!!!!!!!!!!!!!Listening to the Wild Tone of The Omo!

!Can a Geographic Information Systems Data Model Design Project teamed up with Geo-Tourism Establish Co-Evolutionary Intellectual Property Rights for Indigenous-

Traditional Peoples and Landscapes? !!!!!!!!!!!!

Laethe Blaine!organicmana@gmail.com!

Africa Geography PSU!Fall 2013

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The Omo River Valley Watershed in Southwest Ethiopia and NW Kenya is the Wild Human

Heartland of the “blue marble” planet, for all we know so far, it is the Wild Heartland of Empathy,

Honor, and Mythologic Language for the greater Cosmos. We humans are so close to realizing

a meaning greater than our “self;” yet not a meaning that sacrifices the self. We need to find

meaning, that much seems clear. Can we find it as the intermingled, flowing heritage of global

awareness between single-cellular and multi-cellular life? The Omo is the first physical place on

earth that co-developed our collective potential for a sense of metaphysical beauty in images

and symbols and patterns. Why are we letting that meaning be dammed for sugar and hydro-

electricity? What’s stopping us, as a collective, but individualize species, a global tribe of a

social species, from protecting our collective wild heartland from city-biased global

development? Why can’t we designate our wild heartland as a monument to the flow of

something more sacred than the flow of sugar and electrons, the flow of empathy and honor?

We must find a physical way and a collective will, regardless of economic struggles and political

boundaries, to establish a global monument to the wild human heartland where the innate

desire to explore, to walk in many directions and to think and talk in more than one way grew

into true culture and knowledge. “Geo-tourism” as a natural evolution of tourism toward more

empathic and honorable exchanges of identity, maybe just the structure we need.!

Let’s take a virtual tour of the Omo together; a quick listen in on the tone of various

conversations and at what the world thinks of it and we of “US.”!

UNESCO has designated the Omo as a place of “…Outstanding Universal Value (OUV)

related to the discovery in the Rift Valley of hominid fossils, some of which date back four million

years and have been of fundamental importance in the study of human evolution…” (UNESCO

96) This statement is the foundation of my main point and is a considerable contribution to my

main lesson in the study of physical geography, cultural geography, and Geographic Information

Systems: The people of the entire Omo Valley Watershed including those living down stream on

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and around Lake Turkana/Jade Sea, are suffering and will likely suffer further human rights

violations against free speech and personal sovereignty from the global urban community. In

this case should we “Let Knowledge Serve The City?” I see a paradox that needs fixing and I 1

feel can be fixed if knowledge, rather

than serving the city, serves culture

as culture is most directly related to

the wild personality of a landscape in

conversation with the people who are

left geographically unique and intact.

Let’s listen to the wild tone of the

Omo river flowing up from the Atlantic

and falling at the edge of the

Ethiopian Highlands and then

evaporating once again in the heat of

the equator.!

Eliade Mircea, the scholar of

Mythology suggests, “All culture is a

fall into history.” (Eliade) If we use the

tone of the thousands and millions of

years worth of conversations between different cultures which were and are still connected to

mythologic interpretations of history, can we re-interpret intellectual property rights in a way that

actually protects identity and culture? I am confident, as a child of the Great Pacific Northwest,

and a child of the mixed and dynamic pop-culture of the USA, that mixing is in our blood stream,

and thus in our subconsciousness which is thus within reach of our greater understanding. But

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Motto of Portland State University Portland, Oregon1

not if knowledge serves the progress of the future. It seems there is nothing in the future that is

not intimately connected with the past and it seems that true culture, with the guidance and

structure of mythologic symbols, is best prepared and most adaptable to help humans achieve

sustainability by balancing the progress of technology in holistic empathic and honorable ways.!

Many of my fellow Pacific Northwesterners who hike, bike, ski, and who otherwise enjoy

traveling around freely on fossil fumes and who are watching the Fukushima event intently could

agree with me: Engineering and Technology, such as those that propel us to various adrenaline

rushed, are certainly mixed blessings of benefit, risk, and debt. We must choose very carefully

and take only what we absolutely need on our epic quests. Engineering is not necessarily a

miracle as a much more technologically advanced and inclined (and wealthy…) child of the

Northwest has said we need to develop for future civilization , the kind of engineering and 2

corporate agricultural knowledge put in service in the Omo is not only a dishonorable false

miracle, it hints of the-city-is-the-zombie-eating-people-and-culture apocalypse. !

