Stopping Progress

May 27, 2008 by Jay Taber.

I once read about an Amazon tribe that first encountered men in orange vests tying ribbons on trees and pounding stakes in the ground. The next thing they knew, bulldozers came and destroyed their village and forest-based livelihood. A few years later, after retreating further into the forest, the tribe saw men in orange vests again tying ribbons on their trees, and didn’t hesitate to kill what they knew from experience was an advance party scouting their destruction. Hard to argue with the logic.

In a more innocent twist on stopping progress, I once observed young children pulling up survey stakes and running in a field with the survey ribbons attached flapping like little kites. Their uninhibited joie de vivre seems to contain a message for us all.

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