Out of the frying pan... What next for Burma?

I begin this post some eight hours deep into a flight from San Francisco to Osaka. The map function on the seatback display informs me that we are several hundred miles east of the northernmost Japanese island of Hokkaido. North lies the sea of Okhotsk and the eastern fringes of Russia, a corner of this fair planet I will likely only visit during games of Risk.

Japan is the jumping off point for a two week trip to Burma and Thailand led by my good friend Dwight Clark. I met Dwight on a bright Fall morning in 1998. I was nervously awaiting an interview for the Payson Treat Fellowship, a cross-cultural exchange program run by the small non-profit Volunteers in Asia. A kindly gentleman offered me a cup of tea while I waited and struck up conversation. He carried himself with such graceful humility that I was surprised to learn later that not only was he VIA's president, he had been so since he founded the organization in 1963. The tea and conversation soothed my nerves and, very contrary to my expectations, a few days later I was selected to the fellowship.

Five years later, I came to work for VIA as a program director. All the while, Dwight and I have made a point of getting together for tea or dinner to catch up on life, revel in the horse race of American politics, and share thoughts and information on world affairs, particularly those pertaining to Asia. Dwight and VIA have been just about everywhere in Asia over the past 46 years -- Indonesia, China, Japan, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Vietnam, the Phillipines, etc. Since his retirement in 2003, Dwight has not slowed down a bit. His focus these days, and the focus of many of our dinner chats, is increasingly the troubled nation of some 50 million souls now officially known as Myanmar.

Burma has been receiving some press of late over the ruling military junta's decision to continue detaining Nobel laureat Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest through next year's elections. The charges, which stemmed from a bizarre incident in which an American man swam unbidden to Suu Kyi's heavily-guarded home, are consistent with the junta's efforts to marginalize Suu Kyi and pro-democracy leadership regardless of the flimsiness of the rationale.

Burma's military regime has existed in one form or another since 1962, a remarkably tenacious ruling clique. One of my primary interests in Burma is the question of what will happen within the country once the regime, now known by the Orwellian moniker State Peace and Development Council, finally passes by the wayside. Once a fairly prosperous nation, Burma is now among the poorest in South East Asia. Embargos, sanctions, and a general unwillingness to be associated with a government as roundly condemned as Myanmar's has meant that the country has seen little of the rapid economic growth of its neighboring 'Asian Tigers'. (An exception to this standoffishness is China, which has had fewer qualms with its resource-rich neighbor's tendencies towards political repression and human rights violations). When sunnier political days come and Burma strikes a more open posture, the country will be one of the low men on the economic totem pole in the region. Multinationals will be tempted to shift their factories and sweatshops to Burma. The IMF and the World Bank will vigorously champion structural adjustment as the non-negotiable right of passage into the global marketplace. In agriculture, there will be tremendous pressure to move even further in the direction of unsustainable, cash-crop monocultures. In short, Burma will find itself hitched to the globalization express both for better and for worse.

The alluring question for me is to what extent Burma can emerge from its long political isolation without immediately becoming the latest sweatshop to the world. To what extent can the country maintain extant pracitices, structures, attitudes, sensibilities, and knowledge that promote environmental and cultural health? I don't intend to romanticize 'traditional' Burmese society as it exists under the junta or downplay the acute suffering that repression engenders. Yet to the extent that there still exist ways of life in Burma and across the globe that are less energy and resource intensive, I believe the knowledge embedded in those ways of life offer invaluable lessons for our species as we enter an era in which one of our most urgent needs is to relearn how to live more lightly on the planet.