Let’s listen to the wild tone of the Omo, something a zombie would never do, let’s dive into

the open source high technology data bank to try and empathize with the biomes and peoples

on another part of the planet. Let’s climb to the ridge above the north Omo River Valley, at the

head waters of the Omo river in the Ethiopian highlands, the highest plateau in Africa and one of

the highest in the world, certainly one of the highest, closest to the Equator. On the north side of

this ridge, the rain falls to Egypt with the long, exotic course of the Blue Nile, it returns to the

sea. On the south side, the rain falls to the Omo River and is trapped in Lake Turkana, it

evaporates as an alkaline lake unsuitable for drinking, but sipped from non-the-less with severe

health consequences. Fresh water is very precious anywhere on the planet and it is especially

so here. The hydropower dam proposals will have !

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Search for “Technology Miracles” on ted.com.2

Why is it that the flow of money so often incites the painful flow of blood? Why is money and

banking, especially global money, so unlike water and watershed cycles? The environmental

impact of hydro-power in an arid landscape on a land-locked watershed is predicted to cause

violence as it ends the lifestyle of nearly one million indigenous-traditional people who align with

the flood cycles of the Omo River and Lake Turkana (Avery). The environmental impact

statements of the Gibe III dam from the Ethiopian government have been reviewed by various

independent scientists and found lacking and flawed. (Avery) !

!Both of the maps below are of the watersheds of Ethiopia and are sourced from Dr. Sean

Avery and his Oxford University report of the Gibe III Dam’s Ecological and Social Impacts on

the Omo and Lake Turkana Biome.!

The

ecological and

social damage

is nearly

complete: Up to

500,000

thousand

indigenous and

traditional

lifestyle peoples

along the Omo

River are being disconnected from their watershed and consolidated in villagization programs

and nearly the ams amount look to be affected around Lake Turkana (Avery, Omo-Kuraz

Sugar).!

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“Since 2006 the Ethiopian Government has been building an enormous 1800MW hydroelectric power scheme in the middle Omo River Basin. The Gibe III dam is already 40% completed but was initiated without any proper environmental impact assessment of the potential downstream effects on the Lake. Chinese Banks have reportedly agreed to provide funding to complete the scheme.” (Avery, Patrick pg 18, Apr-Jun 2012 in Avery, Sean pg 24, Oct 2012) !!This culturally

and ecologically

sensitive region of

Africa, like many

regions of the world

with limited water

supply, is in threat of

significant water

grabbing as well as

land grabbing. The

dam creates

irrigation flow rate

security that the Ethiopian government owned Omo-Kuraz Sugar Corporation is using for

cultivating at least 175,000 hectares of land for sugar and planning to sell land to other

agricultural ventures. The hydrological consequences are a drop in up to 3m at Lake Turkana.

(Avery, Patrick 20 in Avery, Sean 26) Possibly the most absurd factor added onto the Sugar

Factory speaking for the indigenous people is that sugar is a known toxin to human and other

animal health not to mention the effluent of the processing system. Sugar is one of the simple

known leading causes of heart disease caused from obesity in the United States and Europe,

yet somehow the artificial intelligence of the global economic system keeps planting more of it

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and wiping out those who would take care of themselves with other, more holistic and life

supportive, complex intercropping “flood recession agriculture” food systems.!

“These pastoralists have been living their lives denied infrastructure and social service giving institutions for a very long time… marginalized to keep leading their cumbersome day-to-day lives throughout their history.” (Omo-Kuraz 4) !!“The population, comprising mostly pastoralists, were included in discussions on the project from the zonal level to kebeles and villages, and would benefit from the project, Molloka claimed. Dereje affirmed that the pastoralists of the Omo River Valley would be beneficiaries of the project. “The project would create huge employment opportunities for the local community,” he told Fortune. “It also comprises community development components that include separate irrigation land for the community living in the area to enable them to earn a living from their own irrigation agriculture.” In addition to building a village for employees, around 750km of internal roads (in total) are to be constructed, according to Molloka.” (FortuneAddis.com)!!The true voice of pastoralist people like those in the photo and that Mark Dowie presents in

his article in Orion entitled Conservation Refugees,!!“‘We don’t want to be like you,’ Saning’o told a room of shocked white faces. ‘We want you to be like us. We are here to change your minds. You cannot accomplish conservation without us.’”!!Will Hurd echo’s Mark Dowie and suggests that the tone of the conversations between the

Ethiopian government and the tribal communities is inappropriate and thus possibly the entire

urban community of Addis Ababa and the Western backers of African Parks Foundation are

devaluing the voice of indigenous-traditional peoples:!

