|
|
ecofeminism and globalisation
from Ariel Salleh
ECOFEMINISM AS POLITICS:
nature, Marx and the postmodern
London:
Zed Books & New York: St Martins, 1997.
Chapter 8: ‘terra nullius’ Nature's holograph is
invisible to capitalist patriarchal reason. Its Science and Economics annul
the links which they should preserve and satisfy. The ozone hole, algal
blooms, species loss, leave Eurocentric culture up against a wall of its own
making, and that is its domain construct: Mother=Nature. The ongoing
marginality of gendered relations and unconscious Man/Woman=Nature
assumptions prolong the dilemma. Life process is readily masked as product.
The mystique of the masculine birthed commodity dusts every variety of
thought, from conservative to liberal and socialist to postmodern
conjectures. But needs are not met. In the 1/0 system, an idealised
supply takes priority over material demand.(1) So called growth is driven by
a spiral of debt that sucks out the placenta behind it. The bodies of gendered,
ethnic, and species populations are colonised and
common lands turned over to a quick buck. At the same time,
international finance invested in pure speculation is some thirty times more
than what goes toward the production of goods.(2) In this ephemeral market,
the money itself comes to be treated as a package for sale. Stock is not
stock. A bond is not a bond. Originating in the murky regime of 1/0 denial,
capitalist patriarchal maximisation continually
collapses back into its own self created vacuum. This is no surprise, since
the very idea of money came into being as symbolic debt. Even before a
mercantile class was established, a libidinal foundation for this was laid in
the originary cut. - But there are other ways.
Humans joined by reciprocal trust do not have to shore up the moment of lack
with a dollar sign. In an ecological economy, a bond means an internal
relation. In the developed world,
people talk and shop, numb to the ground which nurtures them. The shame of
that erotic link is sealed off with asphalt. A postmodern intelligentsia
tilts at the lost referent, selling pastiche as style, but celebration of
'what is', deflects political anger away from the brotherhood in suits. Some
men and even feminists reach out for pornography to affirm themselves in the
broken body of nature. A World Trade Organisation
votes child labour off its agenda and democracy
whimpers in a man's right to bear arms. Under pressure of privatisation
and downsizing, bullied white workers find outlet by scapegoating
coloured Others. Community is reduced to an
electronic image, where ever more lines of exclusion substitute for social
structure.(3) In the ongoing colonisation of the Australian continent, the 1/0 has
operated as a legal fiction called 'terra nullius'. And as historian Marcia
Langton has observed those who use it 'treat our land as if our people were
not there'. Unfortunately, some ecologists re-enact the moment of racial
appropriation. Rather than respect the integral connection between Aboriginal
survival and biodiversity, much wilderness politics creates 'natural objects'
to be viewed for entertainment or protected as 'resource banks'. Some
indigenous people now want the word wilderness outlawed altogether, in favour of 'country', 'sea', or 'cultural landscapes'.(4) Langton draws a parallel
between today's push for National Parks and earlier forms of genocide. She
describes the administered reserves set up to sooth the pillow of a dying
Aboriginal race, while entrepreneurs ransacked native land for motifs, from Drysdale's paintings to composer Antill's
Corroborree. Blacks and koalas would get to be
displayed as nice evolutionary oddities on postcards and tea towels; and the
storybook Picaninny Walkabout sold over 100,000
copies. By 1992 Oz high culture interior decor was showing off with dot
painted textiles in New York galleries, while Mick Dundee took the lone white
male outback hero to Hollywood. If popular Western
notions of 'the wild' go back to the Judaeo
Christian tradition, they were reinforced by Enlightenment rationalism with
its dualism of civilised versus savage. However, as
we have seen, this dissociation and its sublimated M/W=N energies is what
compels the capitalist patriarchal project of re-making nature according to
human design. In the fractured alienative
consciousness, nature may be resourced as Man's whore or treated as sacred,
virginal when it represents His absence. By contrast, for most indigenous
peoples, wilderness or country is always alive with cultural 'presence'. In the European
imaginary, Nature, like the arms of Woman is a salve. In an aggressive and
war obsessed culture, wilderness carries the dream of gentleness and peace.
