What a way to get to Bangladesh: rocketing across the Atlantic at 600 m.p.h. on a $1500 ticket, sipping complementary fresh water (a luxury if there ever was one!), tracking our location in real-time on my personal video monitor. It's an ultra-posh plane to an ultra-poor place.
Virgin Atlantic, even in Economy class, offers all the amenities: each passenger gets a sack of hip Virgin-brand freebies; his or her choice of movies and video games in the seat-backs; and (required on a journey to London, our intermediate destination) plenty of hot tea.
The movie I watched was Pretty Woman, which takes place in the ultra-ultra-posh world of high finance. In the movie, the manager of a tony Rodeo Drive boutique asks Richard Gere's character: "Exactly how obscene an amount of money did you mean? Just profane, or really offensive?" Gere replies, with irony: "Oh, really offensive."
Now, I don't think Virgin Atlantic should rip out the video displays, turn down the heat (after all, my video display says it's -49° F outside!), serve up some stale bread and and start calling itself Virgin Ascetic. It's a comfortable flight, and I like it! However, the thought has crossed my mind that everything we've been given so far has been wrapped in plastic, almost certainly not destined for recycling. I wonder if Virgin impresario Richard Branson has read Natural Capitalism? This flight is "really offensive" not in its luxury but in its wastefulness--and that has implications for Bangladesh!
An important question to be asking oneself on the way to Dhaka is, "What can, and what should, development mean for Bangladesh?" The naive answer, one that a disturbing number of official policies seem to offer, is that we should just be filling all the empty seats on this flight with Bangladeshis! "Here, have some key lime pie. Sit back, relax, watch Risky Business!"
The goal of bringing millions of Bangladeshis into the Western super-consumer fold is unrealistic; the planet's resources could not support such a shift. (Of course, the goal may also be insincere, i.e. we realize that such a shift would be disastrous but remain unconcerned because we don't really ever expect it to happen.) Now, a simultaneous shift towards sustainable production and consumption could certainly make the goal more plausible. I admit enthusiastically that we could handle a huge increase in transcontinental flights if they were made on Virgin Atlantic solar-planes that could recycle their own waste-water and plastic wrappers. Unfortunately, we're not making much progress in that direction. I direct Richard Branson once again to Natural Capitalism--in the meantime, we'll have to explore other options.
Bangladesh is not the West, and it seems like there might be a kind of development particularly suited to its strengths and weaknesses. Besides being currently unworkable, the goal above seems unimaginative. Couldn't there be a more specifically appropriate, less generic kind of development? Instead of Thomas Friedman's Golden Straightjacket, the one-size-fits-all economic policy designed to produce super-consumers, it would be a Glass Slipper that fits one and only one foot--one and only one country--perfectly.
So that's something to think about!
-RS.
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