Article 12 and the “Third Wave”

Pacific Island cultures, from Yap to Hawaii, have traditionally placed great importance upon “the land.” The land was sacred and all-important. The land represented the people itself. The land was the vital life force from which sustenance was ultimately derived.

Back in pre-modern times, Pacific Islanders were right to cherish their lands. The land did represent life. The land was indeed all-important. Back then, during the “First Wave,” during the agricultural age, the emphasis on the land did indeed serve a very useful purpose. The land was the primary source of food, social status and wealth.

This was not only true for Pacific Island cultures; it was also true for all other primitive, agricultural cultures, including the European and Native American cultures. After all, we all had to start somewhere. The Industrial Revolution, the “Second Wave” in futurist Alvin Toffler’s parlance, had not arrived yet.

And even when the “Second Wave” of the Industrial Revolution finally did arrive, land was still very important–although less so. Because of tractors and other forms of industrial mechanization, less and less land was needed to produce more and more wealth and food.

Still, a great deal of wealth was built from land during the Second Wave’s Industrial Revolution. Real estate and construction became major industries–bigger than farming. Great factories were built on many acres of land. Great skyscrapers were erected. Land was still important.

But land was more important in the agricultural age than it was during the great industrial revolutions that followed. And land would become even less important in the “Third Wave,” information age, that followed.

Yet, strangely enough, although we are now firmly in the throes of the “Third Wave”–ensconced in the globalized, high-tech, information age economy–many Pacific islanders still have not abandoned their obsolete notions of the importance of the “land.” Though we are living in the present, in the 21st Century’s global Information Age, many of us are still trapped in the First Wave, in the past–in the ancient age of agriculture.

How do we know that land is no longer as important as it once was? We know it because of the shift in wealth creation. If you looked at the Forbes 400 twenty years ago, you would see that, way back then, most of the richest Americans were real estate tycoons.

Today, the richest Americans are no longer heavily into land or real estate. They are into finance, technology, entertainment–in short, into the intangible, creative stuff (the stuff of the present and future).

Why should we fight a losing battle against the future? Why should we, as Pacific Islanders, continue to unreasonably value land in the face of all the changes that are clearly taking place all around us? It is sheer insanity!

We enacted Article 12 because we wanted to protect our people’s most precious, most valuable resource–land. But today the most valuable resource is not land but mind: knowledge, creativity, drive, ingenuity, technology, and education. How on earth are we going to protect that?

Strictly a personal view. Charles Reyes Jr. is a regular columnist of Saipan Tribune. Mr. Reyes may be reached at charlesraves@hotmail.com