To a materialistic, corrupt and polluted society, it brings purification and
spiritual transcendence. In a callous, life aborting society, a river tells
the phases of a human life. For a sexually repressed culture, wilderness
recharges the senses, and where emotion is denied, it speaks what is unfelt.(5) Such heartfelt strivings were very apparent in the
late 80s among protesters at the Franklin River blockade in Tasmania. Yet if
the NO DAMS struggle promised to liberate nature, the social construction of
wilderness as 'out there', also revealed how reactionary its politics was.
For the idea of the marginalised wild serves to
protect the everyday capitalist patriarchal world from encroachment by the
unknown Other. Wilderness Society
stalwarts still under the shadow of van Diemens
Land and its shameful past were not yet ready to link Humanity and Nature or
to think about country as indigenous 'livelihood'. Nor were they ready to
focus on their own taken for granted levels of resource use. For conserved
wilderness is simply the other side of rampant urban industrial growth. Thus
bearded boys in knitted beanies and fatigues ran heavy fuel consumption
four-wheel-drives from inner city terrace homes to TWS strategy meetings.
Their compensatory preservationism sidelined the
global injustice of a high consumption lifestyle where forests in the South
are 'carbon sinks' for the North and where indigenous fishing grounds are
closed off at the behest of a leisure class. corporate harmonisation But there is no doubt
that regional associations also facilitate the penetration of local
communities by TNCs. In Australia, a new Municipal Conservation Association,
bristling with UNCED rhetoric and ESD principles, could readily lend itself to
that. At the World Bank and IMF, the language of 'development aid' has been superceded by 'economic cooperation', or where stronger
inducement to play ball with big brother is wanted, 'structural adjustment'
is the word. The ideology of Green
business disperses itself through Right wing think tanks, phoney
environmental front groups, and appropriate cultural activities. Thus, Hydro
Quebec, who displaced thousands of Canadian indigenes from the Hudson Bay
area, set up a university Chair of Environmental Ethics - then filled it with
a specialist in Leonardo da Vinci
! In Australia's Northern Territory, Ranger uranium funds Aboriginal
Studies at the university; a piece of PR that is highly divisive of
indigenous loyalties, given the company's links to France's environmentally
racist nuclear program in the South Pacific.(7) One enthusiastic apologist for capital has proposed to solve the environmental crisis by maximising the production of synthetics and 'thereby decoupling' the productive apparatus from nature: Perhaps the creation of an environmentally benign economic order calls for ...a truly capitalistic ethos. Capital itself must be regarded as virtually sacred - it represents nothing less than the savings necessary to construct a more prosperous and less environmentally destructive future economy. Capital is deferred gratification writ large...(8) Today, in Alice Springs, the Federal Government LandCare program and the indigenous Central Land Council co-sponsor a computerised catalogue of indigenous mineral, biological
and cultural resources. Local leaders anticipate that resource assessment
based on geographic information systems (GIS) will enhance Aboriginal
livelihood by enabling management of resources in such a way that genetic and
mineral items can be extracted while 'ecological balance' is maintained. Men
and women elders lead resource assessment researchers to special sites which
are mapped after extensive consultation and cross checking. In this process
the necessity for cars and electronic equipment to penetrate 'uncharted'
areas is taken for granted.
Paradoxically, the use of
GIS for resource assessment comes full circle back to terra nullius through
the push to assimilate indigenous knowledges to
Western technocratic discourse. While the mapping process is said to overlay
and 'marry' two information bases, 'cultural data' is supposed to remain with
local people. That claim is plainly questionable, as are other aspects of the
program from the point of view of cultural autonomy and survival. If LandCare requires open access to all GIS data gathered,
and if the same information can be 'presented' either in bush tucker or
scientific terms, there is, in fact, no way of protecting local intellectual
property. The debate over
environmental racism is beginning to focus on problems like these. But there
are many people who expect resource assessment to help 'identify' regions
suitable for politico-legal negotiation between government, corporate, and
indigenous interests. Others wonder if regional agreements, in turn, might
then be a way towards sovereignty? Few have asked
what role transnational firms might have in steering the new 'regionalism'.
