Page 61 - Rights beautiful : collection of Professor Saneh Chamarik

Rights Beautiful Collection of Professor Saneh Chamarik

For the cultures of Asia, the forest has always been a teacher,
and the message of the forest has been the message of intercon-
nectedness and diversity, renewability and sustainability, integrity
and pluralism. And that,
The cultural lessons that Asian societies draw from the forest
apply at two levels: the relationship between society and Nature
on the one hand, and between people within society on the other.
Societies modeled on the forest are based on the lessons of diversity
and democratic pluralism ........ 4
Here then is the key phrase “diversity and pluralism” with a view to
renewability and sustainability. This is what popularly called traditional
wisdom and knowledge. Indeed, if there were to be any sense of positive
“resources management” at all, it would rather incline towards human self-
management with a deep sense of spiritual and intellectual attachment
to Nature and its integrity. “Scientific” or not, the end result is certainly
creativity and sustainability, as we keep crying for nowadays.

Question of Integrity and sustainability
By contrast, the Western values and practice are being tied up with
and determined by the historically Scientific Revolution and subsequent
Industrial Revolution. All of which gives rise to the creed of economic liberalism
and free market imperialism with the strength of capital and modern scientific
technology. In actuality, it is all for the ultimate purpose of domination. More
often than not, it extends itself to the extent of absolutism, or even
totalitarianism in the current age of Neo-Liberalism. As a result, materialism
and industrialism have gone to the extremes, such that human and nature
mean nothing other than commodities: i.e. as labour and raw materials for
the sole purpose of profit maximization. 5

4
J. Bankyopadhyay and Vandana Shiva, “Asia’s Forests, Asia’s Cultures”, in Suzanne Head
and Robert Heinzman, ed., op. cit. pp. 66-67.
5
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: the political and economic origins of our time,
Boston, Beacon Press, 1957, pp.33-42.
OFFICE OF THE NATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION OF THAILAND 55