“A better approach would be for African Parks Foundation to truly partner with the local groups, not just hire some as game guards. The collective knowledge of people who have lived among the animals in this area for thousands of years should be seen as an asset for the park.” (Hurd)!

Going further into speculation, it seems that the voice least represented is that of the

landscape, the entire watershed system and physical habitat of the unique biome is under

represented in the urban-global economy. Scientists working for conservation agencies and

universities attempt to translate a landscape voice through empirical and statistical data

modeling and species inventories and lists. The World Wildlife Fund gives this brief biome

description with plant species:!

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!Biomes: “Somali Acacia-Commiphora Brushlands and Thickets, Ethiopian Montane Moorlands, Ethiopian Upper Montane Forests, Woodlands, Brushlands, Grasslands, Masai Xeric and Shrublands and Grasslands. !!Vegetation includes: “Somali-Masai semi-desert annual grassland and shrubland” Aristida adcendionis and A. mutabilis dominant during rain plentiful years.” (Burgess et.al. 399)!!Dr. Sean Avery and his sone Patrick Avery have been visiting Lake Turkana for 30 years and

listing the bird species and other species in magazines and most recently compiled in Sean

Avery’s report for the African Studies Dept at the University of Oxford.!

Richard Leaky, the archeologist, helped demonstrate the ancient depth of human cultural

significance of the Omo Watershed when he and his team discovered the Turkana Boy, a nearly

complete specimen of Homo erectus. This find demonstrated the importance of fossils in

expressing the complex voice of a landscape with fossil records of deep archeological

significance for the region and for the evolutionary kinship of all human beings. He describes the

area of the lower Omo River and of Lake Turkana in his books such as “Origins Reconsidered”

published 1992 and then the significance of Turkana Boy the Homo erectus fossil:!

!“The shallow lagoon before me is one of many that inter finger the floodplain sediments of the western shore, part of the restricted lake system of the time Reeds and other aquatic plants that can tolerate the brackish waters fringe the lagoons. A spiky grass covers much of the floodplain, a thin, pale green carpet for much of the year.” (Leakey )!!“The Turkana boy had been a part of a major shift in human evolution, one in which the seeds of the humanness we feel within us today were firmly planted. In addition to important changes in overall body form and life patterns, Homo erectus was at the forefront of a surge in brain size, a boost in mental capacity. It was, I believe, at the real beginning of the burgeoning of compassion, morality, and conscious awareness that today we cherish as marks of humanity.” (Leakey 67) !!The delicate hydrologic flood cycles of the Omo and lake Turkana watershed with the

openness of the rugged landscape must have imprinted layer upon layer of valuable

subconscious geographic information upon the evolving human mind for millions of years. Is this

imprinting represented as a sort of geographic information code in the human mind as

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mythology and language and cultural art patterns? Can this code and mosaic be captured for

later multi-purpose translation in a GIS data model using the structure of phenomenology and

the research and education skills of phenomenography? This region is much more valuable

than tons of of sugar and wattage of electricity. There is a deep and irreplaceable value in the

study of human DNA that a geneticist had been demonstrating and defending while Leakey was

discovering fossil evidence, “Paleoanthropologists who ignore the increasing wealth of genetic

data on human population relationships will do so at their own peril.” (Christopher Stringer

caption to his picture after page 280) Could mitochondrial DNA data be blended in an authentic

geocoding process with cultural and biological data so as to express and protect the intellectual

property rights of the landscape and the people who traveled through it and who live there now

as a code of symbols that authentically presents a form of collective, yet individual voice?!

Work has been done and is ongoing in the field of natural capitalism and ecological

economics that seems capable of working out the details of the intellectual property rights in a

venture as I am tying to describe:!

