> From: "Rosser Jr, John Barkley" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Barkley,
Who's to say that traditional societies were more
'ecologically conscious' only because they did not
have available to them more advanced technologies
which would have provided greater benefits from
exploiting natural resources more intensively, either
in an autarchical sense or in the sense of military
technology facilitating the formation of 'empires'
(including subjugation of neighboring ethnic groups)
that came to be associated with (cause?) similar
exploitation? Or that improvement in living standards
leading to population growth would not have generated
similar pressures to 'cash out' natural capital?
That is not to say that such societies did not possess
discoveries which have since been lost, nor of course
to justify their casual, brutal extermination by capitalist
forces, but to say I think we're on a heavy romantic
trip here.
Cheers,
MBS
> In my latest post I referred to a paper by myself as
> being in the May 1975 issue of _Land Economics_. That was
> the May 1995 issue. Among other things I noted the large
> literature showing that many traditional societies handled
> problems of managing common property resources very well in
> contrast to the standard right-wing arguments about the
> "tragedy of the commons". This point has actually been
> known since the 1975 article in _Natural Resources Journal_
> by Richard Bishop and S.V. Ciriacy-Wantrup. There is now a
> burgeoning literature on this by people like Daniel
> Bromley and others, many of them noting that colonialism
> and European capitalism broke down these arrangements. In
> many cases nationalization by post-colonial regimes did not
> improve matters and only led to continued overexploitation
> with control in the hands of corrupt urban elites.
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Max B. Sawicky Economic Policy Institute
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