From: Alan McGowen <beaver.cs.washington.edu!gnosys!hpindbu.cup.hp.com!alanm>
Subject: Re: Ecosystem Protection and Aboriginal Rights
Date: Thu, 30 Jul 1992 22:29:36 GMT

Original-Sender: Alan McGowen <hpindbu.cup.hp.com!alanm>

Peshewegunzh writes:

>Alan McGowen <hpindbu.cup.hp.com!alanm> opined:
>
>> Elsewhere in the world protection of indigenous people's rights is
>> increasingly recognized as a key element of ecosystem protection.
>
>I think this is rather used as a proxy for the real itinerary
>of factions within non-indigenous populations, just as the
>spotted owl example given. And as far as these non-indigenous
>factions are concerned, their mentality is often as alien to the
>consciousness of those indigenous societies they are hanging their
>ideological hats on as it is to the consciousness of a real red squirrel.
>It's often facile to claim to speak for those who can't when they are
>dumb animals, but downright disingenuous to put words in the mouths
>of those who can, but won't be allowed to, and thus are treated just as if
>they were only exotic beasts.
>
>I don't see anything to suggest that other than power politics exists
>beneath such a facade. By the above, indigenous rights are important not
>for any intrinsic concept of human rights, but only because or where they
>support European concepts of "ecosystem protection." That means should they
>be seen to conflict with ideology, they will be sacrificed to that ideology.
>And thus far, sure enough, when that conflict has arisen, Europeans have not
>been able to restrain themselves from making those decisions as against
>indigenous choice.
>
>Human rights are not of equal status to animal rights, nor should
>they be sacrificed to them. European ideologies of recent vintage have been
>all too willing to do away with human rights in the name of varying
>naturalistic imperative ideologies - the cruelties of Darwinian Marxist and
>capitalistic materialist societies come to mind, as well as the pantheist
>pagan self-destruction of Nazism. Current ecological movements, borrowing
>heavily from the same European intellectual genealogy, make most of the same
>unwarranted assumptions about the nature of reality. Such misunderstandings
>can cause human tragedies exceeding those of their parents, without improving,
>ironically, the level of care and stewardship of this global garden.
>
>Trying to make human rights inferior to "ecosystem protection" with all the
>attendant facets of coercive totalitarianism that must be attached to such
>attempts will have the same disastrous results that trying to make any
>supposed future "good end" justify present doubtful means has always had.
>
>As Indians we have had a great deal of experience at the hands of those who
>insisted they were advanced and enlightened. I see no reason why we should
>believe that this time, the children have achieved the infallible status
>denied to their parents.

The notion that "human rights" place humans above nature is itself a
European concept. Ecosystem protection and the protection of indigenous
rights clearly go hand-in-hand where the ecosystem is the source of daily
sustenance, as with many rain forest people. The idea that one or the other
must be superior is based on a European dichotomy between "man" and "nature".

I am sorry that Peshewegunzh has accepted some right-wing propaganda about
the supposed genealogy of ecosystem protection in Nazism. Those whose financial
interests lie in the extractive exploitation of resources without regard to
impacts on human or nonhuman inhabitants of an ecosystem would love to
marginalize all environmentalists as closet Nazis.

But let me ask you this. Nazism was reprehensible because it was founded
on a doctrine of a Master Race, no? Which position is closer to a Master Race
doctrine, a position that says that one species (guess which) has rights
which set it above all other species -- who may exist only at its economic
pleasure -- or a position which says that other species have as much right
to be here as we do, independent of their value to us? On the one hand we
have the "hard-headed utilitarian" doctrine which holds H. Sapiens to be
the Master Race, and on the other hand the more egalitarian view advocated
by ecocentrics. What are we to make, then, of the charge that the latter
position is the Nazi one?

How do such inversions of the truth as the "Nazi genealogy" of
environmentalism come to be repeated over and over again, even by smart
people? Not by accident, you can be sure. The Big Lie was too good a
trick to die with Stalin. Its master practitioners now operate out of
"think tanks" with names like the "American Enterprise Institute". The
last things they care about are the rights of either indigenous people
or of other species, in any order. Their sole interest in rights is in
protecting the right-now of resource exploiters, as in "Maximum Profits
Right Now".

------------
Alan McGowen


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