growth of a money economy as food and other scarce resources must be imported. But the changes wrought by a reliance upon money have been even more pervasive, says Norberg-Hodge. Living off the fruits of the land and their own labors, traditional Ladakhis were self-sufficient, and unaffected by the vagaries of a global economy. Now, like the rest of the world, they are becoming ever more dependent, even for vital needs, on faraway forces beyond their control. Where before they had the security of knowing they had the skills, the knowledge, and the community necessary to support themselves and their families from one year to the next, now their well-being increasingly depends on the uncertainties of inflation, monetary rates of exchange, and international finance. "For 2,000 years in Ladakh, a kilo of barley was a kilo of barley," notes Norberg-Hodge. "But now you cannot be sure of its value. Today it may be ten rupees, tomorrow who knows? `It's terrible,' Ladakhi friends would say to me, `everyone is getting so greedy. Money was never important, but now it's all people can think about.'" As people become fixated on how much money they have, they feel pressured to earn more, the pace of life accelerates -- and one of the first of the scarce natural resources to be depleted is time. In traditional Ladakh, no matter how much work there was to be done, life was lived at a human pace, time was plentiful, and everyone could afford to be patient, explains Norberg-Hodge. Now, "time-saving" technologies and the money economy have turned time into a commodity that can be bought and sold, forcing people to speed up to keep step with machines. As a result, they're spending less time just being with their families and friends, less time engaging in traditional spiritual practices or observing the slow, subtle changes of the natural world around them. As one Ladakhi told Norberg-Hodge, "Machines are dead; you have no relationship with them. When you work with machines, you become like them; you become dead yourself. Technological advances, especially those initiated by distant government decree, have also contributed to feelings of powerlessness, passivity, and even apathy among the once self-sufficient Ladakhis. In traditional villages, when one of the old water-wheels would break down, for example, a group of villagers would set out with tools to fix it. Nowadays, with the introduction of small hydroelectric generators, people no longer have the expertise to repair them -- and anyway, they see such maintenance as the government's responsibility. As knowledge becomes more and more specialized and restricted primarily to experts, the traditional culture, with its indigenous knowledge base, begins to seem increasingly irrelevant. As a result, young Ladakhis begin to wonder whether their elders have anything of value to pass down to them. Contributing to this growing rift between young and old, and between the people and their environment, is the wholesale introduction of Western-style education. When we read that schools are being built in the "developing" world and literacy rates are rising, we tend to assume that the educational experience is having a benign effect on native cultures, explains Norberg-Hodge. In fact, in Ladakh as elsewhere, Western-style schools fill children's heads with global (that is, Eurocentric) knowledge that prepares them to be specialists in a technologically based urban environment. As they spend their impressionable years sitting in classrooms learning faraway facts and figures, rather than working in the fields and pastures under the guidance of family members, they lose touch with the complex, location-specific knowledge and highly developed intuition that has allowed their parents and grandparents to thrive in an austere environment. Unable to use their own resources, unable to function in their own world -- indeed, ashamed of their own traditions which they've been taught to view as inferior -- young Ladakhis have little recourse but to abandon village life and head to the cities in search of work or further "education." (The loss is not only Ladakh's. A recent Time cover story likened the depredation of traditional wisdom worldwide to the burning of the great library in Alexandria, which was the storehouse of the wisdom of the ancient Near East. "Today, with little notice, vast archives of knowledge and expertise are spilling into oblivion," the article laments, "leaving humanity in danger of losing its past and perhaps jeopardizing its future as well.") Faced with the deterioration of a culture she had grown to cherish, Norberg-Hodge was unwilling to accept that environmental and social decline were either necessary or inevitable. Rather, she believed, they were the result of an approach to development that could be circumvented or changed. Inspired by E. F. Schumacher's Small Is Beautiful, she started to take advantage of her unique position as a Westerner who knew the culture intimately and who continued to spend half of each year in Ladakh to preach the benefits of decentralization and sustainability. Convinced by her reading that the developing world could not hope to model itself after the West -- after all, one-third of the world's population was already consuming two-thirds of the resources -- she pleaded with the state and central Indian governments to promote the use of small-scale, renewable energy sources, which could be maintained by villagers and would not disrupt the environment. In 1978 she received permission to organize a small pilot project to demonstrate simple solar technologies, including a solar space heating system known as the Trombe wall, a solar oven, and a greenhouse. (With over 300 sunny days per year, the region is ideally suited to solar energy.) As a result of her efforts, interest in such technologies has increased steadily in Ladakh during the past decade. To counteract the growing sense of shame, especially among the young, who compare their own life so unfavorably to the exaggerated picture they've formed of the West, Norberg-Hodge began to engage in what she calls counterdevelopment -- a concerted effort to expose the hidden costs and dangers of modernization and to champion the strengths of the traditional culture. As she had come to