Political economist Greg Crough from the Northern
Australia Research Unit has been frank about his doubts: basically a resource
assessment gets done, then native title on
inalienable freehold land is traded away for royalties. That view has been
contested by Les Carpenter, a veteran negotiator from the Inuvialuit Final
Agreement in Canada, now roving ambassador for Indigenous Regional
Corporations. The capitalisation
of indigenous struggle is now taking place very rapidly in Australia. One
advocate of regional agreements is former Northern Land Council Director
Daryl Pearce, whose advice to Aboriginal communities has been to 'get hold of
a lawyer and negotiate a deal'. Straight to the bottom line, Pearce says
'make use of contract law, it's purely about business'. But how can
indigenous people negotiate 'fair deals' with mining companies that are 40
per cent offshore owned? Should self determination hang on 'economic growth'
and the return from involvement in such enterprises? Have white small
business people ever got themselves any political muscle? Would a new class
of black small business entrepreneurs really 'get a go' in an economic system
dominated by TNCs? Aboriginal pastoralists think so, as does Phyllis Williams
who runs an indigenous tourist operation under licence
from the Northern Land Council. Regional Agreements seem
attractive against the profusion of legal remedies applicable to indigenous
freedoms in Australia. At the 1995 Ecopolitics IX
gathering in Darwin, Michael Mansell of the
Tasmania based Aboriginal Provisional Government pointed to the fact that the
Native Title Act of 1993 covers only 3 per cent of all Aboriginal people on
the continent. Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islander Social Justice
Commissioner Mick Dodson observed that regional agreements could possibly
undermine Mabo - the historic High Court Decision
on indigenous land ownership. And he warned his people not to give up Native
Title rights to get basic 'citizenship rights' like health and education:
'keep on about human rights so as to access the force of international
conventions' signed by the Federal Government. Of course, the very
concept of 'rights' is corrupted by its origins in the individualistic and
adversarial ideology of bourgeois rationalism. By contrast, indigenous ethics
are communitarian, emphasising mutual support and
exchange rather than possession. Besides, granting 'equal rights' to another'
typifies the self congratulatory delusion of the liberal political tradition.
The very act of giving rights, confirms the colonial
moment of loss and so takes away as much autonomy as it bestows. Is there a
better way towards sovereignty than trading-in cultural meanings for white
men's rights? If there is, eco-activists can move closer to it by exposing
and destabilising the underlying premises of
Eurocentric culture. One encouraging sign is the multilateral grassroots regionalism
growing between groups like the Melanesian Environment Network and Australian
Conservation Foundation. Women are very active in this particular struggle
for survival.(9) capacity building for 'partnership' The corporate lingo of 'harmonisation' and 'partnership' thinly veils a greedy and patronising ethos. As Martie Sibasado from the Kimberleys summed up the frustration of one such mediation session: Why do you have to leave at 3 o'clock to catch a plane, when I've had to walk all my life?.(10) So called 'capacity building' activities -
assessment, monitoring, management, and dispute resolution 'techniques' -
stud the discourse of the Business Roundtable and agencies like the UN and
EPA. Capacity building, also called 'enhancement', is the export of
'universal' - read white masculine - skills needed to help with 'technology
transfer'. Thus a capitalist patriarchal high tech straight jacket nullifies
other ways of life across the globe.
