The Art of Survival

Imagine this scenario: London is somehow devastated, we all lose our homes and any money we might have, New Cross and the whole of South London become a tangled mess of shanty towns with millions of people of people trying to set up shelter and homes out of the rubble. There is no clean running water now. Infection and disease is rife and electricity is inconsistent.
It would be very difficult to keep ones equanimity in such a situation but if forced upon us most of us would like to think that we could use our creative, design ingenuity to find solutions to the new everyday problems that arise. Favelas breed innovation. When there are only a limited amount of resources available people are forced to find new ways of making things to get by. Everything is recycled, reused and given a new lease of life.
The fact of the matter is that this tale is not purely fictional. It is happening right now across the globe with an estimated billion (yes BILLION) people living in shantytowns and refugee camps.1
Right now we are living in a consumerist, wasting, ‘throwaway’ culture where we crave the next version, the latest product. Our values have become corrupted and driven by materialistic desires.
Sometimes it takes an outsiders perspective to shine a light on one’s own situation. A delightful recent Channel 4 experimental program “Meet the Natives” did just this. In what’s been called a ‘reverse anthropomorphical study’ 5 villagers from the island of Tanna in the South Pacific visited the UK to see some of our customs and traditions.
Coming from a completely un-globalised society they were amazed at some of the things they saw. Homelessness shocked them more than anything. “In Tanna if you do not have a home everybody will help to build you one.”
It is very easy to take for granted what we have in the western world. But equally it is hard to notice what we seem to be lacking. For all the technologies and wealth that we have we don’t seem to have the same sense of kinship and actual care and love for the community as people from poorer parts of the world seem to have.
Our economic situation puts us in a position of responsibility for others but we must also learn to lose the superiority complex we have about poorer societies because we have just as much if not more to learn from them as they do from us.

1 – http://technorati.com/videos/youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D_2Js_g7M60M
image – google image search = meet the natives