From: gil@Gilsys.DIALix.oz.au (Gil Hardwick)
Newsgroups: sci.environment
Subject: The Criterion for Ecocentrism
Distribution: world
Date: Tue, 17 Nov 92 06:22:33 GMT
Organization: STAFF STRATEGIES - Anthropologists & Training Agents


In article <BxsKAM.6s8@quake.sylmar.ca.us> brian@quake.sylmar.ca.us writes:

 > You are quite wrong though to think that collectivism (or even communism for
 > that matter) is the opposite of democracy.  It is (at least temporarily)
 > possible to have a collectivisticic society in which "the voice of the people"
 > comes from a democratic vote rather than a dictator.  I don't see that 
 > such a situation is any better than a dictatorship.  In fact, the case could
 > be made that such a democracy is actually WORSE than a dictatorship since
 > a dictator could at least have a long-term plan to which he might subscribe.
 > An absolute democracy would not even have that.  It would eventually result in 
 > a mindless looting of all by all.

Sorry, I have thought no such thing, ever. All you are doing here is
playing word games, from my point of view apparently from a poverty of
vocabulary incapable of avoiding the unbelievable confusion you have
become bogged down in.

Your bizarre extrapolations arise purely from your own hypothetical
scenario, which has no bearing on, or relationship to anything I have
ever said or written anywhere at any time in my life.

 > Upon what legal principle do you find this to be justified?  It is true

Do I find what justified? What are you talking about here at all? If
you are referring to mindless looting you might simply look at the
outcome of your model US democratic principles in your own city of
Los Angeles. I suggest your concerns in fact arise from your proximity
to that real looting and violence, and I can assure you that such a
situation has never arisen here in our country, thank you very much.

You are the ones with such problems, not us, and you might look more
closely at your own laws rather than direct your alarm at whatever you
imagine me to be discussing.

 > that over the last 75 years or so the absolute ownership of property (of
 > all kinds) has been eroding, but that is NOT how the underlying law of
 > the land was originally written.

In Australia, I repeat, there is no absolute ownership of land as a
component of personal property since all of it is vested in the crown,
although of course anything else I work to earn legitimately I own as
my own personal property. There is nothing whatever communistic or
collectivistic about it, by any stretch of the imagination. Our legal
practice of vesting land in the crown, and thereby making land ownership
contingent upon negotiated priorities protecting *both* private *and*
public interest; it is a purely pragmatic legal position on land use.

Before going too far along that line of argument, we do have problems
here with indigenous land claims arising from the legal fiction of
Terra Nullius originally imposed by George III, the English monarch
who asserted crown prerogative on this particular land, but it does
have its benefits in that indigenous people have avenues open to them
through the courts where their quite reasonable claims may be heard,
where in Guatemala, for example, the Mayan people are just being shot
by the military as "radical insurgents" with the survivors rounded up
into "re-education" camps.

Small mercy I know, but therein lies the virtue of the Australian land
laws.

What "underlying law of the land was originally written"? Originally
land just about everywhere was simply colonised; if not actually empty
of other people then it was *won* from them by force of arms, if you
would like to read your own history as well as ours. You might also
like to watch the goings on in old Yugoslavia right now, where they
are murdering villages full of people and kicking any survivors off
their land so that other people can have it instead; the process not
quite conveniently being referred to as "ethnic cleansing".

 > If you used the word "collectivisticic" instead, his comments would be right on.
 > Of course, Australia isn't as collectivisticic as China or Cuba, but it's more
 > collectivisticic than many others.

I did not use the word "collectivistic", anywhere, ever. You people
are the ones throwing in all these silly words, for whatever purpose
you might have in mind as you apparently struggle to come to grips with
the situation of your own making you have over there. I would prefer
you did actually read what I have been posting to this thread before
commenting much further on my own position with respect to my country.

China, BTW, is neither collectivistic in any sense of the word, but is
an ancient Confucian civilisation arising from the even more ancient
Taoist tradition as it is modified through its historic dialectic with
Buddhism. The Marxist/Leninist/Mao Zedong Thought which is currently
floating around on the surface of the Chinese pond has influenced its
economic policy only since 1949, and is itself profoundly modified by
the present Open Door policy, although even then the path is long over
many mountains between Guangzhou and Beijing.

I am not sufficiently familiar with Cuba to comment beyond pointing
out the long history of US intervention in that country's affairs.
There is no point comparing Australia with the place, as if we have
ever had any influence at all in the region at any time in history.

We are tucked right away down under here, south of Indonesia and
Papua-New Guinea, yes?

--
Gil Hardwick                                      gil@Gilsys.DIALix.oz.au
Independent Consulting Ethnologist                            3:690/660.6
PERTH, Western Australia                                 (+61 9) 399 2401
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