In this wave of
neo-colonialism, indigenous people are captured by the West, being made to
think they cannot live properly without its skills and products. But women in
the so called developed world are also colonised by
the 1/0, liberal feminism a clear manifestation of this. It is not only
politics at the periphery which is being manipulated by globalising
forces, women in the North are increasingly divided by class, age, ethnicity,
and ableness, as transnational business creates
opportunities for an articulate few. After two decades, the Second Wave of
feminism is conflicted in the same way that postcolonial struggles are. On
the one side, a self actualising politics of
affluent women chases institutional acceptance by the privileged 1. On the
other, women concerned with the reproduction of life conditions 0, struggle
for community survival. The feminism of 1 has
access to the master's technologies, instrumental reason in practice, and
idealism in theory. The cause of this urban, industrial temper is easy to
find. No longer autonomous producers, women have been reconstructed as
passive consumers and supervised workers, their subversive wisdoms tamed by a
productivist accord in which they had little say.
If feminists seek justice through a revision of the UN System of National
Accounts, they give in to the masculinist logic of
accumulation. Meanwhile, the separation of production and consumption
fragments and mystifies women's awareness of the consequential loops between labour, resources, time, and so called ecological waste. Identification with
middle class Eurocentric norms leaves liberal feminism with a number of
misbegotten political manouvres. In theory, liberal
feminism combines conceptual one dimensionality and ideological pluralism. In
practice, it combines ideological separatism with a curious anti-life but
pro-choice ethic. In a capitalist patriarchal society, the way forward for
women is thought to exist in keeping their options open as men's are.
Fertility control is thus essential to personal achievement and postmodern metropolitain amusements. Many liberal women consider
time spent on environmental problems as a cost to their own advancement as
individuals. When liberal feminists do support environmentalism, they
invariably join the establishment North in advocacy of population control for
the Third World. Yet already 40 per cent of Brazilian women are sterilised and an Indian National Family Health survey
records the average age of sterilisation in that
country at 26 years. In terms of global
justice, when 20 per cent of the world's people need 80 per cent of global
resources to get by, something is very wrong. Ecofeminist
Pat Hynes argues that the time is long overdue for taking a hard look at
global resource distribution in a transnational corporate productivist
system and Taking Population Out of the Equation altogether.(11) But at the
1994 UN International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, the
colonial causes of land degradation and poverty were again put to one side
and another 20 year 'consensus' on population control was forged by the
brotherhood in suits and their emancipated helpers in pearls. At the Beijing
Conference, however, liberal feminists were shocked by what they saw and
heard. Lynette Dumble, an expert on DepoProvera, Norplant, and RU486, exposed the misogynist
and genocidal medical paradigm that drives the debate over population
control: ...long-acting
contraceptives that at one extreme may blind women by increasing the pressure
within their brain cavities...vaccines that render women infertile by
creating auto-immune disease; mass sterilisation camps where women die on a regular basis; medical experiments with hormones
and an array of other chemicals that disrupt women's fertility or terminate
their pregnancies with little or no concern for the acute ill-effects, let
alone the chronic future morbidity.(12)
Typifying the interlock
of a profitable corporate sector and an ostensibly independent international
body such as the Population Council, Upjohn Pharmaceuticals donates US patent
rights for Depo Provera
to the Council, whose bureaucrats in return will ensure an on going market for the product.
