Indeed the prosperity that was achieved by the European bourgeois during the period of colonialism was solely based on exploitation and domination both of nature and the indigenous people. This is not to say that the Aztecs did not exploit and dominate, but at least they were looking towards a universal order which needed to be preserved, while modern capitalists look toward their marginal but idealized order to perpetuate there economic prosperity. For Shiva, there are a couple of essential assumptions driving this western patriarchal practice. These consist simply in the view of the natural world as unproductive. Subsistence living is unproductive, women s role in life reproduction is unproductive, indeed the only way anything can be productive is through man s technological and laborious interference.
Production equates to surplus and profit, ideas that have no grounding in sustainability.
Indeed, profit and progress exist only through the practice of taking much more than is ecologically viable from the earth.