Balancing Technology and Nature in the Coastal Communities of Potiki and The Hungry Tide
By Scott Lothes
In many of the current discourses on both economic development and environmental conservation, technology and nature are viewed in diametric opposition. A cursory glance at the essays in The Ecocriticism Reader is enough to establish the ecocritic's perspective of technology as antagonist. In the opening essay, Lynn White Jr. writes "that scientific knowledge means technological power over nature" (White 4) and goes on to accuse modern technology of "ruthlessness toward nature" (White 8). SueEllen Campbell mentions "the suspicion of technology...that is common among ecological nature writers" (Campbell 131). The opposition between technology and nature even filters into the use of language itself. When Michael J. McDowell writes "a literature that bulldozes local hillsides to make a homogeneous American literature" (McDowell 377, my emphasis), he takes a noun for a technological machine and turns it into a destructive verb.
That technology has facilitated innumerable manmade conquests over nature is indisputable. One needs only to drive east of Portland on I-84 and consider the concrete locks and dams spanning and reigning in the Columbia River. An even more striking example can be found in the Appalachian mountains of West Virginia and Kentucky, where miles upon miles of moon-like landscapes with leveled mountaintops and filled-in streams are being created daily by mining companies in search of ever-cheaper coal. However, it is essential to remember that technology is a human creation and does not roam about destroying nature of its own volition. Rather, technology is a tool of humanity and like any tool it can be used to either destructive or constructive ends.
Humanity has used technology throughout its existence, beginning with the simplest stone tools of the Paleolithic. In Ursula Le Guin's essay "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction," the protagonist is a nurturing prehistoric mother who seeks a sling to carry her infant and a bag for collecting oats, and the author herself espouses the carrier bag as a literary construct (Le Guin 150). Containers and carriers are all forms of technology, simple as they might be. If technology has a place in Le Guin's feminine, nurturing, earth-centric life, then somewhere there must exist a point where humanity can place its fulcrum to balance technology on one side and nature on the other. The seaside communities described in Patricia Grace's novel Potiki and Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide offer two case studies in balancing technology and nature.
Potiki is the story of a Maori fishing village in New Zealand overcoming the threat of western Dollarmen who want to turn the quiet beach around the village into a sparkling seaside resort. By the novel's conclusion, the destruction of technology has become symbolic with repelling western development. "The new road had been destroyed, the new structures had been flattened. The big machines were submerged in the sea" (Grace 166). Grace clearly suggests that the work done by the Dollarmen's heavy construction equipment was too much for the Maori community to sustain. However, once the threat of development has passed and the villagers can return to their normal lives, they "will put the boats out into clear water again and go for kahawai, moki and shark, and will put lines down for kelpie and cod" (Grace 169). The boats, lines and indeed all the fishing implements are forms of technology, and they allow the Maori villagers to live in part off the creatures of the sea.
The leading female character in Potiki is Roimata, wife and mother of the novel's central family. Roimata, like all of the Maori villagers, is deeply tied to her natural environment. Her tie, notably, is by choice. When Roimata was 15 her father sent her away to school, but she returned at age 27 and immediately felt as if those 12 years away from her home had never existed (Grace 24). She is a self-described "patient watcher of the skies," acutely aware of meteorological occurrences and the rhythms of her biosphere. She takes part in every aspect of her family's environmentally-based life, busying herself with "learning all that could be learned about the land and the sea" (Grace 107). Even so, Roimata maintains a soft spot in her heart for technology imported from the west: the New Zealand Railway. As a child, Roimata grew up with her father in a railway house whose kitchen window looked out directly on the tracks. She was captivated by the passing trains and readily shares those stories with her children as she teaches them the art of storytelling (Grace 39). Roimata, however, realizes what the railway is: "steel which had come from the earth and is now riveted to it" (Grace 18).
Roimata and her Maori community allow other forms of modern technology in their lives as well, but selectively. The family's truck and tractor are important for farming, for helping plant and harvest the sustaining crops, and they are thus accepted, along with the petrol to power them. The car, however, was sold after Hemi, Roimata's husband, lost his job and could no longer afford to repair or drive it. The loss is not lamented (Grace 104). Television is similarly dismissed. Roimata explained, "There was little indication through television that we existed at all in our own land. There was little on television that we could take to our hearts" (Grace 105). Yet the few trucks and tractors, boats and fishing line, woodworking tools and even Roimata's railway stories remain as important parts of the village.