...I have [even] seen an Internet suggestion that population expansion
could be more rapidly halted from the use of a genetically engineered
virus...(13)
The contraceptive toxin,
Depo-Provera, is surreptitiously being used on disabled, black and Hispanic
women in the US and on Aboriginal and immigrant women in Australia. Once
again, women and natives are targetted as 'vermin'
by white middle class men. Yet the simple fact is that if we all enjoyed a
vegetarian diet and roads to cycle on, a population of 6 billion would not
cost the earth. very primitive accumulation The assault on nature,
land, and animal and human bodies, has a much longer history in Africa than
in Australia and the South Pacific, and is less sophisticated than current PR
designed approaches through, partnership, capacity building, and harmonisation. But in each region, resolution of 'the
Land question' is the cutting edge of World Bank-IMF activities whereby colonising men of the North unravell
uniquely communal relations of social reproduction. The pattern is now
appearing in New Guinea and in Vanuatu, with registration of custom lands
being a first step toward privatisation and thus
negotiation with outside investors. As happened in Europe centuries before,
once land is valued, a rising urban middle class transforms itself into
gentry with an eye for a well paying operation. Dislocated families are left
with nothing but the labour, or less, the organs of
their bodies to sell for a livelihood. In Africa, Asia, and
South America, the destructive cycle of bank loans is followed by cash crop
programs to meet debt repayments. The strife which follows is attributed to
'religious wars' by the international press. George Caffentzis
describes the early stages of this capitalisation: starvation,
mass forced migrations, wars of extirpation and plagues are, of course, the
violent symptoms of the most fundamental liberation of labour power which is known as primitive accumulation...[this] involves also the
expropriation of the body, of sexual and reproductive powers, in so far as
they are a means for the accumulation of labour ...(14)
The social disruption
from World Bank enforced enclosures has been especially hard on women;
African infant mortality has risen and life expectancy declined. The advent
of AIDS has swelled the reserves of cheap labour
pushing down its price to deperate levels. In Nigeria, harsh
Structural Adjustment measures (SAPs), designed to assist national debt
repayments, cancel health and welfare, leaving women dependent on relatives.
Female genital mutilation, a cause of sterility remains a low priority. Caffentzis' judgement is that The
second success of the debt crisis is in [mastering] the African body, a
male/female body of mythic dimensions in the imagination of economic
analysts. For the economic consequences activated by the debt crisis and SAPS
have given legitimacy to their attempt to control African fertility...by 1984 A.W. Clausen (then president of the WB)...called for a
'social contract' between African governments and African parents...(15)
Silvia Federici notes that under encouragement of the World
Bank, the Nigerian Government has been prepared to tax women who procreate
beyond 'the optimal level', at the same time, it subsidises
wealthy transnational oil cartels who pollute arable land.(16)
World Bank-IMF structural adjustment policies also contributed to the crisis
in Rawanda. And despite a UN embargo, a British
company, Mil Tec Corp cashed in on the genocide, supplying Eastern European
made rifles, grenades and mortar bombs to the Rwanda government secretly via
Zaire. The deal brought home a queenly profit of $6 million.(17) Struggles for
'difference' - cultural autonomy and biodiversity - come together over the
matter of Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) on genetic
resources. In Australia, Henrietta Fourmile from
Cape York has pointed out that the continent's biodiversity consists of some
475,000 plant and animal species.(18) And further,
that the system of totem identification within Aboriginal Customary Law is
the oldest surviving system of usage rights. These Common Law rights are recognised in the Biodiversity Chapter of Agenda 21 and
in the Native Title Act, Section 212. But such provisions are little help,
given on-going bio-piracy of transnational pharmaceutical companies and
nurture of the bio-technology industry by the Australian Department of
Foreign Afairs and Trade. Without due
acknowledgement, and no doubt innocent of the laws of capital accumulation,
Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation
researchers continue to raid knowledge of biodiversity built up over
centuries of Aboriginal groundwork. Hand in hand with entrepreneurial
bio-prospectors, scientists rake through this genetic heritage, 'reserving'
what they want in seed or gene banks. Fourmile
notes that Concurvine, a plant with potential to
cure aids can draw millions in royalty dollars, but Aboriginal people will
see none of it. Although the Biodiversity Convention allows for 'farmers
rights', so far nothing has been paid out in exchange for use of genetically
cultured stock. Part of the reason for this, may be infiltration of the FAO
administration by the international business pressure group CGIAR. In any event, as Indian