realize, the Ladakhis themselves, even many who had been educated in the West, knew surprisingly little about the forces that were shaping their lives. At first she limited her efforts to speaking with individuals and appearing on Ladakhi radio. Then she took to coauthoring and helping to stage educational plays for Ladakhi audiences, of which Ladakh, Look Before You Leap is an example. In it, a young Ladakhi who has vehemently rejected the traditional ways learns that the most modern Westerners actually aspire to live like his grandparents -- eating organically grown foods, dwelling in houses and wearing clothes made of natural materials, living close to nature. "People in America used to tell me," he is told by a Western-trained physician, "`You're lucky to have been born a Ladakhi.'" In addition to communicating her concerns to Ladakhis, Norberg-Hodge embarked on a series of lectures and workshops in Europe and North America to alert sympathetic audiences to the ways in which conventional development was eroding the delicate social and ecological balance in her adopted land. At the same time, she was able to highlight, by way of contrast, some of the root causes of our own social and environmental problems, and to inspire her listeners with the belief that a more humane and sustainable way of life is possible. Soon she was inviting like-minded Westerners, those who had become disenchanted with the dream of unlimited global development and had begun to embrace an alternative lifestyle, to visit Ladakh and share their observations and insights with its inhabitants. By 1980 Norberg-Hodge's efforts in both Ladakh and the West had grown into a small international organization called the Ladakh Project, which in 1991 became the International Society for Ecology and Culture. She also helped bring together some of the country's leading thinkers and visionaries to form the Ladakh Ecological Development Group (LEDeG), which is now the most influential nongovernment organization in the region. Together, the two groups encourage more ecological, sustainable, community-based ways of living by: * Developing and demonstrating a range of appropriate technologies, while involving villagers in siting, installing, and maintaining these technologies; * Supporting the production and sale of traditional handicrafts, thereby furthering local self-reliance and helping to prevent a drift away from the land; * Sponsoring educational programs within Ladakh, including radio shows, publications, meetings, workshops, and conferences, that alert Ladakhis to the dangers of modernization and teach them about sustainable alternatives; * Informing Ladakhis of the growing appreciation and use of organic methods of farming worldwide; * Encouraging contact and communication between Ladakhis and Westerners to help provide a more balanced impression of the West; * Offering workshops, lectures, videos, and publications to Western audiences, based on the experience of Ladakh, to stimulate a reassessment of global trends in such key areas as energy, agriculture, education, and health. From her experiences in Ladakh, Norberg-Hodge has come to believe that counterdevelopment efforts like these are urgently needed throughout the developing world if people are to make fully informed choices about their own future. "Using every possible form of communication, from satellite television to storytelling, we need to publicize the fact that today's capital- and energy- intensive trends are simply unsustainable. We need to draw attention to family and community breakup, show the hidden subsidies of a society based on fossil fuels, and place environmental damage on the debit side of the economic balance sheet. In short, we need to expose the escalating costs of our industrial way of life." "Our aim," she explains, must be "to promote self-respect and self-reliance" in the developing world, "thereby protecting life-sustaining diversity and creating the conditions for locally based, truly sustainable development." Ultimately, Norberg-Hodge envisions a future for Ladakh in which the people regain their self-respect and self-reliance by returning to sustainable, organic agricultural practices (which, after all, they have only quite recently begun to abandon), while incorporating some of the more benign appropriate technologies, including solar, wind, and small-scale hydroelectric. Indeed, she believes that Ladakh can become a model for the rest of the world of an entire society based on decentralized energy sources. "We have an opportunity to demonstrate small-scale on a large scale," she explains. "Nowhere else on the planet has this ever really been tried. The potential is extremely exciting." For those of us in the West who would like to participate in counterdevelopment, Norberg-Hodge recommends first educating ourselves to the issues. Then, she says, we can put pressure on governments and aid agencies to fund indigenous, sustainable projects, and we can do what we can to support grass-roots organizations working for self-reliance. But we can't do it alone -- we have to work together. "It's very self-defeating and disheartening to think only in terms of the changes I as an individual can implement from today to tomorrow." Ladakh -- a distant land of austere beauty where people live simply and love life. A land where people coexist with one another and with nature in harmony and peace. A land where community ties are strong yet individuality flourishes, and spirituality is an inextricable part of everyday life. Perhaps it would not be sentimental or naive to suggest that such a culture, although it lacks the material and technological advances of the West, represents the ultimate flowering of our human potential, the pinnacle of what we as human beings can aspire to become -- and that in the future of Ladakh will be reflected the fate of our species as a sustainable presence on Earth. Stephan Bodian is the editor Yoga Journal and author of the book Timeless Visions, Healing Voices. He is also a psychotherapist in private practice in San Rafael, California. Resources The Ladakh Project/ISEC, P.O. Box 9475, Berkeley, CA 94709 http://www.isec.org.uk/ISEC/ladakh.html http://www.isec.org.uk/ISEC/contact.html Helena Norberg-Hodge's book "Ancient Futures"