[nukkad] Kerala - after being prompte dby the Netgeek

["Ravi Menon" <>]

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Tip of the day:  Remember, this "nukkad" is international.
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This is big but its certainly worth a read.


The Enigma of Kerala
One state in India is proving development experts wrong

Excerpted with permission from DoubleTake by Bill McKibben

Kerala  (pronounced ker'uh luh) , a state of 29 million people in 
southern India, is poor- -even for India - -with a per capita income 
estimated by various surveys to be between $298 and $350 a year, about 
one-seventieth the American average. When the American anthropologist 
Richard Franke surveyed the typical Keralite village of Nadur in the 
late 1980s, he found that nearly half the 170 families had only 
cooking utensils, a wooden bench, and a few stools in their homes. No 
beds - -that was the sum of their possessions. Thirty-six percent also 
had some chairs and cots, and 19 percent owned a table. In five 
households he discovered cushioned seats.

But here is the odd part.

   * The life expectancy for a North American male, with all his chairs and 
cushions, is 72 years, while the life expectancy for a Keralite male is 70.

   * After the latest in a long series of literacy campaigns, the united 
Nations in 1991 certified Kerala as 100 percent literature. Your  chances of 
having an informed conversation are at least as high in Kerala as in Kansas.

   * Kerala's birth rate hovers near 18 per thousand, compared with 16 per 
thousand in the United States- -and is falling faster.

Demographically, in other words, Kerala mirrors the United States on about 
one-seventieth the cash. It has problems, of course: There is chronic   
unemployment, a stagnant economy that may have trouble coping with world   
markets, and a budget deficit that is often described as out of control.   
But these are the kinds of problems you find in France. Kerala utterly   
lacks the squalid drama of the Third World- -the beggars reaching through   
the car window, the children with distended bellies, the baby girls left   
to die.

In countries of comparable income, including other states of India, life   
expectancy is 58 years, and only half the people (and perhaps a third of   
the women) can read and write; the birth rate hovers around 40 per   
thousand. Development experts use an index they call PQLI, for "physical   
quality of life index," a composite that runs on a scale from zero to a   
hundred and combines most of the basic indicators of a decent human life.   
In 1981, Kerala's score of 82 far exceeded all of Africa's, and in Asia   
only the incomparably richer South Korea (85), Taiwan (87), and Japan (98)   
ranked higher. And Kerala kept improving. By 1989, its score had risen to   
88, compared with a total of 60 for the rest of India. It has managed all   
this even though it's among the most densely crowded places on earth- -the   
population of California squeezed into a state the size of Switzerland.   
Not even the diversity of its population- -60 percent Hindu, 20 percent   
Muslim, 20 percent Christian, a recipe for chronic low-grade warfare in   
the rest of India- -has stood in its way.

It is, in other words, weird- -like one of those places where the starship 
Enterprise might land that superficially resembles Earth but is slightly  
off. It undercuts maxims about the world we consider almost intuitive:   
Rich people are healthier, rich people live longer, rich people have more   
opportunity for education, rich people have fewer children. We know all   
these things to be true- -and yet here is a countercase, a demographic   
Himalaya suddenly rising on our mental atlas. It's as if someone   
demonstrated in a lab that flame didn't necessarily need oxygen, or that   
water could freeze at 60 degrees. It demands a new chemistry to explain   
it, a whole new science.

Kerala emerged at the end of the eighth century, when a Hindu monarchy   
supplanted a looser, feudal structure. The trade contacts of the ancient   
and early medieval periods- -Kerala's cardamom, pepper, turmeric, and other  
spices were constant attractions (our word ginger derives from a word in   
the local language, Malayalam)- -eventually turned to more modern, and more  
exploitative, colonial domination. By 1792, the British controlled what is 
now Kerala, dividing it into three districts. The first hints of   
singularity came in that colonial era. In the southern two-thirds of the   
state, the British left the local princes on the throne. Hoping for an   
agricultural surplus large enough to satisfy both themselves and the   
British, these rajahs offered tax breaks for the reclamation of swamps and   
marshes, and they moved to give tenant farmers more control over the land.   
"Development policy in the whole world is generally considered to begin in   
the 1940s," says historian Michael Tharakan. "But you can see the roots of   
it right from the beginning of the 19th century in Kerala."