people stryggle to preserve local intellectual
property, the US initiates legal action against it for violating Clause 301
of the US Trade Act (1 May, 1996). In another move, led by the Foundation for
Economic Trends, International Federation of Organic Agriculture; Third World
Network and ecofeminists, some 200 international organisations will challenge the US Patent and Trademark
Office for granting W. R. Grace a pesticidal patent
derived from the ancient Indian neem tree. Company
lawyers argue that the product is 'a synthetic compound' thus not pirated
knowledge. The case should serve to test the new intellectual property rights
legislation administered by the WTO.(19) Arguing from the
precautionary principle, activists at the Pacific Concerns Resource Centre in
Fiji want nothing less than a moratorium on genetic engineering altogether,
reserving the South Pacific as a 'patent free zone'. However, DNA from the
blood, tissue, and hair of Aboriginal and Torres Straight Island communities
has already been 'tapped' and 'banked' as part of the Human Genome Research
Project. That US research program is funded by the National Institute for
Health and the Defence Department, both having an
interest in the topic of biological warfare. In this ugly context, the
scientist's use of phrases like 'the common heritage of Man' reveals profound
ignorance. In the face of such powerful international forces, Aboriginal
people may look to the UN Convention on Human Rights and Childrens
Rights, the Draft Declaration on Rights of Indigenous People, the ILO
Convention, and International Convention on Civil and Political Rights,
Article 29. But Commissioner Dodson's conclusion is profoundly telling:
...basically
the existing legal system cannot embrace what it needs to define.(20)
Nor it seems, can the
M/W=N regime define what it needs to embrace. The Northern Territory
Conservation Commission shares few of these concerns. In the good capitalist
patriarchal tradition of instrumental reason, its bureaucrats define
biological resources as 'organisms or parts there of,
with actual or potential value for humanity'. And more: patenting as 'a way
of organising order out of chaos'.(21)
To foster R&D, the Territory government has brokered biotechnology deals
between AMRAD pharmaceuticals and the Tiwi people;
with the Northern Land Council; and with itself for an undisclosed
consideration. Meanwhile, expensive international PR firms retained by the
genetic engineering industry sell the whiz-bang benefits of this new
'science' across the media. In fact, what is going on is very half baked
science, with no attention to unanticipated consequences. models of self reliance Langton asserts that the
ecology movement is 'a barometer of colonial anxiety'. And while there is an
element of truth to this, the claim overlooks a world of difference between
how the Business Roundtable thinks and how most eco-activists think. True, there
are some complacently affluent and self serving environmentalists - in the
IUCN; the leisure oriented US Wilderness Movement; the North Queensland
minority who dub themselves Sanctuary protectors. But there are also healthy
and thoughtful Green-Black efforts. In Australia, the ACF, TWS, FOE,
Greenpeace, WHEN, Greening Australia and WWF each work with Aboriginal people
to refine Land Rights policy, Pay the Rent, get better provisions on hunting,
fishing, and parks. Seasonally, the 1/0 gaze
leaves commerce behind and turns to wilderness as unpolluted, pure and
untouched land. Today indigenes are romanticised on
colourful tourist posters, but the 19th century
adulation of the virtuous 'noble savage' was a
equally symptomatic of the spiritual emptyness of
industrial civilisation and hideously hypocritical.
In Australia, a pastoral idyll of the outback home was sustained only at cost
to Aboriginal people held at bay beyond the 'vermin fence'. Modern wilderness
'husbanding' of 'virgin lands' through National Parks further extends the
conquest, displacing indigenous skills and livelihood. TNCs at the Rio Earth
Summit pushed openly for more global 'enclosures' and even privatisation of parks. Yet white men's rhetoric of
wilderness 'management' is self contradictory, and tells the bad faith of
liberal rationalist principles designed to gloss over instrumental mastery
and ultimate exploitation. By definition 'the wild'
must be what escapes control. History has put wilderness and terra nullius
together, but that does not make this meaning of wilderness 'fixed' for all
time. When indigenous activists argue that way, they essentialise
and kill off a highly subversive conceptual tool. To totalise
the 'terra nullius' association of wilderness is to internalise
the master's racism. Not to mention playing into the hands of extractive
industries like mining or bio-prospecting, who would love to see wilderness
go by the board. The wild speaks potentials to rediscover in ourselves.
Moreover, by the ecocentric ethic, land is never vacant
as in 'terra nullius', but an intractable subject in its own right. A similar
notion is found in customary law. Movements beyond virtual
politics can make good use of the wilderness idea, by rejecting the 1/0
projection of it as out there and separate from ourselves. Moreover, working
out just how to do that, is important political work for environmentalists.