The difference between the Maori's technology and the Dollarmen's technology is a difference of attitude. While the developers are addicted to the model of perpetual growth, the villagers revel in contentment. For the Dollarmen, the beach represents a "million-dollar-view," but the view is only worth a million dollars if new roads, resorts, and attractions are constructed. Grace gives her readers the impression that even if the developers had succeeded in their million dollar resort plan, they would not have been satisfied to stop there. They would have packed up their construction equipment and glossy plans and moved on until they found another view with lucrative prospects. Their lives were based on a cancerous model of endless "development," a model impossible to sustain in a world with a finite number of million dollar views to "develop." Of the Dollarmen, Roimata was warned, "They can't help it, can't stop. Can't think because they have become just like their machines" (Grace 151). The Dollarmen created their machines, but in the end they have become subjugated by their very creations.
The Maori villagers, on the other hand, asked for very little beyond the boundaries of their own community. When they found technology that could help them within that community, like their tractors and trucks, they adopted it, but they also knew when it was enough. The cars and the televisions were too much, served no purpose in their lives, and were dismissed unceremoniously and without remorse. The Maori struck a successful balance with technology in their community by limiting it to only that which served their immediate needs.
Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide focuses on the ongoing tensions between humanity and the environment in the Sundarbans, the Tide Country of West Bengal, India and Bangladesh. The novel considers the conflicts between the environment and its tenacious residents, and between those residents and the global conversation groups intent on preserving the Sundarbans' unique aquatic life and tiger population - sometimes at the expense of its residents. The novel's central character is a scientist, the American Piyali Roy of Indian descent, so it is not surprising that technology appears with some frequency throughout The Hungry Tide. Ghosh offers both warnings and cautious optimism of how it can mix with nature.
Ghosh's selection of the Sundarbans for his setting was aptly chosen writes Rajender Kaur in his essay on the novel, "Home Is Where the Oracella Are" (Kaur 127). The Tide Country is a harsh landscape, full of peril and death in many forms. "At no moment can human beings have any doubt of the terrain's hostility to their presence, of its cunning and resourcefulness, of its determination to destroy or expel them. Every year, dozens of people perish in the embrace of that dense foliage, killed by tigers, snakes and crocodiles" (Ghosh 7). Technology, in the form of weapons, tools, boats, houses and protective earthworks, is crucial for human survival. Yet the technology must fit the landscape, or else conflicts arise. Kaur reminds us that postcolonial nations like India have had extreme difficulty in establishing equilibrium between their environments and new economic development (Kaur 133). In the Sundarbans, the consequences of imbalance are drastic. Time and again the Tide Country dictates which of humanity's creations it will tolerate, and which it will obliterate.
When Kanai, one of the book's central male characters, first arrives in the Sundarbans, his boat stops in the muddy shore to unload its passengers. "There were no docks or jetties on [the village of] Lusibari, for the currents and tides that flowed around it were too powerful to permit the construction of permanent structures" (Ghosh 32). The land dictates the technology. The civil engineer may surmise the situation and draw plans for a reinforced concrete pier sunk deep into the earth, but such arrogant detachment from the land would not be welcomed by the Tide Country. Kanai recalls his deceased uncle's belief in the interconnection of all things: "the trees, the sky, the weather, people, poetry, science, nature" (Ghosh 233). The concrete pier would not fit in the interconnected landscape of the Sundarbans.
Elsewhere in the Tide Country, an even grander development scheme was attempted and subsequently rebuffed. During England's colonial reign of India, the British determined they needed a new port and capital city in Bengal, free of the silted Hooghly River that was hampering their trade at Calcutta. Lord Canning sent out his planners and surveyors, who decided on a small fishing village along the wide Matla River, much closer to the Bay of Bengal than Calcutta (Ghosh 235). The British construction crews built the shiny new city of Port Canning with the most advanced technology, only to have it decimated by a relatively minor storm only five years after its completion (Ghosh 237). Unlike the fishing village that it had replaced, the capital-intensive technology of the new city was too expensive to rebuild after such a short time, and the new port was abandoned. Its planners failed to listen to the prophetic words of Henry Piddington, the one Englishman in Calcutta who understood the storms. Piddington realized the interconnections of the West Bengal landscape: the dense mangrove forests of the Sundarbans were the essential natural barrier that shielded Calcutta from the brunt of the storms. Without their natural protection, the new port was doomed (Ghosh 236).
While the story of Port Canning illustrates nature's displeasure with imbalanced technology, another story within The Hungry Tide illustrates some of the villagers' displeasure with lives entrenched too deeply in technology. As a girl, Kusum grew up in the Tide Country, but when her mother is sold into prostitution, Kusum goes to the mining center of Dhanbad in search of her. In Dhanbad, Kusum meets Rajen, who, like her, came from the Tide Country. Despite being crippled, Rajen cares for Kusum and the two eventually marry. Rajen sells food in the railway station and aboard the trains, and lives in a shack right beside the railway line. Almost nothing about Rajen's and Kusum's new environment is natural; they are surrounded by technology and dream of returning to their homeland by the sea.
