The question is to figure out how free people can choose the components of their lives in a truly multicultural, pluralistic world. I recently visited the polar Eskimo in northern Greenland. They live in wonderful houses imported from Denmark. They have DVDs, TVs, cell phones, a fine health clinic, a fully stocked co-op store, and a community hall where elders gather. What they don't have are snowmobiles. They continue to hunt and travel by dog team, with at least ten dogs for every person. They saw what happened when the Inuit of the Canadian Arctic became dependent on machines, and they recognized that maintaining their dogs was a cultural pivot. Even though you can get to your hunting area faster on a snowmobile, once you're there, you're severely limited by the need for oil, gasoline, and so on; and the whole idea of free-form movement over sacred geography, over the landscape of your tradition, is impossible. On a deeper level, the very act of keeping the dogs alive and trained demands skills that root people in their tradition in a very powerful way. The people have their language, which is taught in school; they have their dogs; the men are still hunters. The culture has changed, but it hasn't been transformed.

Tourism, one of the largest sectors of the global economy, can be a tremendous force for good, and if done with respect it sends a strong message. Because visitors are prepared to pay, they are essentially saying, This stuff matters, this counts. People in whatever culture measure the legitimacy of an institution at some level by economic values. A technique that doesn't produce food in the forest will be dropped; a technique that does will be picked up. Compared with the threats implied by, for instance, the unconstrained extraction of oil or egregious industrial logging, ecotourism is benign. One example is the Cofán, an extraordinarily isolated tribe that had the misfortune to live on top of what became Ecuador's oil supply. When I was there in 1974, Lago Agrio looked pretty dreary—an exploding whorehouse town, oil pipelines, roads across the Andes, colonists pouring in, a government not just insensitive but completely dismissive of anything indigenous. Traditionally, the chief in the Cofán community was a shaman, because the only threat was from forces of the metaphysical realm. When oil was found, suddenly the forces were very real, very concrete. So the Cofán selected Randy Borman as their chief. The son of missionaries, Randy grew up Cofán, spoke the language as his mother tongue, and lived in the community. He was not only thought of as a brother but was equipped to go up to Quito, to speak English, to speak Spanish. He began a political process to secure Cofán land and started an ecotourism operation that the Cofán controlled one hundred percent. People would fly in to learn about Cofán culture: How do the people make curare? What is the nature of their medicinal botany? What are their stories and myths? What is the nature of their social relations?