new internationalist
issue 186 - August 1988

Snap and grab
I was very interested to read your issue on photography (NI 185), although I think it failed to make a very important point. Photographs represent the photographer's attempt to possess the moment by turning it into something tangible; something which can be held forever. The subject of the photograph becomes an object to scrutinize at one's leisure. When I come home from my holidays - whether they be in Africa or America - I have a packet of photos to show my friends and neighbours. I have brought the country and its people home with me; in my own small way I own them.

This illustrates a fundamental characteristic about people from capitalist countries: their insatiable desire to acquire things. The value of their lives and indeed themselves is measured by what they've got. And holidays - which are by nature transitory - must be evidence as having 'been had'. The photo provides just this. If only we could forget the need to possess and live for the moment. How much richer our lives would be.

Jacqueline Prelimo
London, UK

Pulp Solution
Your issue on Trees (NI 184) followed the usual NI formula: analyze a subject; make the reader feel guilty for living in a developed nation; highlight the way in which poor countries are being crippled by the problem; suggest that an individual can bring a problem of mind-bending proportions nearer to a solution.

Regarding NI 184, it is difficult to believe that you seriously suggested readers would help the world avoid ecological destruction by converting their pets to vegetarianism. Everything will be destroyed if the motor of the world economy continues to be fuelled by the demand for short-term profit. Until NI realizes this, your solutions to such problems will remain as banal as they were in the Trees issue.

Simon Shaw
London, UK

Hyper-critical
One shouldn't be too critical of the forestry policies in developing countries (NI 184). Developed countries have all devastated their forests to subsidize their development. How can we in the West sit back and ask poor countries not to cut down their trees for the same reason?

Peter Olorenshaw
Middlesex, UK

Perplexing puzzle
No-one tried to solve the development puzzle of your last issue (NI 183), perhaps because the pieces do not fit together. On the one hand the magazine campaigns for letting people decide for themselves what they want, while on the other it prescribes what development must be about for a vision of a better society (with community-owned housing for example). It seems we are already in danger of falling into a new development orthodoxy to replace the mega-development projects of the 1970s. The revised version emphasizes grassroots development molded by the latest Western, feminist and leftist propaganda.

Sadly not all the oppressed and exploited of the world want a revolution, or even to be involved in the small-scale co-operatives that NI describes. They see success as individual, social and economic promotion within capitalist socio-economic relations.

Darrell High
Cambridge, UK

Quick fix
So M J Hughes (Letters NI 184) thinks that only men fix cars and roofs? My friend Janette read the letter on her way to mend her broken wing-mirror. It made her very angry. Does M J Hughes really find time to do such chores in between looking after the baby? If so his roof and car must be in awfully poor condition. I suggest he gets his wife to have a look at them when she gets home from the office.

Tony Wylie
Edinburgh, UK

Magic Solution
Debbie Taylor asks us if we believe in magic (NI 182), but it was David Werner in the same issue who reminded us of the greatest health-related 'magic' of the century. It can halve the mortality rate of the biggest child-killer disease; it is out of the hands of the multinationals and available in any Third World village. He was talking of salt-and-sugar water for childhood diarrhoea. Unfortunately the ultimate magic which would remove the root causes of child mortality - poverty, malnutrition and unhealthy living - is a long way away.

Community Health Team
Madurai District,
South India

Cartoon: Cath Jackson

Choosing nasties
What is this mysterious force called 'Science' (NI 182) which is apparently responsible for all of today's nasty technologies? In reality technologies are chosen by the societies in which they flourish. Our present society is hierarchical, competitive and violent and it chooses large-scale, centrally controlled technology which often causes violence to people and the environment. If we want more human technology we must establish nonviolent, decentralized and co-operative societies. Shooting the scientists won't help.

Robin Arnold
Melbourne, Australia

Speak up
I am very disappointed that your magazine has given scant coverage to the atrocities committed by Israel against the Palestinian people. If media such as yourselves don't expose the brutalities inflicted on the Palestinians, who will?

Ailsa Duff
Canberra, Australia

Bang bane
The title of NI 182 is misleading in that most of the articles do not focus on 'Methods and Madness in Science' but rather on the manipulation of science in the hands of governments and multinationals.

Research requires funding and this is usually forthcoming in amounts proportional to either the likely profit margin, or the size of the bang produced. Little wonder many scientists are forced to pursue research which may have beneficial applications within a framework contrived and controlled by those whose prime concern is profit or 'defence'.

The assertion that physics equals nuclear bombs and medicine equals biotechnology cannot be denied. However physics also equals solar power, and medicine, penicillin. The fact that science can be perverted does not diminish its potential as a major force for the betterment of humankind.

