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Place Located Indigenous Knowledge Finding The Value Of Per Capita Earth Resource Consumption Necessary For Human Sustainability.

ByWilliam M. Alexander

ABSTRACT

Indigenous knowledge in India (How to efficiently create human well-being with minimum amounts of Earth resources per capita) has been augmented in the twentieth century with new technologies. These new technologies have insufficiently raised the Indian well-being, insufficient to cause Indians to choose families small enough to achieve human sustainability within Earth resource short India. Fortunately, within India there is a stable, place located, population (29 million) which currently meets the criteria for human sustainability-modest per capita taking of Earth resources combined with small families.

This population (Kerala) is totally enclosed within the cultural, institutional, political, economic, and geographic boundaries of India. No differences have been located giving Kerala some advantage over India. That is, no advantages except the high Kerala well-being. (No economic measures are among the well-being measures.) The processes of tilizing limited Earth resources in Kerala to create human well-being is clearly more efficient in Kerala than in India.

Efficiency has a knowledge base. There is one significant difference in the indigenous knowledge in the place of Kerala and in the remainder of India. This difference is central to the human experience, family structure, which we may call weak patriarchy versus strong patriarchy. The divergence in this indigenous knowledge appears to have occurred more than a thousand years ago--India changing to strong patriarchy and Kerala not changing from the residual weak patriarchy. The fact that the rapid increases in the well-being measures of Kerala have occurred in the last half of the twentieth century demonstrates synergy between the new technologies (particularly education and medicine) introduced into India and weak patriarchy in the Kerala part of India.

In the nineteenth century, Kerala was only notable for the higher status of its women. Within the Indian low incomes and low per capita consumption of Earth resources, the high well-being measures of Kerala are high enough to have caused a rapid decline in the total fertility rate to a sustainable level, lower than in North America. The low consumption of Earth resources in Kerala thus becomes a benchmark for sustainability, given efficient human consumption. This efficiency benchmark is defined by differences in weak patriarchy Kerala within strong patriarchy India---a contrast of place located indigenous knowledge.


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