The Lost Knowledge of "development"

I have been reading some of Wendell Berry's essays in "The Gift of Good Land." Berry inspired me to learn how to farm after I read "The Memory of Old Jack." I appreciate his critique on culture as it relates to agriculture. In one essay called "Three Ways of Farming in the Southwest" he describes the Papago culture of the Arizona desert:

"In response to their meager land, the Papago developed a culture that was one of the grand human achievements. It was intricately respectful of the means of life, surpassingly careful of all the possibilities of survival. Their ideal was 'survival, not triumph' -- so Charles Bowden writes of them in Killing the Hidden Waters. The Papago communities were at once austere and generous; giving and sharing were necessarily their first principles. The people needed each other too much to risk individualism and dissent. For, as Bowden says, 'The man who hoarded, who saved, who said he and his blood would make it on their own...such a man led his kin to extinction. In the Sonoran desert a man could get and edge, but never savor control. Power came from toil and could only  be stored in other human beings."

"The result was paradoxical: in these almost impossible circumstances, the Papago acieved what Bowden accurately cals a "society of abundance." THe poverty of our "affluent society" never existed among them. The old-time Papago lived close to the Christian morality that we profess, and far indeed from the morality that we practice. We could do worse than put ourselves to school them. "Having little," Boxedn says, "they shared all." And they lived in harmony with their place: they "lived the net yield of the desert's hydrologic budget."

"Contact with white people brought many changes, of which the most radical may have been wells drilled into the aquifers that underlay the desert. But this was a part of a government program that also included livestock production and education. Bowden notes the irony in this effort, which proposed to bring self-sufficiency to a people already marvelously self-sufficient. The opposite happened" 'Education devided the tribe between those who had seen the tractor and those who had not. Stimulation of the cattle industry resulted in the ruin of the rangelands. The wells...cut the ground from underneath the ancient mutual dependence and sharing. A half century after the commissioners' optimistic forecast, the Papago are not respected by their white neighbors and are not self-supporting. They now have a groundwater problem, an overgrazing problem, and an economic problem. The society of abundance is gone."

-Berry (1979)

For  me this loss of a culture mirrors what our culture has become today. We do not know how to support ourselves other than with money and we do not know how to use the land.