“(The essential value of biological diversity is its informational value)… Human capital alone may not be capable of producing all important and valuable information… This biological dimension is the evolutionary process which, through biological interaction and the process of selection, generates communities of life forms that contain substantial amounts of accumulated information.” (Swanson 169)!!“Supplanting a naturally evolved habitat, and slate of species, with a human-chosen slate may confer tangible productivity gains, but it also removes the information that was available from that community. The information from coevolution, the product of the evolutionary process, is lost with the conversion.” (Swanson 169)!!I suppose that some of the question is who can be trusted with this information when it’s

generated and will the traditional-indigenous people dare to trust a small team of modern

western people who contact them and try to explain the concept to them? How contact on the

concept is effected is certainly a deal breaker of maker. Only highly emotionally intelligent,

sensitive, and empathic people could possibly approach people and interview them about their

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feelings on experiences of phenomenons in relationship to their landscape and watershed and

on memories of traditional mythologies. These factors are important when considering the

tourism value of the area and especially from a phenomenology perspective, that is, from the

perspective of the phenomenon that is the human mind and the human propensity to walk and

talk… in collaborative teams.!

What type or types of tourism might best embrace this way of ecological consciousness

where people and landscape share a co-creative intellectual property right over their collective

voice? Well, I’ll go ahead and try to answer that. Most westerners even if they’ve grown up in

Africa and in the African tourism industry seem not to present this concept, which is I see as a

natural extension of the Deep Ecology and Eco-psychology movement. Essentially I’m

advocating upfront that the spirit and principle of wilderness, everything living or landscape

remain as wild and scenic as possible. Many forms of tourism have flooded Africa since post

colonial liberation movements and after the hate, anger, and victims of civil wars and genocides

have subsided and been buried and after the victims of devastating droughts have been buried.

But who of the following list of tourists to the East Africa Region do you think care the most?

Who demonstrates the most sensitivity to the birth place of human language, and team-based

society? Here I briefly survey the various types of tourism including ecotourism, military, neo-

colonial-agricultural, safari, and geo-toursim. !

Eco-tourism has been a difficult term to define since used in the late 1990’s at the latest,

considered as the most “responsible,” “niche or market segment, generally equated with nature

or ecologically based tourism,” which is fundamentally “alternative,” to mass tourism modes and!

“‘an economic process where rare and beautiful eco-systems are marketed internationally to attract tourists… travel to enjoy the world’s amazing diversity of natural life and human culture without causing damage to either… The sensitivity to human culture is often forgotten… A vital requirement is that visitors should show respect for both the environment and the people who live in it… Looking at indigenous people as if they were animals in a zoo is an affront to human dignity. We are all different in our appearance and customs and should glory in our differences rather than subordinate ourselves to some grey middle standard. Tourists should also be

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obliged to pay for their enjoyment.’ -Sir Crispin Tickell Former President of the Royal Geographical Society (Cater ix-4)!!

It seems reasonable to extend the definition of tourism to foreign people involved in

agriculture. These

people are not

n e c e s s a r i l y

visiting the land

t o t a k e o n l y

p i c t u r e s o f

animals, plants,

or indigenous-

t r a d i t i o n a l

people, but they

a r e t h e r e

temporarily until

the soil quality or

a certain global market profit margin runs out to plow what a manager for India-based

agricultural company Kartouri calls “virgin land,” but in fact “Much of what Kartouri calls virgin

land is simply fallow, part of the cycle of shifting cultivation traditionally practiced by the Anuak

(indigenous tribal people of the SW Ethiopian region) The high quality of the soil is testimony to

their farming skill.” (Pearce 11-12) If you can grant me this extension of the word and call this a

form of industrial tourism, then all descendants of imperialist land grabs have some answering

to indigenous-traditional peoples to do. These situations seem distinct from cultural visits in

which the cultures are either blended in much longer termed transitions or quickly exchanged in

mutually beneficial commercial connections. In the cases that Pearce relates, there are certainly

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traits of imperial colonialism which were essentially tourist ventures of hundreds of years in their

arrogant, temporary hostile take overs and then revolutions. While I would love to dive deeper

into the philosophic side of defining tourism, what seems important to me in defining a land

grabber corporate agricultural company as a type of tourist is that their voice for the landscape

is out of any sort of exchange with the local, community context of a community cultural

conversation. That is I find it hard to allow that this Indian Farm company could ever speak for

the landscape, thus I define them as a type of industrial tourist who's ego is needy in someway

outside of the context of a conversation among long term relationships. !

