And one of those societies with the most valuable lessons, especially for us here in New Mexico, is a remote section of India called Ladakh. Back in 1975, linguist Helena Norberg Hodge traveled to Ladakh, one of the highest and driest inhabited places on Earth, to help film a German documentary. Once there, she fell in love — with everybody. Pocketed deep in the Indian Himalayas on the edge of the Tibetan plateau, at altitudes from 10,000 to 14,000 feet, Ladakh has few rivals for harshest, most difficult environment, with its subzero temperatures six to eight months of the year, high wind velocity, severe soil erosion and virtually no precipitation. Yet the people Helena met had not only survived there for centuries, but they had thrived, creating a rich, joyful and self-sustaining culture that lasted intact for 800 years.

When Helena first discovered them, the Ladakhis, like their ancestors, were healthy and well-fed, managing in the few-month growing season, with a system of channels funneling water from snow and ice melt, to grow enough food for the entire year. In the March 1997 Kids' Newsletter put out by the International Society for Ecology and Culture (ISEC), a nonprofit Helena founded, program director John Page explains how, through the nature of the traditional Ladakhi education, this sustainability was possible. "In Ladakh, children learn from parents, neighbors, older friends and siblings . . . how to discern differences among various strains of wheat and barley, and how to know which will do best in local soils and microclimates; how to build and maintain irrigation canals, and how to divert just the right amount of water to each crop; how to tend animals — donkeys, sheep, goats, dzo and yaks — on which Ladakhis depend; how to use plentiful local materials to build a house, one that is not only beautiful but will last hundreds of years. . . . What they learn, in short, is how to prosper in their place on earth, while allowing future generations to prosper as well."

In her December 1986 paper "Appropriate Technology and Cooperative Culture in Ladakh," Helena agrees. "Roles are very flexible. . . . There is very little specialization and, as a result, work is rarely monotonous and boring. Everyone knows how to plant, how to build houses, how to make music, how to spin.

 "Perhaps," she goes on, "the most important characteristic of the Ladakhis that forced me to rethink my beliefs about human nature is the remarkable joie de vivre of the people. . . . After some years of living with them, I started realizing that all that laughter was connected to a deep sense of peace and contentedness. Even more dramatically, as Ladakh started changing because of outside influences and modernization, it became very clear that the people in the 'modern' sector were beginning to develop the same signs of depression, restlessness, anger and aggression that I was familiar with from the West."

This extreme shift Helena describes above came about in the early 1970s, when "development" suddenly happened. The Indian government, wanting to divert trekking and other tourist activities away from the troubled Kashmir region, built the first roads into Ladakh. In a 1987 interview ("Helping a Culture Choose Its Future" in Being Global Neighbors, no. 17), Helena tells Robert Gilma, "I think probably the closest approximation [to what the effects of that were] would be something like the Spanish coming to Hopiland." She watched the devastating results as men and boys flocked to Leh, Ladakh's largest city, to serve the tourist industry: the creation of sprawling urban slums to contain them all, widespread pollution, the imposition of Western-style education, and the breakdown of the family structure.

Farms were mostly abandoned with the arrival of the government-subsidized food trucks; those who continued farming mostly jettisoned traditional ways for "better," more modern techniques, including planting cash crops. "Development . . . is creating a dependence . . . on chemical fertilizers and pesticides (some of which are outlawed in the West)," Helena laments. The modernization that was occurring and in some ways raising the standard of living there, she observes, was based on a conventional money-based Western model, driven primarily by fossil fuels.

"Technology is not a magical tool that can be used without any sort of side effects," Helena goes on to tell Gilma, "and that is a very important awareness to share in the Third World. . . . Not long ago, a hospital was built in Ladakh made of asbestos, and Ladakhis found pieces of the asbestos and baked their bread directly on it. It's the same way with pesticides. I found a family using an empty pesticide container as a salt shaker. . . . There are many technologies that are now outdated because we have found that they cause more trouble than they're worth."

While this new development was discouragingly daunting, it only served to galvanize Helena into action. Through ISEC, whose efforts are approved by the Dalai Lama, Helena began introducing what Fred Schumacher in Small Is Beautiful called "appropriate technologies." The first of these was the Trombe wall solar space-heating system. Her idea behind introducing solar energy as an alternative, she explains, was "to show that with very simple means, the sun could be used effectively to help raise the standard of living." From there, ISEC went on to create one of the largest renewable-energy programs in the developing world, with the addition of solar water heaters and ovens, photovoltaic power for light, micro-hydro installations and small wind turbines for electricity production. And greenhouses. Today, there are thousands of greenhouses throughout Ladakh, built with locally available materials, providing fresh green vegetables year-round.

The next form of activism for all of us worldwide, Helena tells David Leser in the May 2000 issue of Australia's newspaper-inserted magazine Good Weekend, is to get involved at the community level: to start community banking systems, strengthen local currencies, establish community land trusts, and institute a local food movement. "There is almost nothing more important than the localization of food," she says. "Every human being has to eat three times a day, so to call a system efficient that separates people further and further from their source of food is nothing short of madness."

When Helena first came to know the Ladakhis, living the lifestyle handed down to them by their ancestors' ancestors, she writes of them in her classic book Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh, "Even in the peak of the working season, during the harvest, when people work for 18 hours in a day, play is mixed with work. The whole family and friends are together in the fields; everyone from great-grandparents to great-grandchildren helps and sings together. And for the other eight months, there is a lot of leisure, with weddings which last two weeks, monastery festivals, storytelling and music-making."

This is what the Ladakhis have to teach us: how to give ourselves fully over to a sustainable lifestyle while truly enjoying it. We need to not just exist on our incredibly beautiful New Mexico land but to immerse ourselves in it, remembering how to get our hands dirty again. Become one with our landscape. Embrace it, and in so doing, take whatever radical measures are necessary to protect it. We owe this not only to ourselves and future generations, but to our fellow humans worldwide, in order not to cause those thousands if not millions that Somnath Mukherji warns will otherwise be paying for our own selfish squandering of the Earth's resources with their lives and livelihoods.

It will take all our heart, it will take all our breath. It will be short, it will not be simple. It's what we came now to do.