To conclude, however, that Kerala under the British was becoming an   
enlightened and democratic place would be a mistake. The tradition of   
caste, bulwark of the Hindu rulers since the eighth century, was as strong   
as ever in the nineteenth. At the top of the heap were the Namboodiri   
Brahmins, followed by the Nairs- -soldiers and administrators- -and various  
artisanal classes. Below all of them were the Ezhavas, roughly a fifth of  
the population, who traditionally made their living climbing palms to   
harvest the coconuts, and the Pulayas, the local untouchables. Within the   
various castes, innumerable complicated subsets emerged, and the codes of   
conduct became ever stricter and more degrading over time.

Kerala is now less caste-ridden than any spot in the Hindu world; it is a  
transition more complete than, say, the transformation achieved by the   
civil rights movement in the American South. Looking backward, it is clear   
that some of this epic, and mostly peaceful, change can be traced to new   
economic conditions. As the British and the rajahs pushed cash crops   
instead of subsistence farming, and as more and more tenant farmers became   
involved with that market, the need for literacy, for instance, grew, and   
some of the old customs became financially ruinous.

But a purely economic explanation of singular history is as unsatisfying   
as calling the Civil War a clash between industrial and agrarian   
economies. Economic factors are clearer in hindsight; to those who lived   
through the changes, they seemed much more dramatic and less inevitable.   
"The large masses of people accepted caste distinctions as part of the   
order of things" writes M. K. Sanoo, a Keralite historian. "Each in his   
own set place, moving along the orbit of caste, as if it was nature. The   
men of those days could not even dream that any change was possible." Even   
Tharakan, a devout rationalist, says, "Though these changes had an   
economic base, they were mediated at the level of ethics, of moral   
dictums." Or, in plainer English, Kerala too had its Lincolns, its Martin   
Luther Kings, and to understand this quick and peaceful miracle- -and   
perhaps to repeat it elsewhere- -we need to catch their temper, see the   
ideas they set loose.

Sri Narayana Guru was born in 1856 to an Ezhava family- -in proper   
holy-guy fashion, in a hut "but a shade better than a cowshed." As a young   
man, he renounced worldly attachments and began to wander, sitting in   
caves with legs crossed and meditating, fasting, and consorting with   
lepers. As more people sought him out for healing or advice, he and his   
disciples felt the need for a regular temple for worshipping Shiva. At a   
beautiful spot in a river near Aruvippuram, he had his followers build a   
small canopy of coconut leaves and mango leaves over an altar on a rock   
jutting out in the water. The year was 1888. "They improvised lamps with   
shells and arranged them in rows. They were lighted at dusk and a piper   
began to play devotional tunes. The whole place was soon filled with pious   
village folk." Sri Narayana, who had been sitting apart and meditating all   
night, stood at midnight and walked into the river. As thousands watched   
silently ("If silence had music, the atmosphere was filled with it," wrote   
one correspondent) he descended into the river and then reemerged, holding   
an idol of Shiva. He stood beneath the canopy with it in his arms for   
three hours, totally lost in meditation, tears flowing down his cheeks.   
Finally, at three in the morning, he installed the idol on the pedestal.

His action was the Keralite equivalent of overturning the tables of the   
money changers, or refusing to give up a seat on the bus. From the   
beginning of time, so far as anyone knew, only Brahmins had ever installed   
an idol. "Yet when Swami performed the sacred rite it appeared so natural   
for him to pick up a small rock and install it." When Brahmin authorities   
arrived to question him about his action, he gave an answer that still   
makes Keralites laugh. "I have installed only the Ezhava Shiva," he said,   
a mockery of caste that undermined its rotten superstructure more than his   
actual deed.

Caste did not crumble immediately, however. Sri Narayana Guru and many   
other reformers spent their lives campaigning for more rights- -more   
opportunity, the right to enter and worship at all temples- -for the   
various castes. But all the prosaic struggle for civil rights went on in   
an atmosphere of spirituality; more than the simple assertion of power by   
a group too large to be ignored, it was also the assertion of a moral   
ideal, a view of human dignity against the oppressions both of feudalism   
and of faith. "One caste, one religion, one God for man," was Sri Narayana   
Guru's rallying cry.

Since oppression and religion were so intertwined in Hindu culture, social 
progress depended on religious reform, which could only come from   
religious leaders; there's a sense in which activists like Sri Narayana   
Guru had to be both Martin Luther and Martin Luther King. He knew the   
freedom struggle was about much more than political independence. When a   
student of his said once that if all the Indians merely spat at the same   
time, the Englishmen would be drowned, the swami replied, "That is true.   
But the mouth becomes dry on seeing an Englishman." He was building new   
people as much as a new politics.

