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14. The Ethics of Expedition Motorhome Design
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One of the main reasons why I find myself wanting to describe the TerraLiner as an “all-road” or “bad-road” vehicle, instead of an “off-road” vehicle, is ethical.
I figure that if the TerraLiner were merely the kind of large 6x6 motorhome that can handle the corrugation of gravel tracks in Australia, or the corrugation of some sections of the G219 highway in Tibet, then that should be enough. A vehicle this large should only go where highway infrastructure is good enough to support it, and this means middle-income “Second-World” countries like China, and some of the more prosperous and stable Third-World countries that have improving road networks. These will then be countries where the wealth that such a large motorhome represents is less likely to be experienced by locals as an affront and an insult. Put graphically, there would be nothing unethical about driving through China or Botswana with such a large motorhome, because one would not be driving past poor people who are starving.
Whereas to design even a medium-sized vehicle that can handle mud-tracks in the poorest parts of Africa, i.e. countries in the center like the Republic of Congo, is to invite ethical controversy. The days of colonialism are long gone, and to design vehicles motivated by Imperial nostalgia is politically and geographically anachronistic, to say the least. Central Africa is not a “dark continent” whose remotest corners are still waiting to be discovered by white men travelling in luxurious 4x4 Unimog-based motorhomes. Rather, central Africa is a desperately poor region plagued by war, disease, famine, corrupt governments and weak nation-states, whose borders do not correspond to natural, ethnic, or linguistic boundaries, because they were imposed by Europeans and did not emerge organically.
So while a 6x6 “bad-road” TerraLiner designed to traverse the emerging Asian Highway Network, as well as Second-world developing countries more generally, seems morally defensible, a more extreme sort of “off-road capable” vehicle deliberately designed to transport one to the worst parts of Africa seems awfully problematic. Yes, I am just as bitten by the bug of wanderlust and just as sympathetic to the spirit of adventure as the next guy. But the bottom-line geo-political fact is that we no longer live in a world that contains lots of “undiscovered” peoples and cultures.
Sure, it's a world that still contains wilderness, and millions of undiscovered species, most of them bacteria and insects. But the world's various ethnicities and cultures should no longer be imagined as objects of neo-Imperial or anthropological “discovery”, but rather, as peoples whose countries we visit as tourists, even if they are poor. Just like us they want to develop and modernize. They do not want to remain quaint primitives whose barefoot children or bare-breasted wives and daughters serve as exotic props for our photographs.
This is deflationary argument, to be sure, and deliberately so. For further discussion, see the thread titled
“Ethics of Third World Travel by Motorhome” at
http://www.expeditionportal.com/for...orhome?highlight=third+world+travel+motorhome , and see the article written by Barry and Margaret Williamson that inspired that thread, at
http://www.magbaztravels.com/content/view/1440/324/ .
The Williamson's article is inspiring and thought-provoking, and seems a "must read" for anyone seriously interested in the economic, political, and ethical issues raised by expedition motorhome design. Sure, one could just ignore the article, and design as if it had never been written. But on my own view that would be hubristic and short-sighted. The Williamson's article is the fruit of vast personal experience and ethical rumination, it is well-written and well-argued, and so it must be taken very seriously.
Furthermore, although most participants on ExPo seem to have technical backgrounds, or backgrounds in science and engineering, and seem to prefer technical discussions to the exclusion of aesthetic or ethical ones, modern transportation design studies is
not like this at all. This may be hard for some ExPo participants to hear, or accept. But it's a simple fact. A consideration of economic, political, and ethical questions is now absolutely central to transportation design studies, especially at the MFA level. The following is the description of the MFA program at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, universally acknowledged as the foremost institution for Transportation Design studies in the United States:
Transportation Systems and Design
Our Transportation Systems and Design students are developing compelling, sustainable and viable transportation and mobility solutions for an inspired future.
For people passionate about the automotive industry and the expansive field of transportation and personal mobility, our Master of Science program encourages creativity and strategic thinking beyond the sketchpad to impact the vehicle manufacturing industry, and to create better, compelling transportation solutions at a systems level, rather than a product level.