For unless we develop an analysis that heals the artificial split between
humans versus nature, civilised versus native - and
the self-denial that it thrives on - our efforts will simply be gobbled up by
the ideology of growth and control. Consider the as yet unspoken costs of
using geographic information systems to 'preserve' indigenous knowledge. Does
not the digital methodology of GIS itself instantly subvert indigenous ways
of knowing which are fine tuned by sensuous interaction with land? When an
oral knowledge tradition is extracted from its generational context, what
impact will that have on the social well being of a community where elders
are pivotal to social integration? Surely, the very translation of indigenous
knowledges into 'resource speak'
betrays indigenous cultural meanings? If GIS data gets to be
available only to those with computer access, is that democratic? Who will
glean profts from the sale of local knowledges copyrighted on CD Rom, international encyclopaedias, or transferred by media satellite? Will
GIS play into the hands of overseas corporate interests, currently attempting
to centralise the global food industry, and what
hope then for self-sufficiency? Ideally, in a democratic, non racist, non speciesist world, the research process would flow in the
opposite direction. People would want to understand how customary
classification systems are put together and to acquire - for themselves, not
for sale - hands-on skills passed by generations of elders. The knowledge
would be honoured in its entirety, not 'picked
over' by outsiders in the race for efficient management and a quick buck. In the long run, to base
'value' on human labour and markets is to buy into
the founding assumptions of capitalist patriarchal economics, where only what
is 'improved' by Man - the commodity - has worth. Oxford based academic
Darrell Posey calls the Biodiversity Convention a double edged sword, because
although it 'recognises' indigenous or farmer's
innovation of wild species, 'genetic patenting' puts that knowledge under
State or commercial control. Posey urges activists to take an ecocentric not human centered view of animals and plants;
one much closer to indigenous ways of thinking where value is relational and
intrinsic. He asks: Who owns wildlife anyway? Let's stop talking about
property and speak rather of 'traditional resource rights' which are
inalienable and cannot be commodified. Communities
in India have lead the way by making inventories and seed banks using
traditional methods.(23) Yet even well meaning radical groups like Cultural
Survival Enterprises promote indigenous forest products for trade on the
international market; a secular equivalent to the missionaries' saving of
souls which simply validates the 1/0, dissolving indigenous lore in the
process. In practical terms,
hunter gatherers would have to be the affluent societies par excellence.(24) They are self-sufficient and thus genuinely
autonomous. They have a stable interchange with their habitat; use low impact
technologies; work few hours a day; and give energies to social bonds,
ceremony and art. Ecologists taking a lesson from Aboriginal cultures might
discover how to devise low demand, low impact economies where sustainability
and social equity can go together. Closing the gap between rich and poor
nations will depend on the West scaling down its
taken for granted levels of resource use, but that alternative is yet to take
hold. The ghost of corporate speak is everywhere it seems, in discussions of
indigenous self determination and in feminism too. notes 1 Louis Arnoux, Energy Within/Without (Auckland:
New Zealand Energy Research and Development Committee, 1982) seems to
reinforce the mater/matter cut by prioritising
symbolic exchange, viz Illich
and Georgescu-Roegen are said to
'anachronistically' link back into a 'supposedly natural' order, p.312. 2 Frances Milne, Economic
Reform Australia, Green Party Workshop, University of New South Wales,
Sydney, November 1996. 3 On the failure of
community, see also Kevin McDonald, 'Morals is all you've got', Arena
Magazine, 1995, No. 20, 18-23. 4 Marcia Langton, 'Art,
wilderness and terra nullius', Ecopolitics
IX Conference papers and resolutions (Darwin: Northern Territory
University, 1995). 5 Adapted from Ariel Salleh, 'TWS: At the Interface', Australian Society,
1984, No. 7. 6 Business Council for
Sustainable Development, Changing Course, (Cambridge: MIT Press,
1992); Bob Burton 'Right wing think tanks go environmental', Chain
Reaction, 1995, No. 73/74, 26-29; Kenny Bruno, et. al.