Thus a qualifying question in assessing the phenomenon of the degree an outside visitor or

company acts as a tourist could be phrased in terms of a quality conversation: How does the

visitor join and contribute to the economic or artisan-gift-based conversation between the

landscape and the indigenous-traditional, local people who have been communicating with the

landscape before they arrived? !

With this question Indian national Sai Ramakrishna Karuturi who is operating Karuturi Global

with the aiere of a temporary passerby looking in lust at “virgin land.” With “the world’s largest

rose-growing business selling 650 million stems a year… 10% of the global market, he employs

ten thousand people in Africa alone.” Karuturi is moving toward palm oil plantations in the

Gambella region of SW Ethiopia just outside the Omo River Valley to the west. With this

Ethiopian government and USA financier backed effort indigenous-traditional peoples are being

forced, often times violently into villagization programs that if resisted, scatter tribal relationships

across Eastern Africa into urban slums such as Nairobi, Kenya, Addis Ababa or refugee camps

in South Sudan. (Pearce 3-13)!

The World Bank’s report on “Tourism in Africa: Harnessing Tourism for Growth and Improved

Livelihoods” released 2013, offers a broad, but very useful, mostly un-philosophic biased scan

of world tourism in the south, tropical and subtropical global regions, but it speaks highly of the

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Corporate controlled lodge-based model and many of the case studies do seem to be biased

towards engineered-thinking development models. This makes me question the world view of

the World Bank. !

The World Bank’s Africa Region Tourism Strategy vision is Transformation through tour- ism:

harnessing tourism for growth and improved livelihoods. The strategy relies on four pillars:

policy reforms, capacity building, private sector linkages, and product competitiveness.!

They have three analytical steps to the research methodology used in this report:!

1. “Benchmarking performance. African countries have been benchmarked with other comparable countries along four groups: pre-emerging, potential, emerging, and consolidating.”!

2. “Explaining differences in performance. Differences in value added, quality, cost, and productivity among countries were explained to the extent possible by differences in the way tourism actors operate, which in turn can be related to factors in their external environment.”!

3. “Identifying solutions to improve performance growth constraints. Because constraints to the growth of tourism vary by country—although certain commonalities exist—this report includes 24 case studies on the growth of tourism throughout the developing world.” !

Here, especially in No. 2, we can see the greatest source of cultural/institutional

clash: How do we judge the performance of others? How do we explain difference in

performance in relation to monetary value added without placing our own outside bias

on the systems of value we see? This is where empathy and honor are crucial human

rational and emotional mechanisms for collaborative co-creative evolution. These two

key emotional elements of intelligence are most saturated in the way information is

collected and designed into a map of sorts for where tourism could take the economies

of Africa. It is both objective and subjective on Africa and on the World Bank for the

class of cultures inherent in this industry and in the confluence of the urban and

globalization phenomenon. These three analytical steps make up the membrane barrier

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between cultures, urban and rural. The analytic method is the threshold of the

conversation between the socio-economics of the West and of those in Africa. Here we

can sense the tone of the ancient conversation between the city and the barbarians.

The World Bank expresses a certain proper world view when suggesting “policies

preventing markets from functioning properly.” (World Bank 16) How should we

“harness” the phenomenon of the desire to think freely and express one’s self freely and

move about the planet freely?!

So if those are the three steps guiding the World Bank’s analytical work toward

identifying the ideal system of tourism, what is guiding their data collection?!

Given the potential of tourism growth, Rogerson suggests that careful and strategic policy interventions, grounded in evidence-based research from the African experience will be essential to maximize the role of tourism in national, regional, and local development. Seif and Rivett-Carnac (2010) have called for the need “to anchor research to a canon of literature, so as to achieve greater compatibility between research sites and over time.” (World Bank 18)

Here we read that their data collection is to be “anchored in a canon of literature” “grounded

in evidence-based research from the African experience.” Could this be synonymous with how I

phrase listening to the wild tone of the Omo? I would tend to think so if that literature were the

mythology of indigenous-traditional peoples as those myths gave structure to their interpretation

of the voice of their landscapes. However, I do not know what literature they refer to nor what

they mean by “African experience.” Is that the experience of people born and raised in Africa? In

the bush or in the cities of Africa? Or is it of visiting researchers interpreting “the African

experience?” Surely I have learned this one true thing in my initial look at the African

experience: The African Experience is vast and extreme, and extremely diverse.!

