Reply To: 26.5.2014 Ancient Futures

Erika Kriukelyte
Reply to Kristina Berglund

In the first part of your reflection, you synthesized Helena Norberg-Hodge ideas and offered your own evaluation of her text. In this part, I would like to focus more attention to your mentioned, as well as author, one-way notion of development, linear progress path. This perception of the world leads to unification of the systems, which develops the same agendas for the desired outcome and in the same time it depends to have constant growth. However, the natural world does not fit in these frames of similarities and unstoppable augmentation, because it has its own laws that cannot be tamed. Thus this created the alienation between expected outcome and the real results. In some point, Helena’s attention to global and local visually expresses this gap and she considers this to be the reason that caused the problem created by unification. I believe it is important to understand that unification does not bring equality and equity, but on the contrary it caused gentrification.
In the second part of your reflection, you tried to make sense of my question that was designed rapidly and not thoughtfully, so sorry for this. However, after reading through your answer, I would like to discuss some arguments you are using in the text. You are speaking about urbanization as something that transforms humans’ values: from family towards individuals and so on. I cannot fully agree with this kind of view. As the human population is expending every year and till 2025 it is expected to reach 9 milliard inhabitants on the Earth, cities became solution in questions like decrease of pollution and population growth control. If we investigate family as phenomena, we would find out that it changed meaning. In the past creating a big family and being member of it, was necessary for survival, for security, for food production, but right now it is not necessary to have this kind of safety circle. Women want to be more independent from house environment and families as the units focus more not on quantity of the children, but on having fewer children with better breeding and further education.