For years, India has debated the ethics of disturbing the lives of the tribes to bring development. Some people now fear that the floods may have delivered a death blow to their fragile cultures.Entire cultures now face extinction and instead of wondering whether the cultures should have been disturbed, the question now becomes how the introduction of the modern world may have saved many of these people.
"Ecosystems tend to regenerate. But my biggest concern is for the primitive tribes who are already living on the precipice and dwindling rapidly in numbers," said Sameer Acharya, who heads a group called the Society for Andaman and Nicobar Ecology in Port Blair. "Their extinction would now become a reality, just a push button away."
But before our friends say, okay, we won't regress the culture that far, just to the pre-industrial age, maybe they should ask the Amish what they think: "I didn't vote for the last 30 years," he said, puffing on a pipe. "But Bush seemed to have our Christian principles."
