Download the Full Text PDF (3MB)
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Globalization and the Transformation of Cultures & Humanity: A Curriculum and Toolkit for the Efflorescence of Ecological Literacy in Legal and Business School Education Robert Alan Hershey* AIt=s noble to be good, and nobler to teach others to be good, and less trouble.@ BMark Twain “We are the great abbreviators. None of us has the wit to know the whole truth, the time to tell it if we believed we did, or an audience so gullible as to accept it.” -Huxley “I’m all for progress. It’s change I can’t stand.” -Mark Twain * Robert Alan Hershey is a Professor on both the Law and American Indian Studies Faculties and Director of Clinical Education for the Indigenous Peoples Law & Policy Program at the University of Arizona. He received his law degree from the University of Arizona College of Law in 1972. In 1972 and 1973, he worked as Staff Attorney for the Fort Defiance Agency of Dinebeiina Nahilna Be Agaditahe (DNA Legal Services) on the Navajo Indian Reservation. Thereafter, as a sole practitioner, Professor Hershey specialized in Indian affairs. From 1983 to 1999, he served as Special Litigation Counsel and Law Enforcement Legal Advisor to the White Mountain Apache Tribe, and, from 1995 to 1997, as Special Counsel to the Pascua Yaqui Tribe. Professor Hershey has also served continuously from 1989-present as Judge Pro Tempore for the Tohono O=odham Judiciary, and he is a past Associate Justice for the Yavapai-Prescott Indian Tribal Court of Appeals. He has been a member of the White Mountain Apache, Hopi, Pascua Yaqui, and Tohono O=odham Tribal Courts. He has taught American Indian Law at the University of Puerto Rico Escuela de Derechos and at the University of Deusto in Bilbao, Spain, and has taught a version of this course in Summer 2005 at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. For the past nineteen years he has taught Indian/Indigenous/Aboriginal law at the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law. His current courses include Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy Clinical Education (which promotes and assists the self-determination of Aboriginal communities in the southwestern United States and worldwide), Advanced Topics in Indian Law, and Globalization, Future Life, and the Transformation of Culture. E- mail correspondence: [email protected]. 1 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am deeply grateful for the hard work and dedication of my former and present students who helped make this manuscript possible: DeAnna Rivera Amanda Banat Stacy Butler Amanda Kucich Vanessa Picard Shasta Kilminster Nicole Ong Kevin Linoue Megan Hendricks Danielle Hiraldo Pankaj Raval Ryan Dreveskracht I want to heap special praise for those that contributed solidly to the crafting of text and footnotes: Ron Gard Eric Pavri Joel Feinman Lastly, and with sincere admiration, I thank Barbara Lopez, a colleague at the law school, who worked tirelessly to prepare the manuscript for production. 2 Table of Contents Page # The Intro Background to the Syllabus • Why Question Globalization? • Redefining Progress • The Confluence of Population with Food & Water Access, Safety, and Security • Population • Food and Water: Access, Safety and Security • The Environment and Technology: On the Precipice or In the Crevasse? • The Collision of Technology, Intellectual Property and Cultural Survival • The Industrialization of Digitization • Creating the Corporate Utopia: Transnationalism, the W.T.O. and the I.M.F. • Globalization and its Significant and Special Impacts on Indigenous Communities • Solutions/Conserving Communities • The Future The Course Papers The Course Syllabus The Outro Bibliography Websites Magazines Academic Presses Organizations & Periodicals Websites for Technology & the Internet Websites for Indigenous Peoples Websites for Industry Video/Media Education 3 THE INTRO The esoteric quality of legal education has been known to deliver absurd twists of language, confoundedness, and meaninglessness.1 I have looked for another modifying adjective and have found that the word, “esoteric,” immediately follows “esophoria” in my dictionary, a condition of a squint in which the eyes turn inward toward the nose, and am reminded of the old story about how lawyers squint at gnats and swallow camels to make their point; so I’ll keep the word “esoteric” here. The law systematizes and legitimizes procedures for looking backwards, where constant references to stodgy bastions of precedent dilute and make parsimonious the urgency, the emergency, of social justice. Should we, as law and business school professors, myopically emphasize legal scriptures and procedural complexities in area by area of practice? Should we not be educating, in equal measure and with immediacy, humane social dialogue, the tactics of public civility, and furtherance of egalitarian values?2 The place in which each young attorney and MBA student finds himself or herself, and where they will continue to find themselves as they season, and their own