Fishing Meakambut in Papua New Guinea / Photo by Amy Toensing / 2012

The February issue of National Geographic features a sobering story about the Meakambut, one of the last semi-nomadic hunters and gatherers of Papua New Guinea. They live in caves, high up in the jungle of the Central Range. Their land is under pressure from logging and mining, and fish and wild pigs are ever harder to find. But what makes life especially hard, though, is that diseases like malaria and tuberculosis are wiping their people out.

By the end of the story, a member of National Geographic’s team vows to do everything in his power to protect the Meakambut and their land. But one of their leaders takes a different position. He says: “We, the Meakambut people, will give up hunting and always moving and living in the mountain caves if the government will give us a health clinic and a school, and two shovels and two axes, so we can build homes.” We can’t blame him, of course. We can only blame ourselves for being so hopelessly romantic. Progress isn’t linear.

Last year, Dutch designers, philosophers and scientists developed a game for tablet computers that humans and pigs can play for mutual enjoyment. What I find interesting about this project, aside from the game itself, is the way in which design is used as a research tool. The philospher Clemens Driessen, who took the initiative, sums up the advantages for researchers: “Technological designs can ‘disclose’ moral worlds, e.g. by extrapolating existing situations into unsettling proposals. [...] Both the design process and the eventual playing of a game with pigs offer ways to explore a variety of ethical questions. This means that technological design can lead to new reflection, on the importance and the meaning of central concepts such as naturalness or intelligence, but also in more direct and embodied ways, in forging new types of human animal encounters and relations.”

I largely agree with this, but that shouldn’t imply that design is a reliable research tool. Technology is not a value-free medium, but one that steers people’s attention decidedly in certain directions. For example, towards harmonious interactions with farmed pigs intended for consumption, as in Pig Chase (why isn’t it a shooting game?). But also towards itself, as if technology were the only thinkable source of solutions to human problems. So, however inspiring the use of design may be for researchers, in order to know what one is studying, care must be taken.

Telaga Warna / 1910-1940 / Source: Tropenmuseum.nl

In the past year, the admired Dutch writer Hella Haasse died at the age of ninety three. In 1948, she debuted with her novel Oeroeg, a story situated in the former Dutch East Indies. It tells the tale of the friendship between a Dutch and a native boy. Sadly, their bond slowly weathers and dies, against the background of the rising resistance to colonial rule. All that remains for the Dutch boy, the narrator in this story, is the beautiful landscape in which their shared youth left many traces. But even that landscape appears to have changed. At the end of the book, despite the legitimacy of the Indonesian quest for independence, the reader will feel that something valuable was lost.

Aside from the tea shrubs, the mountain streams and the blue shadow of the clouds, a mysterious role is played by a small lake. It lies hidden in the lush tropical forest and has a dark, somewhat threatening surface. It is said that the inspiration for this lake came from Haasse’s own memories of Telaga Warna, a small lake south of what is nowadays called Jakarta. The picture above shows what it looked like when she was young. A few years ago, when a journalist wanted to visit Telaga Warna, Haasse warned that it had become an amusement park, with a playground and lots of sellers. But it still exists, and that’s something. Today, it’s a reserve where city people like to come to relax, and maybe even experience some of the magic that Hella Haasse has seen in her life. I hope it’s still possible. It will be a reminder of her love of nature.