In the morning, every road in Kerala is lined with boys and girls walking  
to school. Depending on their school, their uniforms are bright blue,   
bright green, bright red. It may be sentimental to say that their eyes are   
bright as well, but of all the subtle corrosives that broke down the old   
order and gave rise to the new Kerala, surely none is as important as the   
spread of education to an extent unprecedented and as yet unmatched in the   
Third World.

Though Christian missionaries and the British started the process, it took 
the militance of the caste-reform groups and then of the budding left to  
spread education widely. The first great boom was in the 1920s and 1930s,  
particularly in southern Kerala, where the princes acceded to popular   
demands for ever more schools. When leftists dominated politics in the   
1960s, they spread the educational programs into Malabar, the northern   
state that had been ruled directly by the British, and began granting   
scholarships to untouchables and tribal peoples. By 1981, the general   
literacy rate in Kerala was 70 percent- -twice the all-India rate of 36   
percent. Even more impressive, the rural literacy rate was essentially   
identical, and female literacy, at 66 percent, was not far behind. Kerala   
was a strange spike on the dismal chart of Third World literacy.

The government, particularly the leftists who governed for much of the   
late 1980s, continued to press the issue, aiming for "total literacy,"   
usually defined as a population where about 95 percent can read and write.   
The pilot project began in the Ernakulam region, an area of 3 million   
people that includes the city of Cochin. In late 1988, 50,000 volunteers   
fanned out around the district, tracking down 175,000 illiterates between   
the ages of 5 and 60, two-thirds of them women. The leftist People's   
Science Movement recruited 20,000 volunteer tutors and sent them out to   
teach. Within a year, it was hoped, the illiterates would read Malayalam   
at 30 words a minute, copy a text at 7 words a minute, count and write   
from 1 to 100, and add and subtract three-digit numbers. The larger goal   
was to make people feel powerful, feel involved; the early lessons were   
organized around Brazilian teacher Paolo Freire's notion that the concrete   
problems of people's lives provide the best teaching material. "Classes   
were held in cowsheds, in the open air, in courtyards," one leader told   
the New York Times. "For fishermen we went to the seashore. In the hills,   
tribal groups sat on rocks. Leprosy patients were taught to hold a pencil   
in stumps of hands with rubber bands. We have not left anyone out." For   
those with poor eyesight, volunteers collected 50,000 donated pairs of old   
eyeglasses and learned from doctors how to match them with recipients. On   
February 4, 1990, 13 months after the initial canvass, Indian prime   
minister V.P. Singh marked the start of World Literacy Year with a trip to   
Ernakulam, declaring it the country's first totally literate district. Of   
the 175,000 students, 135,000 scored 80 percent or better on the final   
test, putting the region's official literacy rate above 96 percent; many   
of the others stayed in follow-up classes and probably had learned enough   
to read bus signs. The total cost of the 150 hours of education was about   
$26 per person.

Organizers knew the campaign was working when letters from the newly   
literate began arriving in government offices, demanding paved roads and   
hospitals.

Many people, sincerely alarmed by the world's ever-expanding population,  
have decided that we need laws to stop the growth, that, sad as such   
coercion would be, it's a necessary step. And they have some cases to   
point to- -China, for instance, where massive government force probably did  
manage to contain a population that would otherwise have grown beyond its  
ability to feed itself. But as that country frees itself from the grip of  
the communists, the pent-up demand for children may well touch off a   
massive baby boom. Compulsion "does not work except in the very short   
term," writes Paul Harrison in his book The Third Revolution (Viking   
Penguin, 1993), and his case in point is India, which tried to raise its   
rate of sterilization dramatically in the 1970s. To obtain recruits for   
the "vasectomy camps" erected throughout the country, the government   
withheld licenses for shops and vehicles, refused to grant food ration   
cards or supply canal water for irrigation, and in some cases simply sent   
the police to round up "volunteers." It worked, in a sense: In 1976, 8.3   
million Indians were sterilized. But Indira Gandhi lost the next election   
largely as a result, the campaign was called off, and it was "ten years   
before the number of couples using modern contraception rose again to   
their 1972-73 peaks," Harrison writes. India's population, which grew by   
109 million in the 1960s and 137 million in the 1970s, grew 160 million in   
the 1980s. That is the population of two Mexicos, or one Eisenhower-era   
United States.

