The relentless advances in travel and communication have shrunk the modern world and incessantly driven homogenization of cultures. Messi’s albiceleste shirts are on the backs of people everywhere, Taylor Swift songs are on the lips of folks from Rio to Sydney and you can get Tandoori chicken in Atlanta or Zermatt. Everywhere you go, the effort for convenience and familiarity has driven a homogenization that gives one pause. This article in The Guardian gives a glimpse of it. The world has shrunk so much that you could be in Bengaluru and feel like you are in Bethesda. A recent trip to Tanzania gave me an opportunity to reflect on the implications.

Tanzania has set aside more than a third of its land area as protected national parks and the Serengeti is the most famous of them. The Serengeti National Park contains the most diverse and complex mammalian population on Earth. The name of the park is derived from a Maasai word which means “the place where the land runs on forever” (locals will translate it to you as “endless plains”) and it truly does run on forever. Out in the Serengeti it feels like Tanzania is making a valiant attempt at holding back time. With millions of wildebeests and zebras churning up dust on ancient migratory routes, with predators hidden in an ocean of grass and holed out in riverbanks, one gets a sense of deep time. In a shrinking world, Serengeti gives a sense of the possibilities of the vast expanse and the “polepole”¹ reminder by the locals captures the the virtue of moving at the pace of nature rather than the frantic pace of modernity.

Despite America’s early leadership in conservation and the success of The Endangered Species Act, we seem to be losing ground. In the US only about 13% of the landmass is permanently protected primarily for nature and biodiversity conservation (GAP status 1 & 2). In systems theory, an ecosystems’ survival depends on a slow pace of change at its foundation. Tanzania, by setting aside over a third of its landmass for conservation, is perhaps making one of the grandest governance-level efforts on Earth to say no to the fast layers of commerce and infrastructure. It is a deliberate institutional attempt to build an ecological seawall to hold back the relentless tide of what the Club of Rome called the exponential material throughput. Within the park you witness the steady-state equilibrium that Meadows and her co-authors envisioned: an intricate web where the carrying capacity of the land modulates population sizes, where the lions, leopards and crocodiles and available forage impose negative feedback loops that balance the population of various species in the park (except for certain species like the rhino which has been hunted by humans to near extinction).

The friction between preservation and progress was nowhere more clearly visible than in the Maasai bomas that we visited. Here was a way of life that has been sustained for centuries, explained by the chief’s son, Olé, in fluent idiomatic English, followed with a request, as we said goodbyes, to bring him a wristwatch when we visit next. A community that has lived entirely by the slow arc of the sun and the movement of cattle was suddenly fascinated by the ability to measure existence down to the second.

On one side lies the pressure of state conservation and global eco-tourism, which often attempts to fix the Maasai in an idyllic past, preserving their beadwork, red shúkàs, and pastoral lifestyle as part of the "authentic" safari backdrop. On the other side is the inevitable pull of modernity: mobile phones and urban aspirations. You cannot freeze a living culture in amber while the rest of the planet accelerates. While it is easy for visitors to romanticize an unbroken tradition and bemoan the rise of a homogenized global monoculture, who are we to deny the Maasai the agency to choose their own future?