Many months passed and we spoke of coming back here: that place was not home; there was nothing for us there. Walking on iron, we longed for the touch of mud; encircled by rails, we dreamed of the Raimangal [River] in flood. We dreamed of storm-tossed islands, straining at their anchors, and of the rivers that bound them in golden fetters. We thought of high tide and the mohonas mounting, of islands submerged like underwater clouds. By night we remembered, we talked and we dreamed - by day coal and metal were the stuff of our lives. (Ghosh 136)
Eventually, technology claims Rajen's life. While running to get money from an unpaid customer, he stumbles and falls under the wheels of a moving train. Not long afterwards, Kusum and their young son migrate back to the Tide Country.
While Ghosh is quick to warn his readers of the danger and folly of technology that is not balanced with nature, he does not advocate a lifestyle completely devoid of technology. Rather, Ghosh suggests that the ideal way of living strikes a balance between the two, although that balance often lies closer to nature than the present governments of India and the West seem to think. While India has rejected its colonial history, it unfortunately did not learn from the British's failed attempt at developing Port Canning. Kaur writes that the Indian leaders "unreflexively embraced models of economic development that marginalized the local and subaltern in favor of the metropolitan, a top down perspective on development that was patronizing at best and ruthlessly exploitative at worst" (Kaur 133). From both Ghosh's and Kaur's perspectives, the fisherfolk of the Sundarbans offer a far better ideal.
One of the principle settings in the novel is the island village of Lusibari, the southernmost permanent settlement in the Sundarbans. Lusibari offers several examples of comingling between technology and nature. The town could not exist without its badh, the earthen wall surrounding the village and keeping out the salty waters of high tide. Even with its shelter, the town's existence is tenuous at best. "Only at high tide was it evident that the interior of the island lay well below the level of the water. At such times the unsinkable ship of a few hours before took on the appearance of a flimsy saucer that could tip over at any moment and go circling down into the depths" (Ghosh 32). Parts of the badh are often damaged by storms, and when saltwater floods the fields, it takes years to reduce their salinity to levels suitable for agriculture. The badh, in fact, is constantly under siege from the environment it attempts to keep at bay. In addition to the storms, tides and currents, crabs burrow into the badh to make their homes, weakening its structure (Ghosh 171-172). The villagers, however, do not attempt to dissuade the crabs, which comprise a substantial part of their diet and economy. By allowing the crabs to eat away at their structural protection, the fisherfolk of Lusibari help maintain their own supply of food and trade.
Boats are present throughout The Hungry Tide, and while every boat is some form of technology, the protagonists' reactions to the various levels of technology employed provide another insight to Ghosh's idea of balance. On one end of the spectrum, the diesel-powered boats are mockingly called bhot-bhotis for the chugging sounds the make. Piya longs to escape her government-hired bhot-bhoti for the far simpler, oar-powered fishing boat of Fokir, a local village. The locals tolerate bhot-bhotis to a limited degree; the diesel boats are useful as ferries for carrying large numbers of people and goods. Piya later acquiesces to using a locally hired bhot-bhoti for her research on river dolphins, but only when it is accompanied by Fokir's rowboat, which allows for more intimate studies. Its "silence was a comforting contrast" (Ghosh 279) to the big diesel-powered boat.
While The Hungry Tide's main characters prefer simpler forms of boat technology in their daily lives, they are not opposed to certain forms of more advanced technology. Modern Doppler radar and weather alert systems provide early warning of approaching storms, allowing the villagers to seek shelter before the weather turns rough in the novel's climactic ending (Ghosh 282-283, 323). After the storm claims Fokir's life and all of Piya's notes, Fokir's knowledge of the river dolphins' behavior is preserved through the modern marvel of Piya's GPS device (Ghosh 328). The villagers of Lusibari appreciate the modern medical help available in the town's hospital compound, whose communal technology serves as a gathering place in the town. In one particularly memorable scene, the hospital compound's streetlights, which work for only three hours each evening, draw in the local school children who converse and study beneath the electric glow (Ghosh 53). Contrast that image to one of solitary students working independently beside their own lamps - with no sense of community - and Ghosh's ideal place for technology becomes clearer. Technology is at its best when it is used to build stronger communities in the public domain.
The advocates of both technology and nature have long depicted the two as being at odds with each other. Such antagonism is destructive, as some form of technology is necessary for human survival on almost the entire planet. Establishing the proper balance is both difficult and essential: while some technology can enable humanity's existence, too much will ensure our destruction. The texts of Potiki and The Hungry Tide offer two examples of attractive, sustainable balances between nature and technology.
Works Cited
Campbell, Sueellen. "The Land and Language of Desire: Where Deep Ecology and Post-Structuralism Meet." The Ecocriticism Reader. Eds. Glotfelty and Fromm. Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1996.