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the journal of the krishnamurti schools no.25

as people engaged with problems and campaigned for social and
political reforms.
Krishnamurti’s dismissal of this gradualist approach stopped me
in my tracks. It made me intensely curious to explore the whole
idea of progress and transformation. I realized that if you travelled
across the world you could visit hunter gatherer bands and ‘medie-
val’ farming villages and get a glimpse of our past. Each age leaves
evidence of its dominance in remnant communities. Our most
recent development, the Industrial Revolution, is still unfolding in
cities in rapidly developing countries.
When I left art school, I set myself a fascinating project—to pho-
tograph the sweep of history. You can have an interesting life if you
follow your passions!
For over a million years everyone was a hunter-gatherer. It was
humanity’s first and most successful adaptation, occupying nine-
ty-nine per cent of human history. I was privileged to stay with
Ashaninka, Yanomami and Surui communities deep in the Ama-
zon jungle, cut off from the modern world. Anthropologists, who
spent long periods with contemporary hunter gatherers, all say they
were generally happy. This was my impression, but it wasn’t Eden as
some leading thinkers in the environmental movement claim. They
romanticise indigenous people to promote the idea that humans,
at our core, can live harmoniously in nature and with each other.
They propose that somehow, we might return to the mind-set that
operated before we were banished from Eden. It’s a tempting idea—
that the way forward is to somehow scrape away at the psycholog-
ical deposits built up over the last 10,000 years and regain our lost
innocence. But it doesn’t correspond to what I observed.
The hunter-gatherers I met were like any cross-section of
humanity. They lack the technologies developed over the last
10,000 years, but they are essentially the same as us. There were
story tellers, healers and hunters; some were sensitive to nature
and some treated it as a resource to be exploited; there were people

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