Kerala- -and a scattered collection of other spots around the world, now   
drawing new attention in the wake of the United Nations' Cairo summit on   
population- -makes clear that coercion is unnecessary. In Kerala the birth   
rate is 40 percent below that of India as a whole and almost 60 percent   
below the rate for poor countries in general. In fact, a 1992 survey found   
that the birth rate had fallen to replacement level. That is to say,   
Kerala has solved one-third of the equation that drives environmental   
destruction the world over. And, defying conventional wisdom, it has done   
so without rapid economic growth- -has done so without becoming a huge   
consumer of resources and thus destroying the environment in other ways.

"The two-child family is the social norm here now," said M.N. Sivaram, the 
Trivandrum- -capital of Kerala- -representative of the International 
Family   Planning Association, as we sat in his office, surrounded by   
family-planning posters. "Even among illiterate women we find it's true.   
When we send our surveyors out, people are embarrassed to say if they have   
more than two kids. Seven or eight years ago, the norm was three children   
and we thought we were doing pretty good. Now it's two, and among the most   
educated people, it's one." Many factors contribute to the new notion of   
what's proper. The pressure on land is intense, of course, and most people   
can't support huge families on their small parcels. But that hasn't   
stopped others around the world. More powerful, perhaps, has been the   
spread of education across Kerala. Literate women are better able to take   
charge of their lives; the typical woman marries at 22 in Kerala, compared   
to 18 in the rest of India. On average around the world, women with at   
least an elementary education bear two children fewer than uneducated   
women. What's more, they also want a good education for their children. In   
many cases that means private schools to supplement public education, and   
people can't afford several tuition’s.

Kerala's remarkable access to affordable health care has provided a   
similar double blessing. There's a dispensary every few kilometers where   
IUDs and other forms of birth control are freely available, and that   
helps. But the same clinic provides cheap health care for children, and   
that helps even more. With virtually all mothers taught to breast-feed,   
and a state-supported nutrition program for pregnant and new mothers,   
infant mortality in 1991 was 17 per thousand, compared with 91 for   
low-income countries generally. Someplace between those two figures- -17   
and 91- -lies the point where people become confident that their children   
will survive. The typical fertility for traditional societies, says   
Harrison, is about seven children per woman, which "represents not just   
indiscriminate breeding, but the result of careful strategy." Women needed   
one or two sons to take care of them if they were widowed, and where child   
mortality was high this meant having three sons and, on average, six   
children. In a society where girls seem as useful as boys, and where   
children die infrequently, reason suddenly dictates one or two children.   
"I have one child, and I am depending on her to survive," said Mr.   
Sivaram. "If I ever became insecure about that, perhaps my views would   
change."

Kerala's attitude toward female children is an anomaly as well. Of 8,000   
abortions performed at one Bombay clinic in the early 1990s, 7,999 were   
female fetuses. Girl children who are allowed to live are often given less   
food, less education, and less health care, a bias not confined to India.   
In China, with its fierce birth control, there were 113 boys for every 100   
girls under the age of 1 in 1990. There are, in short, millions and   
millions of women missing around the world- -women who would be there were   
it not for the dictates of custom and economy. So it is a remarkable   
achievement in Kerala to say simply this: There are more women than men.   
In India as a whole, the 1991 census found that there were about 929 women   
per 1,000 men; in Kerala, the number was 1,040 women, about where it   
should be. And the female life expectancy in Kerala exceeds that of the   
male, just as it does in the developed world.

Whatever the historical reasons, this quartet of emancipations- -from   
caste distinction, religious hatred, the powerlessness of illiteracy, and   
the worst forms of gender discrimination- -has left the state with a   
distinctive feel, a flavor of place that influences every aspect of its   
life. It is, for one thing, an intensely political region: Early in the   
morning in tea shops across Kerala, people eat a 'Dosha' and read one of 
the   two or three Malayalam-language papers that arrive on the first bus.   
(Kerala has the highest newspaper-consumption per capita of any spot in   
India.) In each town square political parties maintain their icons- -a   
statue of Indira Gandhi (the white streak in her hair carefully painted   
in) or a portrait of Marx, Engels, and Lenin in careful profile. Strikes,   
agitations, and "stirs," a sort of wildcat job action, are so common as to   
be almost unnoticeable. One morning while I was there, the Indian Express   
ran stories on a bus strike, a planned strike of medical students over   
"unreasonable exam schedules," and a call from a leftist leader for the   
government to take over a coat factory where striking workers had been   
locked out. By the next day's paper the bus strike had ended, but a bank   
strike had begun. Worse, the men who perform the traditional and much   
beloved Kathakali dance- -a stylized ballet that can last all night- -were   
threatening to strike; they were planning a march in full costume and   
makeup through the streets of the capital.