The African Wildlife Federation with the African Heartlands project have developed a

biodiversity management and study philosophy that is unique from the World Wildlife Fund’s and

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demonstrates a key concept; that Western thinking set free on the African content is an

inherently flawed phenomenon of chaos. It seems we have the limit to this principle of wildness,

that Western thinking mindsets are the only thing that should be contained and controlled and

restricted in Africa. This AWF study offers a complementary and even a more power authority

check to the conservation land grabbing of the conservation agencies. (Muruthi 168) The

system of designating heartland's of species concentrations is very similar to the phenomenon

of the evolution and travel of the multiple species of Humans. Research like that of Richard

Leaky clearly demonstrate the phenomenon of human migration out of Africa from the rift lake

zone heartland. A geo-tourism company that models their entire tour guiding system on this

concept could do much for promoting the kind of thinking that garners protection of pastoralist

communities who are people who migrate and manage a complex membrane-like lifestyle buffer

between urban and rural. What is missing is a useful system of translating, not just language,

but the mythologic base of relating to the landscape and in that way hearing the voice of the

landscape.!

This translation system could be found in a combination of our hopeful future and our past

mythic minds. Some scholars of mythology and archetypal psychology have suggested

reconnecting the modern mind with the ancient mind through the study of symbolism as an

important life goal:!

!“All Culture is a “fall” into history, and is, by the same token, limited. But the images which precede and inform cultures remain eternally alive and universally accessible.” (Eliade 173) !!“The west is now compelled to accept a dialogue with the other, the “exotic” or primitive cultures. It would be regrettable indeed if we entered upon this without having learnt anything from all the revelations vouchsafed to us by the study of symbolisms.” (Eliade 175)!!Mircea Eliade, scholar of mythology and symbols seems to warn modern minds of a

“regrettable” future without a rich diversity of the deeper meaning of symbols and myth in

modern life from “the other, the ‘exotic.’” Has the West already fallen too far into this regrettable

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state? It seems that the popularity of American and European movies, fantasy and science

fiction moves in particular, clearly demonstrate that there is indeed a deep subconscious need

that generates a supply of lucrative cash flow and fame. Take for example the epic poem-style

portraits of this regrettable modern state juxtaposed with the ancient in Avatar, Cloud Atlas,

Dances with Wolves. But what meaning can the highly engineered modern movie industry really

achieve if they merely cut, copy, and paste, and edit the emotional intelligence harvested from

ancient mind’s personal experiences from thousands of years of living in and with various

natural phenomenons, both violent and splendid? Should we not try to do better and achieve

more realistic interaction with our shared archaic, symbolic past?!

Alphonso Lingis further suggests the importance keeping this connection to the ancient and

archaic symbolism and how a complete loss of that sort of understanding is indeed a

“regrettable.” He describes the phenomenon of “collective performances.” For him, primarily

from the view of a philosopher and researcher of phenomenology, it seems the issue of losing

that symbolic past as a human heritage will be a physiologic as well as psychologic loss that the

engineered intelligence, technology-driven world can’t seem to understand.!

“Collective performances release, in music, song, and dance and also in trance, resources of pleasure, pain, and expression in our bodies and in unconscious precesses that are untapped in everyday life.” (Lingis 136)!!“…there is little about how they generate splendor, and little about that splendor. A people are transfigured in glorious adornments and movements; their experience as they perform is transfigured; exalted emotions surge in them; their assembling becomes dramatic, epic, cosmic… Now that anthropologists no longer study tribal peoples to exhibit primitive stages of human cultural evolution, and the agricultural and technical skills they studied have little relevance to our industrial mass production of food and commodities, will not the splendor produced in their collective performances be ever more important to us, in the petulant venality of our mercantile culture?” (Lingis 137)!!What can be done about such seemingly intangible social issues of “the petulant venality of

our mercantile culture” the urban zombies supposedly unconsciously consuming the wild

Human Heartland. Is this the zombie apocalypse of pop-culture imagination acting now at a

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merely accelerated pace from the expansion of urban colonial Europe? Has this force of modern

urbanization and globalization been acting as the pre-cursors of the robotics industry’s “artificial

intelligence” as early as the 1900’s America phenomenon of hydroelectric power development

on the Willamette River for Portland, OR and along the Columbia and in the Cascade Mtns and

Sierra Mtns? !

