Funciones y propiedades del dinero

In the spring of

1978

I spent seven weeks at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, as a Hubert Humphrey Visiting Profes­ sor, giving regular seminars to undergraduate students and de­ livering a series of public lectures. This was an excellent op­ portunity for me to summarize what I had learned about the paradigm shift in medicine and health care from numerous dis­

cussions and from the extensive literature I had collected. The college provided me with a large and comfortable apartment, in which I could work without any disturbance and spread out my books, articles, and notes over many empty shelves and tables. I remember noticing a couple of small African wood sculptures when I moved in, and I regarded it as a good omen when my hosts told me that they had been left behind by Alex Haley, who had spent several weeks in the same apartment working on his celebrated epic

Roots.

It was in this apartment that I actually began to lay out the chapters of

The Turning

Point

and to order my notes and references accordingly.

These seven weeks at Macalester were very satisfying and enriching for me. They were a time of concentrated study and writing, which I enjoyed enormously, and they gave me an op­ portunity to meet many interesting and very kind people, not only at the college but also in the twin cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis. In particular, I was fortunate to be introduced to a large network of artists and social activists through whom I experienced the cooperative spirit and community feeling that is a valued tradition in Minnesota.

As I mapped out the conceptual framework for a holistic approach to health and healing, my discussions with numerous social activists and community organizers brought about a sig­ nificant change in my perspective. In my discussions with

THE SEARCH FOR BALANCE 181

Simonton and with many other health professionals in Cali­ fornia I had explored primarily the psychological dimensions

of health and the psychosomatic nature of the healing process. In the very different social and cultural climate of Minnesota my attention shifted to the environmental, social, and political dimensions of health. I began with a survey of environmental health hazards-air pollution, acid rain, toxic chemical wastes, radiation hazards, and many others-and realized very soon that these manifold health hazards are not just incidental by­ products of technological progress but integral features of an economic system obsessed with growth and expansion.

Thus I was led to investigate the economic, social, and po­ litical environment in which today's health care operates, and in doing so I realized more and more that our social and eco­ nomic system itself has become a fundamental threat to our health.

In Minnesota I became especially interested in agriculture and its impact on health at multiple levels. I read frightening accounts of the disastrous effects of the modern system of mech­ anized, chemical, and energy-intensive farming. Having grown up on a farm myself, I was very interested in hearing about the pros and cons of the so-called Green Revolution from farmers themselves, and I spent many hours with farmers of all ages discussing their problems. I even attended a two-day confer­ ence on organic, ecological agriculture to learn about this new grassroots movement in farming.

These discussions revealed to me a fascinating parallel be­ tween medicine and agriculture, which helped me greatly in understanding the entire dynamics of our crisis and cultural transformation. Farmers, like doctors, deal with living organ­

isms that are severely affected by the mechanistic approaches of our science and technology. Like the human organism, the soil is a living system that has to remain in a state of dynamic balance to be healthy. When the balance is disturbed there will be pathological growth of certain components-bacteria or can­ cer cells in the human body, weeds or pests in the fields. Disease will occur, and eventually the whole organism may die and turn into inorganic matter. These effects have become major problems in modern agriculture because of the farming meth­ ods promoted by the petrochemical companies. As the pharma­ ceutical industry has conditioned doctors and patients to be-

1 82 UNCOMMON WISDOM

lieve that the human body needs continual medical supervision and drug treatment to stay healthy, so the petrochemical indus­ try has made farmers believe that soil needs massive infusions of chemicals, supervised by agricultural scientists and techni­ cians, to remain productive. In both cases these practices have seriously disrupted the natural balance of the living system and thus generated numerous diseases. Moreover, the two systems are directly connected, since any imbalance in the soil will affect the food that grows in it and thus the health of the people who eat that food.

As I spent a long weekend visiting farmers on their land, traveling from one farm to another on cross-country skis, I found that many of these men and women have preserved their ecological wisdom, passed down from generation to generation. In spite of massive indoctrination by the petrochemical corpo­ rations, they know that the chemical way of farming is harmful to people and to the land. But they are often forced to adopt it because the whole economy of farming-the tax structure, credit system, real estate system, and so on-has been set up in a way that gives them no choice.

My close look at the tragedy of American farming taught me an important lesson, perhaps the most important of my entire stay in Minnesota. The pharmaceutical and petrochemi­ cal industries have been extremely successful in achieving ex­ tensive control over the consumers of their products, because the same mechanistic world view and associated value system that underlie their technologies also form the basis of their economic and political motives. And although their methods are generally anti-ecological and unhealthy, they are firmly supported by the scientific establishment, which also subscribes to the same outdated world view. To change this situation is now absolutely vital for our well-being and survival, and change will only be possible if we are able, as a society, to shift to a new holistic and ecological vision of reality.

In document UNIVERSIDAD DE EL SALVADOR FACULTAD DE CIENCIAS ECONOMICAS ESCUELA DE ECONOMIA ESTUDIO COMPARATIVO SOBRE EL ENVÍO DE REMESAS DE ESTADOS (página 27-33)