Michael Bird
Victoria, Australia

Cold dowse
In the past I have trusted NI editors so completely that I cited, without corroboration, facts which I read in this journal. Imagine the embarrassment of a naive reader who took seriously Neil Thin's article about a dowser solving the problems of drought in India (NI 179).

Dowsers have as much relevance to Third World poverty as mathematicians who can multiply wheat-grains using logarithms, exorcists who prevent famines by undoing curses, and psychics who communicate with the dead to learn which crops should be planted in specific areas. Including them in an issue dedicated to human rights allows sceptics to laugh away your serious conclusions along with your silly ones.

Robert Katz
Toronto, Ontario

Value or money
I read your issue 'The Politics of Housework' (NI 181) and ended up with a sense of despair when I was looking for hope. What most disappointed me was to see perpetuated the idea that reproductive labour is of little value. It seems that the writers have fallen into the same trap everyone else has - that of equating 'value' with economic return. Along with pictures of the world as it is, I would have appreciated more discussion on the intrinsic value of housework. If we women cannot see value in this work, how can we expect the rest of the world to do so either?

Mary Lou Kiassen
Guelph, Canada

Name and address withheld by request

The views expressed in these letters are not necessarily those of the New Internationalist

	The beckoning dream Small ants and robots are part of a national fantasy in China, as Sue Robson explains. 'In 10 or 20 years' time,' reflected a 20-year-old asked to think about China's future, 'our diet will be much better. Small ants and many other new foods will be on the table.' Wonderfully inventive as I think the Chinese are in making artificial foods and in the ingenious using of existing ones, China's ideas of progress do not always match my Western ones. But what strikes me in conversations is not only the way people in this country see the future, but their firm belief that it will be progress. Ask anyone here how China is likely to change, and the answer will be optimistic. 'Our life will be richer and more comfortable, and food will be more delicious,' commented another young man. 'We will build our homes in the quiet countryside, and travel in our own cars. In the big modern cities there will be no traffic jams and no pollution.' While we see technology as bringing inevitable problems, Chinese young people imagine instead a romance of technology able to transcend all difficulties. In a developing country where everyone aspires to own colour televisions and huge fridges propped prominently in the corner of a living room, technology holds a charm long lost to someone hardened by the technological chaos of Western cities. 'In the future,' a woman added dreamily, 'we teachers won't have to go to the classroom: we can just speak into a TV camera, and students can sit at home and watch us on their own TV screens. The students can ask the TV to borrow reference books, and check their homework. Machines will do all the hard work, and I'll be able to buy things in my own home by an auto-line to the shops.' Here in the Yangtse valley, where there is little machinery to ease the burden of everyday tasks and huge loads of farm produce, logs and scrap-iron are hauled in carts pulled by men, a world where all the work is not hand-done is a rose-tinted dream. A favourite Chinese fantasy is a future world where robots, as obvious substitutes for people, take over the chores. Perhaps one cultural difference is that the industrial world has experienced the technological miracle already, and found it wanting; perhaps to jaded Western youth, it is difficult to imagine a future of glorious change. Our teenagers, I believe, do not imagine that in a couple of decades life will be wonderful; quite the reverse. But unlike the West, the people in China are forcibly involved in planning for a bright future. When the 13th Party Congress met in Beijing last October to plan the country's progress, leaders' speeches were circulated nationwide for workers and students to discuss in the weekly political study sessions over the next few months. 'We will have achieved the Four Modernizations by the end of the century,' the young woman explained confidently. 'We'LL catch up with the developed countries. No-one will look down on our country, and everyone in the world will want to come here to see a very developed China.' Working towards a glorious future is official policy: and so foreigners often dismiss the English language newspaper, China Daily, as propaganda. 'Balance of trade likely to be favorable', 'Power industry reaches milestone', 'State revenue on target' and 'Golden age of growth in Fujian Province' are the big headlines in the stack of recent papers beside my desk. For bad news , you have to turn to the back page - the foreign news. Western newspapers relish incest, murder cases, traffic accidents and other gloom. And so, as someone accustomed to Western media, China Daily teeters between propaganda and simple economic optimism. So life in China will be wonderful in 10 or 20 years' time, or almost. 'In the future,' one smart young man speculated, 'everyone will have a bright, shiny and very big car.' He hesitated. 'The roads will have to be wider, as China has so many people.' He thought again. 'We'LL widen the roads and pull down all the old houses, and let people sleep in their cars.' Sue Robson is a teacher of English at a small-town university in the Yangtse Valley.