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Sustainable Development, Talk about the good work being done to meet both the present and future needs of people and the planet. | 15120 Followers  |
 Four months into my first stint living abroad, I was desperate. I wanted a taco, or a nice bowl of pho, maybe some shrimp shumai, a deep fried Oreo, a cookie dough cupcake the size of my head, all washed down with a fruit smoothie roughly the size of a small island nation. In other words, I wanted a taste of my home nation (and city) of New York. But I couldn't have it. I was stuck in Southwest France (poor me) and was forced to fill up on thick slabs of barely heated duck breast, served with viscous glasses of red wine, and inevitably finished with a profiterole, crème brûlée or perhaps a fruit tart. Even the few non-French restaurants in town, somehow tasted, French. Between you and me even French food grows tiresome. Unless you're French, in which case it's completely normal to grow up eating nothing but French food. Because culture is not just the language one speaks, the history of a nation, but also, very viscerally intertwined with the food they eat. Food histories, illustrated in books such as The Taste of Conquest: The Rise and Fall of the Three Great Cities of Spice by Michael Krondl or Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky, are not just tales of food but of human societies. The food diversity that I grew up with in New York City is intimately intertwined with its history as a hub for a wide variety of ethnicities from around the globe. What, if anything does this have to do with sustainable development? In development we care about the physical standards of well-being: mortality and hunger rates, as well as the effects on the larger environment. Ecologists and biologists worship at the altar of diversity and for good reason: biological diversity is a strong indicator of a healthy ecosystem. The same is true of cultural diversity. And yet, development often kills cultural diversity, either directly or indirectly. The push for foreign money to create development often results in developed areas that look nigh identical to their western counterparts. The café culture in Istanbul is being replaced by Starbucks (or it was in 2005 when I was there). People were so intent on living the image of Starbucks that they would purchase one cup of coffee and then reuse the disposable cup for several days filled with homemade coffee to keep up appearances. Starbucks is in the land of Turkish coffee and smoky coffee houses? Maalesef evet. And it isn't simply Starbucks; it's Spanish clothing retailers, French supermarket chains etc. While European countries push back against the destruction of their cultures, developing cultures often at the whims of development agencies, and the IMF have little social capital with which to muster much resistance. The effect is threefold; first we are passively devaluing the home culture. Secondly, it is becoming increasingly difficult to travel and to maintain a sense of where you are, as Kuntsler points out in his book the Geography of Nowhere, everywhere is beginning to look like everywhere else, and consequently everywhere is beginning to resemble nowhere. Finally, it creates a culture where the bulk of funds are pumped out of the country back to the foreign entity. So what can we do about? On a personal level, when we travel (and even at home) we can choose local over the global, not necessarily all of the time but at least some of the time. This is not an anti-Starbucks, or McDonalds etc stance. In fact, I will be shortly hopped up on Starbucks coffee myself. It's merely recognition that when it comes to commerce we vote with our dollars and if we want to maintain consumer diversity we have to spread those votes around. Making a conscious decision as to where we spend our money goes a long way to changing the world in which we live. Secondly, we can move away from this idea that in order for a nation to develop they need foreign investors and investments and instead move to stimulate local economies and businesses.  |
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