‘True human development means a recognition that we are animals, and that we have no more right to planetary resources than any other species.’ Photo: by Greg Rosenke on Unsplash
Country pursuits: Helen Minnis wants a rethink on how we refer to other nations
‘We have to start talking about “Developing” and “Developed” countries in a different way.’
One Saturday last month, a group of Glasgow Quakers gathered in the pouring sleety rain to do some gardening in Gilshochill. Gilshochill (pronounced Gilshie-Hill) is known as a ‘materially deprived’ part of Glasgow, and this group meets once a month to tend a beautiful garden, orchard and labyrinth that has been developed on a large grassy hillside there. Another local church group, the Mosaics, has worked hard to transform what our local Housing Association has called a ‘low quality leisure space’ just a bit further up the same hill. This is now a gorgeous little community garden, with a firepit and garden chairs, and a space where outdoor gigs have been held – also in the pouring rain!
There has been a gradual transformation in Gilshochill: what used to be a dark, dangerous patch of waste ground, only frequented by local drug users, has opened out into a light, friendly place where everyone in the community can meet, walk their dogs and get to know one another. During the pandemic, this place felt like a real blessing. We live in an unusually socially mixed area, with a few private houses among housing association flats, including one block that provides temporary accommodation for homeless people. During the first lockdown, an informal food bank developed, and it was great fun to see Muslim asylum-seekers doing swapsies with multi-generational Scottish Gilshochill residents – cans of ham and pea soup for cans of chickpeas.
My husband, Steve Koepplinger, a member of Glasgow Meeting, had been working on this piece of land for a few years with just one other neighbour but, gradually, a strong local group has formed that comes out to pick up litter regularly and organises community events. We call ourselves the Friends of Gilshochill – the FOGHERS – and if you say that quickly, you can guess at the irreverence with which we regard ourselves. For me, the highlight of the otherwise dreadful 2020 was the ‘Zombie Walk’, which the Foghers ran for the local kids: five actors (resting due to lockdown) in full makeup and costume, jumping out from behind trees, uplit and made spooky with real stage lighting, as the children were ushered through the little wood to the anti-Zombie-vaccination station at the other side – until they realised that ‘the doctor’ had also turned into a zombie. The sheer terror of this moment was mitigated by sharing a socially-distanced barbecue with the actors, later, in front of a huge bonfire. This has now become an annual event but, since the actors were no longer resting this year, the 2021 Zombies were local people who got into full makeup and costume in our back room.
All of this local activity has coincided with my preparations for the 2022 Swarthmore Lecture, and with being part of Glasgow Meeting’s welcome of COP26 delegates and visitors to our city. An excellent COP26 session on Climate Justice, led by Rebecca Woo and Paul Parker from Friends House, suddenly crystalised something for me – we have to start talking about ‘Developing’ and ‘Developed’ countries in a different way. Phil Chandler, who is part of my Swarthmore support team, recommended a book written in 1972 by Walter Rodney called How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Rodney was obviously writing from a Marxist perspective and it was a shock to me that, even looking through a left wing lens, he seemed to regard human development as a linear journey towards material wealth. But that perhaps made more sense back in the 1970s when there were very real concerns about there not being enough food or other essential resources to go round an ever-increasing world population. We are in a very different position now: science and technology have advanced to the extent that there are enough resources to go around everyone if we were able to get our priorities right. The problem that Rodney could see back in the 1960s is still staring us in the face now: it is exploitation of our fellow human beings and their lands that is the problem. As Rebecca Woo explained in her talk about Climate Justice, the UK, other European countries, and the US have been extracting wealth from countries they colonised for centuries. Slavery, and then cheap labour, in colonised countries cemented a ‘them and us’ economy where we extract and they are extracted from. Walter Rodney’s view of development was that the people who had been treated as ‘them’ needed to take over the means of production so that children in exploited countries would no longer go hungry. But the focus was still on ever-increasing production as the ultimate goal of ‘development’. The difference is that, here in 2021, we have enough ‘stuff’ as a planet – there is no reason why any child should go hungry or unvaccinated. But if we continue to exploit other people in other parts of the globe, in the way we have been habitually doing for the past 500 years, we are all in danger. The Omicron variant of Covid 19 is a salutary example: the Oxford vaccine team waived their intellectual property rights to enable widespread use in low-income countries, but they have been the only team to do this. Hence, most of the ex-colonised world has managed to achieve only very low rates of vaccination. This means the emergence of new and potentially more dangerous virus strains is inevitable – and all of us suffer.
This brings me back to the term ‘developing’. I believe we need to reclaim the meaning of this word. Low income does not mean under-developed. In fact, if there is one thing that I learned from the COP26 delegates in Glasgow in November it is this: true human development means a recognition that we are animals, just like all the other animals, and that we have no more right to the resources of our shared planet than any other species. This is something that many indigenous people have always known, and have held onto against the odds from time immemorial – yet because the exploitation of colonialism made them and their lands poor and unproductive, we dare to call them under-developed.
Here in Gilshochill, the community is developing. Quakers are supporting this development work. I’d like to propose a new meaning of a ‘developing country’: a country in which all of its human beings are striving to once again respect and uphold the land we live on and the communities we live in. We are a long way away from that in the UK, but I look forward to a time in the future when we can be proud to say that we live in a developing country.
