Questioning this state of human affairs has been a sport I have liked to practice since my youth. I first started to do it alone and then I started to have more fun by practicing it in group. This is somehow where this story starts.

My experience is that in modern life, we are so busy with all kinds of "things", it has become almost strange to speak about human affairs. Our lives have been invaded by the culture of materalism, business and technology to such an extent that ,somehow, as full human beings, we have become strangers to ourselves. Not only that, but we seem to cultivate a myth of self-destruction that is becoming a real threat to the diversity and plurality of human experience. 

Looking around, we see a global monoculture that is spreading like an oil slick all over the planet.Local cultures and languages are dying as quickly as animal and plant species. Entire conceptions of what it means to be human evaporate, and there is scarcely one human being today who seems able to control this unprecedented transformation. The upshot of it all is a vision of total emptiness. In this respect the differences between poor and rich, rural and urban, man and woman, citizen of the North or the South, are only relative.

Our visions of the world play a crucial role in shaping our thoughts and behaviors. During milleniums, the natural world has been a major source of inspiration for human kind. Local communities all over the world have shared similar attitudes about it, and successfully avoided systems of class and hierarchy, knowing that systems of domination are not natural, destroy the balance and harmony between people, and in addition, destroy the brotherhood of life. 

Before civilization arised upon them, primordial people lived in small groups and communities - we may term “tribes”. They learned how to co-operate and shared what they held in common. The entire framework of life in these by gone times focused upon a reverence for nature's gifts and on learning of the lessons Mother Earth had to offer. Each tribe or community  created ceremonies, rituals, myths, legends that were part of an ongoing quest for meaning. Sacred locations, ritualized dances and music, artifacts contributed to the many layers of a good and simple life. Violence probably arose only occasionally, and never reached a point where all forms of life could be threatened. People felt and shared a sense of duty and thanksgiving towards the land. Consideration for the oneness and interdependency of all things was the most fundamental principle.

With the raise of civilization, human aspirations for light, life and love that were the pre-conditions of a knowledge system based on trust, confidence and frugality, have been gradually alienated by a vision of the world where the rainbow of life/reality has been replaced by the flat light of system/rationality. The inner space of Man has been completely invaded and wittled down, existing liberties and escapes reduced to freedom of consumption. A new rationality - technocracy (1)- has produced an irrrational reality where peace depends on war, democracy on burocracy, self-determination on mass alienation, economical growth on ecological degrdation. 
 

I've always been impressed by how we tend easily to ignore ancient times and traditions, but also the people - indigenous, aboriginal, native - who have preserved the memory of them up until the present day. To me, it's a non-sense trying to grow a tree without roots. And I'm not the only one to see it in that way. 

In his short essay about the concept of development, Wolfgang Sachs notes that: " Gandhi was not won over to technical civilization with its machines, engines and factories, because he saw in it a culture which knew no more sublime end than that of minimizing bodily efforts and maximising physical well-being that could not be offered to all. Didn't local cultures of the world who had lived undisturbed for thousands of years have more substantial things to offer? " (2)

Unfortunately, our culture of modernity seems to teach us that what belongs to the past is obsolete. As a result, we become the victims of the apolegetic universalism of civilized thought and of the free trade catechism of global economic thinking, that create the grounds for the kinds of action which threaten the survival of our planet.

The world policy which emerged in the end of the eighties - a convergence of ideological, political and technological forces behind a process of economic globalization - is shifting power away from people more furiously than ever before, invading all aspects of our daily life and even threatening the foundations of life on Earth. It generates fear and mistrust. The middle class itself, which was the incarnation of success and industrial progress, is slowly losing everything that it considered to be its gains.

The world market, once brandished as a weapon against political tyranny, has itself become a closet dictator under whose dominion both rich and poor countries tremble. The fear of falling behind in international competition has become the predominent organizing motive of politics in North and South, East and West. It drives all countires further into self exploitation. The categorical imperative of world market competition repeatedly thwarts all attempts to organise society creatively and democratically. Those looking for an alternative (3) generally fall into the same rationality. They rarely challenge the grounds upon which such rationality is based. 

Yvonne Dion-Buffalo and John Mohawk, two long-time native activists, suggested some years ago that to resist global economic culture, people have three choices: to become "good subjects", by accepting the premises and promises of modernity, progress and development; to become "bad subjects", by always revolting against this "civilized" way of affairs; or to become "non subjects", acting and thinking in ways removed from those imposed upon us.
 

The fact is that native people - together with their awareness and lifestyles - represent a primordial dimension of our exxistence that cannot disappear without human beings themselves disappearing. For those like me who experienced it, even temporarily, the transformation that certain ancient ways bring about life seems to be one of the games really worth playing.

I was once told that each one of us has to walk is own path i a sacred manner. Looking back on my youth, I see clearly that I have always been among those people who share the vision of a world of peace and diversity. For almost thirty years (I'm 46), I have consistently been searching for the many ways to reconsider the basic assumptions on which our Western civilized culture is built. Considering and integrating what are the ethical, social and practical implications of such an understanding has become a way of life. It has been, and still is, a permanent challenge.
 