Sometimes all the disputation can be overwhelming. In a long account of   
his home village, Thulavady, K.E. Verghese says that "politics are much in   
the air and it is difficult to escape from them. Even elderly women who   
are not interested are dragged into politics." After several fights, he   
reports, a barbershop posted a sign on the wall: "No political   
discussions, please." But for the most part the various campaigns and   
protests seem a sign of self-confidence and political vitality, a vast   
improvement over the apathy, powerlessness, ignorance, or tribalism that   
governs many Third World communities.

How can the Kerala model spread to other places with different cultures,   
less benign histories? Unfortunately, there's another question about the   
future that needs to be answered first: Can the Kerala model survive even   
in Kerala, or will it be remembered chiefly as an isolated and short-term   
outbreak from a prison of poverty?

In the paddy fields near Mitraniketan, bare-chested men swung hoes hard   
into the newly harvested fields, preparing the ground for the next crop.   
They worked steadily but without hurry- -in part because there was no next   
job to get to. Unemployment and underemployment have been signal problems   
in Kerala for decades. As much as a quarter of the state's population may   
be without jobs; in rural villages, by many estimates, laborers are happy   
for 70 or 80 days a year of hoe and sickle work. And though the liberal   
pension and unemployment compensation laws, and the land reform that has   
left most people with at least a few coconut trees in their house   
compound, buffer the worst effects of joblessness, it is nonetheless a   
real problem: In mid-morning, in the small village at the edge of the rice   
fields, young men lounge in doorways with nothing to do.

To some extent, successes are surely to blame. A recent report published   
by the Centre for Development Studies looked at the coir (coconut fiber),   
cashew processing, and cigarette industries and concluded that as unions   
succeeded in raising wages and improving working conditions, they were   
also driving factories off to more degraded parts of India. Kerala's   
vaunted educational system may also play a role. Because of what they are   
taught, writes M.A. Oommen, "university graduates become seekers of jobs   
rather than creators of jobs." In Kerala, says K.K. George of the Centre   
for Development Studies, "the concept of a job is a job in a ministry.   
When you get out of school you think: `The state should give me a job as a   
clerk'"- -an understandable attitude, since government service is   
relatively lucrative, completely secure, and over, by law, at age 55.   
Large numbers of Keralites also go into medicine, law, and teaching. That   
they perform well is proved by their success in finding jobs abroad- -as   
many as a quarter million Keralites work at times in the Persian Gulf- -but  
at home there is less demand.

The combination of a stagnant economy and a strong commitment to providing 
health and education have left the state with large budget deficits.   
Development expert Joseph Collins, for all his praise of progress, calls   
it a "bloated social welfare state without the economy to support it," a   
place that has developed a "populist welfare culture, where all the   
parties are into promising more goodies, which means more deficits. The   
mentality that things don't have to be funded, that's strong in Kerala- -in  
the midst of the fiscal crisis that was going on while I was there, some   
of the parties were demanding that the agricultural pension be doubled."

But the left seems to be waking up to the problems. Professor Thomas   
Isaac- -described to me as a "24-karat Marxist" and as a wheel in the   
Communist Party- -said, "Our main effort has been to redistribute, not to   
manage, the economy. But because we on the left have real power, we need   
to have an active interest in that management- -to formulate a new policy   
toward production." Instead of building huge factories, or lowering wages   
to grab jobs from elsewhere, or collectivizing farmers, the left has   
embarked on a series of "new democratic initiatives" that come as close as   
anything on the planet to actually incarnating "sustainable development,"   
that buzzword beloved of environmentalists. The left has proposed, and on   
a small scale has begun, the People's Resource Mapping Program, an attempt   
to move beyond word literacy to "land literacy." Residents of local   
villages have begun assembling detailed maps of their area, showing   
topography, soil type, depth to the water table, and depth to bedrock.   
Information in hand, local people could sit down and see, for instance,   
where planting a grove of trees would prevent erosion.