The Greenpeace Book of Greenwash (HEIP
Campaign, Washington, 1992); Ariel Salleh, 'Earth
Summit: Some Reflections on Our Political Times', The Ecofeminist
Newsletter, 1993, Vol. 4. 7 What follows is adapted
from Ariel Salleh, 'Politics in/of the Wilderness',
Arena Magazine, 1996, No. 23. See also Christine Christopherson,
with Marcia Langton, 'Allarda! (No to the Ranger
uranium mine)', Arena Magazine, 1995, June/July; Richard Ledgar, 'Links between Ranger uranium and France's
nuclear program', Newsletter of the Environment Centre of the Northern
Territory, August 1995, PO Box 2120 Darwin, NT 08013; and most issues of Pacific
News Bulletin, PO Box 803 Glebe, NSW 2037. 8 Martin Lewis, Green
Delusions (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992), p.187. 9 Helen Rosenbaum (ed), Principles for the Environmental Management of
Australian Mining Companies Operating in Papua New Guinea (Melbourne:
ACF, 1995) and WEEP, PO Box 4830 Boroko,
NCD, Papua New Guinea. 10 Workshop
on Regional Agreements, Ecopolitics IX, Northern
Territory University, Darwin, September 1995. 11 Pat Hynes, Taking
Population Out of the Equation (Amherst: Institute on Women and
Technology, 1993); Betsy Hartmann, Reproductive Rights and Wrongs: The
Global Politics of Population Control and Reproductive Choice (New York:
Harper, 1987); Malini Karkal,
Can Family Planning Solve the Population Problem? (Bombay: Stree Uvach, 1989). 12 Lynette Dumble, 'Women and the UN: another forged consensus?', Green Left Weekly, 20 September, 1995, p.3;
'Population Control's Medical Paradigm: regulation of fertility or disruption
of lives', Newsletter: Women's Global Network for Reproductive Rights,
1995, No. 50, p. ii - iv. 13 Lynette Dumble, 'Population Control or Empowerment of Women', Green
Left Weekly, 2 November, 1994, p.15. 14 George Caffentzis, 'The Fundamental Implications of the Debt
Crisis for Social Reproduction in Africa', in M. and G. Dalla
Costa (ed), Paying the Price (London: Zed,
1995), p.19. Italics added. 15 Ibid.,
p.31. 16 Silvia Federici, 'The Debt Crisis, Africa and the New
Enclosures', in Midnight Notes Collective (ed), Midnight
Oil: Work, Energy, War (New York: Autonomedia,
1992). 17 Michael Chossudovsky,'IMF World Bank Policies and the Rwandan
Holocaust', Third World Resurgence, 1994, December; Sam Kiley, UK Firm in Rwanda arms trade', Australian,
11 November 1996. 18 Henrietta Fourmile, 'Protecting Indigenous intellectual Property
Rights in Biodiversity', Ecopolitics IX
Conference papers and resolutions (Darwin: Northern Territory University,
1995). 19 ‘Biopiracy Update',
Pacific News Bulletin, 1996, January. 20 Michael Dodson,
'Indigenous Peoples and Intellectual Property Rights', Ecopolitics
IX Conference papers and resolutions (Darwin: Northern Territory
University, 1995). 21 Bill Freeland,
Workshop on Intellectual Property Rights, Ecopolitics
IX, Northern Territory University, Darwin, September 1995. 22 Second Conference of
the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, 6-17 November 1995,
Jakarta: Bob Phelps (ed), Newsletter of the
Australian Gen-Ethics Network c/o ACF, 430 Gore Street, Fitzroy, Vic
3065. 23 Darrell Posey,
'Indigenous Peoples and traditional resource rights: A basis for equitable
relationships?', Ecopolitics
IX Conference papers and resolutions (Darwin: Northern Territory
University, 1995). 24 This argument is not
new: Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics
(New York: Aldine, 1972). |