 

In the beginning of the 90's, I happened to come to Finland to take part in a seven year research program about Aboriginal Cultures. The main goal was to build a forest ecovillage into the wilderness and carry on field studies about traditional-indigenous knowledge. It was an ambitious programme. Unfortunately, the team of experts who were involved with it had to leave the country before the programme even started. They were too many contrasting interests among commissioners in Finland.

Our permanence in the country had been short but long enough to have some cultural impact on the host community - especially among a generation of young people who were more attracted by the "ancient ways" than by the "American way of life" the country had adopted, with a specific interest for their Finno-Ugrian roots

The following decade, I was again in Finland, to spend holidays with my son and his mother. For three years, we organized Forest Summer Camps and were joined by a dozen of families with their kids. We felt it was important for the small ones to get a touch of what means to live in direct contact with nature.

We lived in tipis, picked up wild plants for food, went swimming in the lake and walking in the wilderness. We had family circles and played with children. We enjoyed each other's company as never before. People presented workshops in their own fields: crafts, arts, music, herbs, etc. Every evening, we met around the fire for sharing, telling stories and singing. We created our own rituals according to the rhythms of nature. There was much fun, and some of us thought this was a wonderful experience that could  inspire their lives for the future. There were talks about building sustainable communities and eco-villages, and the small circle of friends started to expand.

Manitonquat, or Medicine Story, an elder of the Wampanoag Nation (USA), and his wife Ellika from Sweden visited our camp in 2000. They shared with us their experience and wisdom. It was a real gift for all. Medicine Story is well known among natives and non-natives for the healing power of his stories. His  books Return to Creation and Children of the Morning Light are very inspiring, and his "circle" therapy based on traditional knowledge proves to be very successful for reconnecting people with themselves and all their relations. We ended up the camp with a "sweat lodge", a traditional Native American healing sauna.

I love those camps for they gave people the feeling of being part of something natural and worthwhile. On a personal level, it brought me back to what I had experienced on a permanent basis with The Tribe - this group of ecotopians who came together in France in the middle of the Seventies. It happens to me more and more often to be asked by young people - and not exclusively - about that experience. I'm happy that stories about those times still make sense for other people today. It may inspire them to start building their own tribes.
 

Trying to say anything about The Tribe has frustrated me for years. Finally, I have chosen to speak from my own experience. What follows is a summary of how I met The Tribe and walked my path with them for fifteen years. Nothing here is purely objective, nor exclusively subjective. There could be at least one hundred different stories about this experience, as many as the number of people who were involved with. It really would be great. Since I cannot know all my readers in advance, I hope it can engage in some kind of dialogue. 

Goethe wrote: “ Theories are gray; trees are always green”.
 

Welcome to the bush!
 
 
 

(1) The power of technological worldview
(2) The Archeology of the Development Idea, in Intercultrue, Volume XXIII, Number 4, Fall 1990, Montreal, Canada.
(3) "There is no one alternative, but there may be alternatives. Yet, most alleged alternatives, however, are only reforms. They are different modes of solving a particular problem, accepting by and large the vision of the technocratic world, forming part of it or idealistic dreams. The real question is not the solution of the problem, but the problem itself. On the other hand, a radical alternative would be incomprehensible within the parameters of the very system of which it purports to be an alternative. It would be immediately discarded, since it would destroy the very foundations of a possible change as seen from the point of view of the status quo. Democracy, for instance, may accept a democratic change but does not tolerate a modification of its ground rules. The problem is delicate.

I repeat: to accept one possible alternative is already to fall into the trap of the technocratic view of monistic thinking. Sheer dialectical opposition and much less violence are not solutions. Even if the other party could overpower technocracy, the remedy could turn worse than the malady. After all, not everything in technocracy is negative; indeed, it has already pursued a process of adjustment to human conditions. The roots of technocracy are much deeper. It is not a question of right or left, socialism or capitalism.

There could be alternatives. And the reason for this is deeper than the obvious strategic observation that, since we cannot solve everything, it is better that some groups tackle the ecological problems, some the political, while others the economic ones. This is to believe that cutting the problem into smaller portions, following the well-known (and fallacious) cartesian rule, we may come to a solution. To want to make things easy, so as not to discourage people, is wrong in itself as well as a bad policy. The human predicament today can neither be minimised nor compartmentalised. Reality is not the great machine that a mechanicist worldview would have us believe. Reality is a whole, and as a whole not equal to the sum of its parts. In this way there are no alternatives either, precisely because there is no alternative. There may be options which pave the way for a transformation by means of a provisional emphasis on another side, not of the problem (which does not need to be the same) but of the overall state of affairs. Any alternative which is not capable of discovering the other side is not an alternative.

Using the word alternatives in the plural, we understand that the alter may have many sides of which our option is only one side. This is another name for pluralism, that is, the recognised co-existence of mutually exclusive styles of life, views of the real, opinions about things and systems of thought. Not aliud (in the sense of the other), but alter (in the proper meaning of the alterity inherent in any experience of otherness – which is reciprocal). Ultimately what is at stake here is the ontological status given to the epistemological reductio ad unum, as if what is necessary for the intellect were also a necessary axiom for reality. We cannot understand without reducing the known thing to a certain unity, but this does not prove that reality should be intelligible." 
R. Panikkar, The Dharma of India