Why is it that any one who cherishes this regions wilderness spaces and the core of the

wilderness principles and ethics would not get sick at the thought of the sort of urbanization and

globalization that occurred in the Great Northwest causing devastating consequences to wild

salmon habitat and spawning cycles that so many of us have worked to repair, why is it that we

would let this tone of conversation between humans and wilderness continue in the Omo? Likely

because we see no other option, we have no other choice of action, we all want electricity and

depend on it for all levels of our social structure, so should the rest of the planet’s human

civilizations. Well, I can’t help but imagine there are other options that are obscured but he

phenomenon of mythology and how mythology builds veils and windows of world views.

Brianwashing, sure, probably, but more likely the zombie effect in real life, real time: people see

a world view and accept it out of convenience and lack of energy to build an alternative one.!

Can a team of modern westerner geographic information designers redirect this sick pop-

culture zombie appetite and establish a co-creative co-evolutionary intellectual property

geographic information data modeling network effectively and safely enough with modern

indigenous-traditional peoples like those of the Omo Watershed? Can they/we actually co-

create and co-own intellectual property with a landscape? Isn’t that what human language is

and the human culture that has evolved with language? Seems this mission is very real when

looked at through the natural lens of semiotics, biosemiotics, image and symbols. I do doubt the

sanity of the political ad economic structures that we all have inherited from the post WWII

community, based on what cultural conflicts they have created in Africa and all over the planet.

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But can the further co-evolution of Land Ethics-based philosophy and economics be secured in

DNA and microbiology and geographic thought? Can a mythologic and symbolically meaningful

identity exchange system be derived from a geographic data model that follows the human

migration pathways via linguistics data, mtDNA data, and the earth-human micro biome

relationship and other biosemiotic codes? !

Can we take this data and design modern “collective performances?” Can westerners find

the will to essentially give up their notions of ego and reconnect with our ancients from

European indigenous-tribal times pre-Roman era and then on into the African Wild Human

Heartland? These sort of “collective performance” would be difficult to image and likely

uncomfortable between vastly different cultures that were once one. Certainly they should not

be one again, but somehow united in the struggles to exist in the Cosmos against threats of

impact clearly beyond our current levels of social conduct. It seems one task is to meld together

without destroying individual self autonomy, the various codes, mosaics, myths of shared

personal identity into a new form of global kinship extracted and expressed, at least in part, from

the thoughtful, meaningful design of geographic information and empathy. !

That seems possible only if these feelings called empathy and honor can continue to be

defined socially with any authenticity and accuracy. Can a spin be placed on the geo-tourism

theme that might facilitate this sort of social empathy and honor while building a geographic

information systems data model that facilitates the co-creation, co-evolution of patterns of

unique identity exchange? Isn’t that what tribal societies the world over were doing when the

began to confederate and create larger economic networks? Seems we westerners merely

failed to listen to the tone of the landscape when we got so busy building our cities. To diffuse

the drastic clash of cultures that have always occurred between stubborn mindsets intent on self

preservation now at an almost incomprehensible global scale in the Omo watershed, seems like

listening to the tone of inter-species inter-cultural conversations is the most important thing we

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jet setters could try to do. These global and urban forces are beyond my complete

understanding, yet I can understand the fundamental desire to be understood, that is, I can

easily empathize with the fundamental desire to achieve a life of empathy and honor in the form

of listening to the voice of others and of others hearing my voice contributing to a cultural

conversation. Other wise, if faced with the deadly threat of being profiled by a strange, artificial,

emotionally intolerant or ignorant mindset, I will either just walk away or if cornered and accused

of being inferior and barbarian, I will find a way to fight to the death to defend the honor of my

voice and the honor of the wild voice of the heart of my people and of our wild heartland.!

!!

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Bibliography By Relevance!!The need for an Authentic, Cultural Voice of the Wild Landscape Beginning in the Wild Human Heartland: Omo River Watershed Ethiopia-Kenya:!!1. Bulbeck, Chilla. Facing The Wild: Ecotoursim, Conservation and Animal Encounters.