satisfaction with that time and space of our 1 One author suggests that law instruction is part “ideological training for willing service in the hierarchies of the corporate welfare state.” Duncan Kennedy, Legal Education as Training for Hierarchy, in THE POLITICS OF LAW 40 (David Kairys ed., 1998). The law also toys with the imagination. If I had a television, I would have watched the former CBS series, “Century City,” covering the ground of a small Los Angeles law firm in the near future. “In the pilot episode, a widower whose 7-year old son is dying of an incurable liver disease wants to clone his son’s cells to develop a baby who could donate a portion of his liver to save him. Unfortunately, he illegally smuggled the cloned cells into the United States from Singapore, where cloning is legal, and his future embryo was confiscated at customs.” Alessandra Stanley, Law Firm of Tomorrow: Like ‘The Practice,’ but with Engineered Genes, N.Y. TIMES, Mar. 16, 2004, at B1. 2 I must confess that when I began writing this tome many years ago, I felt that our system of legal education emphasized – to quote one of my older colleagues – the “making of horse collars” in a rocket-ship age, and I had written thusly in an earlier iteration. But I do find today a dynamic change in the way we have become forward thinkers and questioners of the future. See, e.g., Alberto Bernabe-Riefkohl, Tomorrow’s Law Schools: Globalization and Legal Education, 32 SAN DIEGO L. REV. 137 (1995); Thomas D. Morgan, Educating Lawyers for the Future Legal Profession, 30 OKLA. CITY U. L. REV. 537 (2005). See infra note 61. See also MARJORIE A. SILVER, THE AFFECTIVE ASSISTANCE OF COUNSEL: PRACTICING LAW AS A HEALING PROFESSION (challenging the legal profession’s gladiatorial paradigm). 4 hypermodern world,3 remarkably is dependent on how ever fast the world turns and to what extent we instill in them the practice to take moments to answer questions of the soul B how values are created B in the face of numbing and desensitizing stimulus that has become western culture.4 This “Globalization” class, then, was designed to be just one example to educators of a blended curriculum in the field of law, economics, sociobiology,5 human geography,6 philosophy, ecological literacy7 and human justice. I’m lazy in esotery. So, instead, I teach impending doom, resilience, heartbreak, hope, action, paying attention. In the early part of my legal career, after I returned from living and working on the Navajo Indian Reservation, I was wonderfully good at knowing that I did not know much, and I did not pretend to. But, I could always smell the intangible scents of trouble, like Humphrey Bogart in film noir, and my recognitions came to me as strong as newly coated varnish in a dive boat’s kitchen galley mixed with the vapors of morning bacon grease. I like to think that this class is about reaching into infinite space and grabbing odors from the back of minds. I want our young lawyers to wear orange jumpsuits to watch red sunsets, to be alive sensuously, to be urgent, to be called to awareness. In essence, my class explores humanity and 3 Aptly thought out in CHARLENE SPRETNAK, THE RESURGENCE OF THE REAL: BODY, NATURE, AND PLACE IN A HYPERMODERN WORLD (1997). 4 See JOANNA MACY, WIDENING CIRCLES: A MEMOIR (2001). Cf. EDWARD SAID, CULTURE AND IMPERIALISM (1993); HOMI BHABHA, THE LOCATION OF CULTURE (1994). 5 The word "sociobiology" was coined by John Paul Scott in 1946, at a conference on genetics and social behavior, and became widely used after it was popularized by Edward O. Wilson in his 1975 book, SOCIOBIOLOGY: THE NEW SYNTHESIS. 6 See HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: SOCIETY, SPACE AND SOCIAL SCIENCE (Derik Gregory, Ron Martin & Graham Smith eds., 1994); EDWARD W. SOJA, POSTMODERN GEOGRAPHIES: THE REASSERTION OF SPACE IN CRITICAL SOCIAL THEORY (1989); DAVID HARVEY, JUSTICE, NATURE, AND THE GEOGRAPHY OF DIFFERENCE (1995); JARED DIAMOND, GUNS GERMS AND STEEL: THE FATES OF HUMAN SOCIETIES (1999); JARED DIAMOND, COLLAPSE: HOW SOCIETIES CHOOSE TO FAIL OR SUCCEED (2004). 7 This term derives from the great mind of David Orr, a Professor of Environmental Studies and Policies and Chair of the Environmental Studies Department at Oberlin College. See DAVID W. ORR, ECOLOGICAL LITERACY: EDUCATION AND THE TRANSITION TO A POSTMODERN WORLD (S.U.N.Y. Press 1992). FRITJOF CAPRA, THE HIDDEN CONNECTIONS: A SCIENCE FOR SUSTAINABLE LIVING (2002). 5 inhumanity in an accelerated world.8 It asks, as capitalism approaches universality, what are the legal, social, and community obligations that accompany global participation? Does money equal wealth?9 How do technological innovations enhance, displace, or devalue human existence and culture?10 If public morality supposedly resounds in the law, then is morality increasingly bound to perpetual consumption?11 Should we not rethink the very nature of human 12 progress? 8 Man’s inhumanity to man was articulated by Robert Burns, in From Man Was Made to Mourn: A Dirge (1785), www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/244100.html.