Remembering Pracha Hutanuwatr and Maria Mies

Sadly, two of my dear colleagues and soulmates ¬ Pracha Hutanuwatr and Maria Mies – passed away recently.

Pracha Hutanuwatr

I first met Pracha when he visited us in Ladakh in the mid-1980s. We immediately recognized that we were kindred spirits, and he invited me to Thailand and introduced me to his mentor, Sulak Sivaraksa. Deeply spiritual but also committed to social change, Sulak and Pracha were founders of the International Network of Engaged Buddhists (INEB). The three of us shared the conviction that more community- and land-based ways of living were essential for human as well as ecological wellbeing. At the same time, we recognized the destructive impact of conventional schooling and development.

Pracha and Sulak became close and important members of our small network of holistic thinkers from around the world. They were keynote speakers at conferences we organized in the UK, the United States, Australia, Japan and Ladakh, and for many years I went to Thailand to support their work there.

We were interested in ideas for action, not just for the sake of argument. We shared a rejection of the dominant, western worldview – a key component of a global economic system that replaces diverse cultures worldwide with a consumer monoculture. And in this work we recognized that ideas and concepts were important activist tools.

Pracha wrote and published books, lectured, participated in international conferences, and organized educational programs, courses, and retreats. All of this was invaluable work, contributing to what I call “big picture activism”. This meant spreading an understanding of how conventional “development”, western-style schooling, and mass urbanization lead inexorably to the breakdown of local food economies, the erosion of local self-reliance, and a steady loss of cultural self-respect.

As part of this work, we shared a commitment to non-violence, and to exploring and developing the whole journey – from inner, spiritual work, to outer, political work.

Our collaboration extended over four decades. We worked to link the Global Ecovillage Network with existing villages in the so-called “underdeveloped” world, as a way of raising the status of farming and improving rural livelihoods. Pracha organized the translations of almost all our films and publications into Thai – he even translated Ancient Futures into Burmese and smuggled it into Myanmar. He was an important voice in our film, The Economics of Happiness, which INEB featured at their international conference on Gross National Happiness.

In my 40 years of friendship with Pracha, I became aware of how many people he influenced. I’m confident that his memory and work will live on in the countless number of people he inspired to join the movement to heal both people and the earth. Along with countless others – not only in Thailand but around the world – I will sorely miss him.

Maria Mies

Maria Mies passed away on May 15 at the age of 92. She was a professor of sociology and an ecofeminist who early on offered a penetrating critique of neoliberal globalization and promoted what she called “subsistence”, or localization.

I became friends with Maria and her close colleagues, Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen and Claudia von Werlhof in the 1980s. They all shared our commitment to localization, with a particular focus on the role of women. Like Pracha, they became important members of our international network of holistic thinkers.

In all of Maria’s work, especially in her 1999 book The Subsistence Perspective (co-authored with Veronika), Maria elaborated a penetrating critique of neoliberal globalization as the engine of contemporary colonialism and world-scale inequality and impoverishment, while also spelling out the critical role of economic and political localization in the struggle for liberation of both people and nature.

Maria recognized that “right from its beginning the capitalist economy has been a world system, based on colonialism and the marginalization and exploitation of peripheral countries and agriculture. This colonial structure was and is the basis for what became known as ‘free trade’…. [D]ue to its inner logic of permanent growth or accumulation, capitalism has to strive towards universality and globalism.” Colonialism and the destruction of local subsistence/sufficiency-based economies, in other words, was necessary for globalization, and today’s global economy is predicated upon ongoing colonialism – of resources, labor, and commons of all kinds.

She was one of the first to understand that “Universal food security is impossible in a global market economy that rests on worldwide liberalization and deregulation of agricultural and food trade, and on the neoliberal dogma of comparative advantage, universal competition, profit maximization and permanent growth.” She saw that such deregulation exposes countries to tidal waves of dumped industrial commodity foods that ruin domestic farmers and local food economies, and undermine people’s ability to feed themselves.

To oppose this, she called for a “reinvention of the commons-linked economy” with a main feature being “regionalization and localization against the trend of globalization. This means production, exchange and consumption within the region, so that an ecological reproduction takes place. Only in such regions can people form communities and feel responsible for the region.”

Maria spent many years working in India and learning from anti-globalization struggles there, which had long possessed a clear-eyed understanding of how the global economy threatens environments, cultures and ancestral village-based local economies:

When we seek a political answer to the globalization of the capitalist economy, it becomes evident that we in the industrialized North can adopt much of what the Indian people’s movements see as a political perspective for the future: decentralization of power, localization and regionalization, self-rule (autonomy) of local communities, democratic pluralism and direct democracy, local and regional control of resources, protection of the environment, and protection of the livelihood and the basic conditions of existence of the people.”

Maria’s analysis is more relevant than ever today. She must have despaired at how the forces of corporate globalization continue to dominate, but must also have rejoiced at how many people and communities, South and North, are (re)creating just the kinds of sufficiency-based, localized economies she long called for.