London: Earthscan, 2005.!2. Burgess, Neil etal. Terrestrial Ecoregions of Africa and Madagascar: A Conservation

Assessment. Washington D.C.: Island Press, 2004.!3. Burns, Ken. The National Parks: Americas Best Idea. PBS, The national Parks Film Project

LLC. 2009.!4. Cater, Erlet. “Ecotoursim in the Third World–Problems and prospects for Sustainability.” pg

69-86. Ecotourism: A Sustainable Option? New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1994.!5. Ehret, Christopher. An African Classical Age. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia,

1998.!6. Grzimek, Bernhard. Serengeti shall not die. New York: Dutton Press, 1961.!7. Hurd, Will. “Rangers By Birth.” http://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-

quarterly/ethiopia/rangers-birth.!8. Leakey, Richard. Origins Reconsidered: In Search of What Makes us Human. New York:

Double Day, 1992.!9. Leakey, Richard. The Making of Mankind. London: Rainbird Publishing Group, 1981.!10. Nyquist, Mary. Arbitrary Rule. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2013.!11. Omo-Kuraz Sugar Corporation Project. !12. Pearce, Fred. The Land Grabbers. Boston: Beacon, 2012.!13. Prankhurst, Richard. ed. Travellers in Ethiopia. London: Oxford University Press, 1965.!14. Rigby, Peter. Cattle, Capitalism, and Class: Ilparakuyo Maasai Transformations.

Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992.!15. Scott, Ridley. Black Hawk Down. Columbia Pictures, 2001.!16. Stuart, Simon N. et.al. Biodiversity in Sub-Saharan Africa and its Islands: Conservation,

management and Sustainable Use. Gland, Switzerland: International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, 1990.!

17. Vazquez, David J. “An Epistemology of Ignorance: Hierarchy, Exclusion, and the failure of Multiculturalism in the Modern Library Top 100.” Erasing Public Memory. Ed. Joseph A. Young and Jana Evans Braziel. Macon: Mercer University Press, 2007.!

18. Wilson, E.O. The Social Conquest of Earth. New York: WW Norton and Co., 2012.!19. http://www.conservationrefugees.org/threatened.html!20. http://www.mursi.org!21. http://www.internationalrivers.org/resources/ethiopia-s-endangered-lower-omo-valley-3978!22. http://www.tourdust.com/products/africa/ethiopia?gclid=CL7Hl-TfnLsCFQqGfgodmiEAKg!23. http://www.ethiopia.gov.et/web/Pages/People!!What that voice may sound like and look like:!24. Diamond, Jared. The World Until Yesterday. New York: Viking, 2012.!25. Economist. “Everything is connected.” January 5th, 2013, 17-19.!26. Ensminger, Jean. Making A Market: The Institutional Transformation of an African Society.

New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.!27. Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1962-2012.!28. Lingis, Alphonso. Violence and Splendor. Evanston: Northwestern University, 2011.!

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29. Liszka, James Jacob. The Semiotics of Myth: A Critical Study of the Symbol. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989.!

30. Marguilis, Lynn. Symbiotic Planet. !31. McLaren, Deborah. Rethinking Toursim and EcoTravel. West Hartford: Kumarian Press,

1998.!32. Mensch, Jennifer. Kant’s Organicism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.!33. Mircea, Eliade. Image and Symbols. New York: Search Book, 1969.!34. Nowak, Martin A. Super Cooperators: Altruism, Evolution and Why We Need Each Other to

Succeed. Neew York: Free Press Simon & Schuster, Inc., 2011.!35. Prosser, Robert. “Societal Change and the Growth in Alternative Tourism.” pg 19-37.

Ecotourism: A Sustainable Option? New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1994.!36. Sagan, Carl S. and Rice, Ann. Legends of Forgotten Ancestors. !37. Simon, Julia. Rousseau Among The Moderns. University Park: Pennsylvania Press, 2013.!38. Sheridan, Michael J. and Celia Nyamweru. African Sacred Groves. Oxford: James Currey

Ltd., 2008.!39. Intellectual Property Rights and Biological Conservation: an interdisciplinary analysis of the

values of medicinal plants. Ed. Timothy Swanson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.!

40. Turle, Gillis. The Art of the Maasai. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.!41. Wiskus, Jessica. The Rhythm of Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.!42. http://www.bridgestoprosperity.org!

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