March 4, 2008

Dear Colleague:  

    Inequality among humans is pretty much taken for granted in all cultures and societies. An outstanding exception is the West, which has worried over the large differences in endowment and opportunity between one people and another, one individual and another. The West's discomfort derives from its belief that all humans are creatures, even children, of God. What, then, is one to do about the inequality? Charity was and is one answer: those who have are urged to give to those less fortunate. However, in modern times, thanks to such thinkers as Karl Marx, charity came to be seen as a feeble answer—indeed, not an answer at all—to inequality. Needed are changes in the social and economic orders of society that can bring about a significant redistribution of wealth. To most people, wealth means material possessions. But there are other kinds of wealth—social wealth, cultural wealth, and environmental wealth.

    Environmental wealth is both cultural and natural. Culture has produced beautiful homes, but also bland housing estates and ugly slums. Justice demands that the housing estates and slums be upgraded. Strange to say, not even geographers have paid much attention to the quality of what nature provides. There, too, one finds large inequalities. A rich environment, such as the indented coastal areas of Southeast Asia, offers its inhabitants, visually alone, open sea, protected valleys, open sky, dense forests, gently sloping seashores and towering mountains. By contrast, think of the tropical rainforest—rich, certainly, in plants and animals; and rich, too, visually in the details, but so dense is the vegetation that the people who live in it have no sense of distance. That, as I see it, is a severe deprivation, for distant vision—the ability to see a composed space extending to the far horizon—is a unique human endowment; and, moreover, one that enables people to have an extended sense of time: where I am now is the present, what is out there in the distance is the future. As human habitat, another example of environmental deprivation is the Arctic. For the sake of simplicity, I'll again emphasize the visual. Humans are endowed with an extremely subtle color vision. Yet, what use is this gift to the Igluliks and Aiviliks who live in a world of whites and grays,  where they rarely encounter the green colors of vegetation, or even the mineral colors of mauve, brown, and gold that blaze in hot deserts?

    Something can be done about economic and cultural inequalities. Nothing can be done about inequalities in natural setting. For a start, people don't see the aesthetic and spiritual limitations of their natural habitat—that is to say, they don't realize that their setting utterly fails to stimulate their sensorial and imaginative potential. Wherever surveys have been conducted, people express satisfaction with their natural habitat, even though, to outsiders, it seems dull or threatening. The same is true, though to a lesser degree, of the man-made environment. I live in a modest condo, but I don't in the least envy Bill Gates' mansion. Why? A simple answer is that I can barely do justice to what I have. Gates's mansion would overwhelm me; to protect my sanity I may even have to cauterize my sensibility. In other words, I may get as much out of my $200,000 pad, with its books and DVDs, as Gates does with his 100-million dollar palace, with its first editions and Gauguins. Moreover, a component of overpowering richness in our environment, which we both have to equal degree, is—yes, you guessed it!—our neighbor, another human being, who, no matter how badly clothed, is a wondrous handiwork of God. Even the poorest of the poor have that handiwork—that wealth—in their midst. So maybe there is more justice in the world that we think.

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu