Salty!

I'm reading Michael Benanav's Men of Salt now, which is one of the best travel stories I've ever read. It's about a man who latches on with a camel caravan that goes into the middle of the Sahara to trade at the Taoudenni salt mines and discovers a way of life that has been largely unchanged for over a thousand years.

Although I'm not done reading yet, several passages about the culture of the azalai (traders) aroused my interest as contrasts with modern western culture. A passage about the rationale for living in the most forbidding place on earth, from page 73:

Why bother? The environment is so unrelentingly brutal, it's hardly the optimal place for anything to live. Why then are plants, animals, and people so driven to eek out an existence in such a place? What's the point? Certainly neither money nor glory. The answer, it seems, is survival simply for its own sake. The deepest urge of all. And by adopting strategies that adhere to the laws of the desert, they can.

This, I saw, was about as far as one could get from the American proclivity for outsized consumption. Unlike the Saharans, who know the need for balance with the natural world because they live in it, we live as though we're separate from it, immune to the repercussions of overusing it. Yet with looming environmental catastrophe on a planetary scale, our circumstances are not all that different from the Saharans.

If their ethic of mutual sustainability is a survival strategy, then ours is a suicide strategy. If survival is the most hardwired biological impulse of all, we've got a short in our system. Our craving to consume, which in healthy amounts is critical to sustaining life, has hit pathological proportions, like a grossly obese person who not only can't stop eating, but justifies every bite. In other words, our culture is ill.

Pretty self-explanatory stuff. Think about that next time you see someone ordering a large drink because it's only 25 cents more than the medium, or driving a car the size of a small bus because it looks cool. The author backs these assertions up with numerous examples of azalai sacrificing their own self-interests to ensure the survival of the Saharan way of life. A prominent example, from page 136, occurs when the author is trying to figure out how the azalai and miners can coexist with the relatively recent introduction of trucks to the Sahara, which changes the trading equation:

After I returned to Timbuktu, I spoke about this issue with Sidi Mohammed Ould Youbba, a historian who is an authority on the salt trade. He said that soon an agreement would have to be forged among the truckers, the azalai, and the miners to resolve the matter. Wondering whether the truckers would concede to tinker with a system that currently works to their advantage, I asked if he thought it was likely that the three groups could come to mutually acceptable terms. "Of course," he replied, without a drop of doubt. Such pacts are commonplace, he said, and no one wants to drive anyone else out of business - which was a shock to my American ears. The truckers, miners, and azalai recognize the importance of the system as whole, he continued, and, as long as their own survival isn't threatened, will make agreements and even sacrifices to promote the welfare of the others. This is due in part to the familial ties among all three groups, as well as to the ethic of mutual sustainability that permeates Saharan culture. Again, it seemed like a perspective plucked directly from the desert ecosystem, in which resources are shared such that no one gets fat but the whole is able to survive, which in turn supports the survival of its members.

Wow. It reads like some kind of international copy of Bowling Alone. Considering that very few Americans feel their survival directly threatened at any point, where have we gone astray (no one gets fat?!)?