Newsgroups: sci.environment

Gil writes:
>and so [I]
>oppose McGowen when *local* people who know their own area by living
>in it and depending upon it absolutely for their own livelihood are
>the ones to be consulted about protecting it. That is not merely an
>aside, it is the main political game right now.

It is not my view that local dependence on the land for livelihood 
can be ignored in conservation efforts. That would obviously be both 
unjust and counterproductive. And it is quite true that in some cases
local knowledge of how to maintain local ecosystems, developed with 
millennia of experience, is superior to use patterns which are encroaching.
Amazonia is full of examples of that.  However, there are also many cases 
where local people are clearly degrading their environment either as a result
of (often colonially intruded) unsustainable land use or other population
pressures such as hunting pressure. Africa is full of examples of that; 
Southeast Asia also. Locality is absolutely not a guarantee of sustainability.

I strongly deny any principle to the effect that local people automatically
have a sovereign right to destroy any resource in their vicinity. One major
disagreement I have with Agenda-21 is the declaration in the preamble of 
the absolute sovereignty of nations over all biological resources in their
borders. [The early drafts did not have this terrible flaw, for which the 
former US administration is partly responsible, but spoke in more ecocentric
terms.] I maintain that sovereignty does not extend as far as to allow 
irreversible damage. Compared to the time scale required for the evolution
of these resources all humans everywhere are mere tenents of the land: 
they have a sovereign right to live there as they see fit -- *short* of 
burning the place down. *That* right they do not have. 

But rights or lack of rights won't put out raging fires. Economic 
restructuring -- like that needed in our own US Pacific Northwest where 
the economy depends on unsustainable forestry -- is essential. In many 
places that restructuring needs to arise primarily out of local initiative 
[whether the Pacific Northwest is one of those places isn't quite clear]. 
But, as so much of the problem is a result of the colonial past, the developed 
countries have an obligation to help out. Also, they contribute to these 
fires in their own ways -- the US by selling DDT outside its borders (DDT
is banned inside US borders), for one example, and all the support (loans) 
given by the developed world to maintaining a postcolonial economic 
dependence of the developing nations on developed-world markets, which 
contributes to unsustainable land use, for another example. These contributions
to destruction have to stop.

Another vital step needed is assistance for international family planning 
and population programs. For some 12 years US aid to these programs was
frozen by executive order, because of the possibility that this aid might
fund abortions, which outraged the religious right in this country. Two
days after his inauguration, president Clinton ended that freeze.

Electoral politics matters. 

Gil's claim about the "main political game" is largely wishful thinking,
I am afraid. The developed world has vastly more power over the future of
the world's ecosystems than do indigenous people who live in them, and
when another power dominates it is always the postcolonial national 
government, never indigeneous people. That is appallingly unjust, but 
obviously true. 

Gil's solution seems to be to rant and rail at all concentrations of power,
all political processes, and all citizens of powerful polities. That may
be emotionally satisfying to him, but it is quite ineffectual. Major changes 
must occur within the centers of power of our world -- within the United 
States, Europe, Japan etc. and in the United Nations, and these changes
must devolve into the national governments of the developing world, before
anything remotely resembling social justice and ecological sanity can be 
secured in Amazonia or Sarawak. 

Forcing those changes is our responsibility, those of us in the powerful 
states. And those of us in the US, which has behaved so egregiously in
the past, have a larger responsibility, beginning with establishing social
justice and ecological sanity here at home, and with demanding accountability
for the destructive actions outside our borders of the transnational 
corporations we helped to create. 

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

"By the faces we show each other and the world... we force the spring."
-- Bill Clinton.