And the map makers think about local human problems, too. In one village,  
for instance, residents were spending scarce cash during the dry season to 
buy vegetables imported from elsewhere in India. Paddy owners were asked  
to lease their land free of charge between rice crops for market gardens,  
which were sited by referring to the maps of soil types and the water   
table. Twenty-five hundred otherwise unemployed youth tended the gardens,   
and the vegetables were sold at the local market for less than the cost of   
the imports. This is the direct opposite of a global market. It is   
exquisitely local- -it demands democracy, literacy, participation,   
cooperation. The new vegetables represent "economic growth" of a sort that   
does much good and no harm. The number of rupees consumed, and hence the   
liters of oil spent packaging and shipping and advertising, go down, not   
up.

With high levels of education and ingrained commitment to fairness, such   
novel strategies might well solve Kerala's economic woes, especially since   
a stabilized population means it doesn't need to sprint simply to stay in   
place. One can imagine, easily, a state that manages to put more of its   
people to work for livable if low wages. They would manufacture items that   
they need, grow their own food, and participate in the world economy in a   
modest way, exporting workers and some high-value foods like spices, and   
attracting some tourists. "Instead of urbanization, ruralization," says K.   
Vishwanathan, a longtime Gandhian activist who runs an orphanage and   
job-training center where I spent several days. At his cooperative, near   
the silkworm pods used to produce high-quality fabric, women learn to   
repair small motors and transistor radios- -to make things last, to build a  
small-scale economy of permanence. "We don't need to become commercial   
agents, to always be buying and selling this and that," says Vishwanathan.   
He talks on into the evening, spinning a future at once humble and   
exceedingly pleasant, much like the airy, tree-shaded community he has   
built on once-abandoned land- -a future as close to the one envisioned by   
E. F. Schumacher or Thomas Jefferson or Gandhi as is currently imaginable.   
"What is the good life?" asks Vishwanathan. "The good life is to be a good   
neighbor, to consider your neighbor as yourself."

A small parade of development experts has passed through Kerala in recent  
years, mainly to see how its successes might be repeated in places like   
Vietnam and Mozambique. But Kerala may be as significant a schoolhouse for   
the rich world as for the poor. "Kerala is the one large human population   
on earth that currently meets the sustainability criteria of simultaneous   
small families and low consumption," says Will Alexander of the Food First   
Institute in San Francisco.

Kerala suggests a way out of two problems simultaneously- -not only the   
classic development goal of more food in bellies and more shoes on feet,   
but also the emerging, equally essential task of living lightly on the   
earth, using fewer resources, creating less waste. Kerala demonstrates   
that a low-level economy can create a decent life, abundant in the   things- 
-health, education, community- -that are most necessary for us all.   Gross 
national product is often used as a synonym for achievement, but it   is 
also an eloquent shorthand for gallons of gasoline burned, stacks of   
garbage tossed out, quantities of timber sawn into boards. One recent   
calculation showed that for every American dollar or its equivalent spent   
anywhere on earth, half a liter of oil was consumed in producing,   
packaging, and shipping the goods. One-seventieth the income means   
one-seventieth the damage to the planet. So, on balance, if Kerala and the   
United States manage to achieve the same physical quality of life, Kerala   
is the vastly more successful society.

Which is not to say that we could ever live on as little as they do- -or,  
indeed, that they should. The right point is clearly somewhere in between. 
Logical as a middle way might be, though, we've not yet even begun to   
think about it in any real terms. We've clung to the belief that perhaps   
someday everyone on earth will be as rich as we are- -a belief that seems   
utterly deluded in light of our growing environmental awareness.

Kerala does not tell us precisely how to remake the world. But it does   
shake up our sense of what's obvious, and it offers a pair of messages to   
the First World. One is that sharing works. Redistribution has made Kerala   
a decent place to live, even without much economic growth. The second and   
even more important lesson is that some of our fears about simpler living   
are unjustified. It is not a choice between suburban America and dying at   
35, between agribusiness and starvation, between 150 channels of   
television and ignorance.

It is a subversive reality, that stagnant/stable economy that serves its   
people well, and in some ways it is a scary one. Kerala implies that there   
is a point where rich and poor might meet and share a decent life, and   
surely it offers new data for a critical question of our age: How much is   
enough?



Bill McKibben is the author of The End of Nature (Random House, 1989), The 
Age  of Missing Information (Random House, 1992), and Hope, Human and Wild 
(Little  Brown, 1995).




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