Because design brings value well beyond the areas of product and service development, our curriculum encompasses a combination of design methodology, strategic innovation, systems thinking, customer-driven research, political insight plus entrepreneurial and communication skills. The program's community of students—with prior degrees in subjects such as design, architecture, urban planning, business, engineering, anthropology and economics—brings diverse perspectives and stimulates the transdisciplinary culture that is essential to advance transportation design throughout the coming decades. Degree candidates participate in international conferences and conduct rigorous research; in collaborative teams they explore how to create the ideal user journey while preserving precious environmental resources. The College's strong ties to government and industry provide direct access to organizations pushing the emerging fields of new mobility and alternative energies.
This course of study encourages graduates to become agents of change prepared to reinvigorate industry across a broad landscape, from design studios and manufacturers to organizations responsible for transportation systems solutions at the national, state and local levels.
See http://www.artcenter.edu/accd/programs/graduate/transportation_design.jsp .
So even if the typical ExPo participant is uninterested in such questions, that does not mean that they are not worth asking, or that they should not be central to this thread. This thread, after all, is a "transportation design thread".
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15. The Simplistic Geopolitics of “Third World Travel by Motorhome?”, by Barry and Margaret Williamson
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With that said, after considerable reflection, the Williamson's article now strikes me as a bit outdated. In a nutshell, the Williamsons draw a very strong, dualistic contrast between travelling by motorhome in the First World (morally acceptable), versus travelling the world by motorhome almost everywhere else (morally unacceptable). This contrast seems motivated by a rather anachronistic and geopolitically naive categorization of most countries as either “First World” or “Third World”, consigning only a handful of former Soviet-communist countries to the "Second World" category:
By 'third world country' we mean the majority of the world's 200 or so countries. The 'first world' are the few developed countries to fully benefit from advanced capitalism. The 'second world' includes Russia itself, the countries in central and eastern Europe it occupied between 1945 and 1990 and its former empire in central Asia. Some third world countries are slowly developing towards a higher status, but are still unsuitable for motorhome travel (South Korea, Taiwan, China, India, Brazil).
Again, see
http://www.magbaztravels.com/content/view/1440/324/ .
My considered view is that this division is too simplistic, because it no longer makes sense to talk about a non-communist “Third World”,
simpliciter.
As already discussed at length in this thread, much of the planet is now better described as
economically “Second World”: middle-income developing countries that are no longer abjectly poor – see posts #225, #226, and #227 on page 23 of this thread, at
http://www.expeditionportal.com/for...pedition-RV-w-Rigid-Torsion-Free-Frame/page23 (standard Expo pagination). The term "Second World" began as a political term, used mainly to describe the Soviet Union and its eastern-european satellite states. But as suggested earlier in the the thread, it is best to now understand "Second World" as an economic category, instead of a political one. And when used as an economic category, huge swathes of the planet are now better classified as "Second World" as opposed to "Third World".
The various maps shown in post #226 vary widely in their interpretation of what countries should count as "First World", "Second World", and "Third World." Two maps even classify Brazil and Mexico as First World, India as Second-World, and only central African states as Third World:
These maps strikes me as far too optimistic. But on the other hand, some maps will go in the opposite direction, and like the Williamsons, they will classify all countries outside North America, Europe, and Russia as "Third World":
This map also strikes me as wrong-headed, because it so dated.
So for me, by far the best maps are those that depict the more nuanced gradations captured by the UN's HDI (human development index):
On my own view, this much more detailed and nuanced HDI map
should be used to categorize the countries of the world along the following lines:
HDI dark Green: the First World
HDI medium and light green: Second World
HDI bright yellow and dark yellow: Third World
HDI orange, bright red, and black: Fourth World
In terms of transportation design, it then seems ethically acceptable to travel by expedition motorhome in countries colored
dark green,
medium and light green,
bright yellow, and perhaps even
dark yellow, for instance, South Africa and Botswana. But it is much more ethically problematic, for the reasons given by the Williamsons, to travel by motorhome in countries colored
orange, bright red, and
black. Put another way, it is most definitely ethically problematic to travel by expedition motorhome in central African countries that are Fourth World:
Now notice how in none of these maps does contemporary China ever classify as Third World. Not even in the most pessimistic map. One of the optimistic maps even classifies China as First World! To be sure, this seems wrong; but it seems equally wrong for the Williamsons to classify China as Third World. And even more wrong for them to describe China as
"slowly developing towards a higher status".
"Slowly developing" is
not a description that most people would ever apply to the pace of economic change in China over the last 2 decades.
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CONTINUED IN NEXT POST
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, during the 60[SUP]th[/SUP] session of the ESCAP commission in Shanghai, China (ESCAP stands for the “United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific”
