The Most Isolated Man on the Planet (and what he teaches us about sustainability)

31 Aug 2010 – Patrin Watanatada

I can’t stop thinking about The Most Isolated Man on the Planet (and I’m guessing neither can the 10,962 people who’ve shared this Slate piece on Facebook to date). Writes former Washington Post correspondent Monte Reel, who left the Post in order to write a book on him:

He’s an Indian, and Brazilian officials have concluded that he’s the last survivor of an uncontacted tribe. They first became aware of his existence nearly 15 years ago and for a decade launched numerous expeditions to track him, to ensure his safety, and to try to establish peaceful contact with him. In 2007, with ranching and logging closing in quickly on all sides, government officials declared a 31-square-mile area around him off-limits to trespassing and development.

As Reel points out, what’s amazing here isn’t only that Most Isolated Man has maintained his solitude to such a degree and for so long, but that he is deliberately being left alone.

Advanced societies invariably have subsumed whatever indigenous populations they’ve encountered, determining those tribes’ fates for them. But Brazil is in the middle of an experiment. If peaceful contact is established with the lone Indian, they want it to be his choice. They’ve dubbed this the “Policy of No Contact.” After years of often-tragic attempts to assimilate into modern life the people who still inhabit the few remaining wild places on the planet, the policy is a step in a totally different direction. The case of the lone Indian represents its most challenging test.

I blog about this here not only because it’s a captivating story, but also because this piece offers a couple of short meditations relevant to our work. First, on the limitations of abstract cost-benefit analyses—when set against individual (and collective) human rights, yes, but even when set against reality:

Most [local landowners]… say that it’s absurd to save 31 square miles of land for the benefit of just one man, when a productive ranch potentially could provide food for thousands. That argument wilts under scrutiny, in part because thousands of square miles of already-cleared forest throughout the Amazon remain barren wastelands, undeveloped.

…The question of who’d benefit from clearing the land versus preserving it boils down to two people: the individual developer and the lone Indian. The government agents know this, which is why they view the protection of the lone tribesman as a question of human rights, not economics.

Second, on the role that technology-enabled transparency can play in holding us to account—what’s often called the court of public opinion, and which I like to think of as “crowdsourced civil society”:

But how long can his isolation last? I get Facebook updates telling me what people half a world away are eating for breakfast… In 2010, can anyone realistically live off the grid?

Some Brazilians believe that the rapid spread of technology itself might protect his solitude, not threaten it. The agents who have worked on the lone Indian’s case since 1996 believe that the wider the story of the man’s isolation spreads—something that’s easier than ever now—the safer he’ll be from the sort of stealthy, anonymous raids by local land-grabbers that have decimated tribes in the past. Technologies like Google Earth and other mapping programs can assist in monitoring the boundaries of his territory. Instead of launching intrusive expeditions into the tribal territories to verify the Indians’ safety, Brazilian officials have announced they will experiment with heat-seeking sensors that can be attached to airplanes flying high enough to cause no disruption on the ground.

Lovely reminder that sustainability-type challenges and learnings are everywhere. And as my colleague Shankar said when I e-mailed him this piece (he has written on land rights and displacement related to corporate projects, for example in this Issue Brief): “I think more than anyone else, indigenous people know what true sustainability is! It’s back to the big question – ultimately, what is life all about?”