Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Earthly goods: environmental change and social justice

1997; Association of College and Research Libraries; Volume: 34; Issue: 08 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5860/choice.34-4405

1943-5975

Fen Osler Hampson, Judith Reppy,

Environmental, Ecological, and Cultural Studies

The segment which interested me most revolved around an eagle chick that had just been hatched. Both parents were busy hunting and ferrying fresh kills to the chick to satisfy its insatiable appetite. A couple of days later, the second egg in the nest hatched while both parents were away, hunting for more food. As soon as the second chick broke loose from the egg, the first chick started pecking on it incessantly, ultimately killing its sibling and eating parts of it. To me, the moral of the story is that greed is fierce and competition deadly for the weak. Driven by its greed, the eagle chick was not only selfish, it went so far as to bring total destruction to its own sibling to avert any competition for the spoils of its parents5 hunt. There is an uncanny parallel between the eagle chick's predatory behav ior and the history of the West's attitude toward the environment (nature) and Developing World countries (former European colonies). Not only does the West possess a voracious appetite for resources, essentially treat ing the environment as a colony to be exploited for its material glory, but its predatory imperative also compels it to view the Developing World in the same light as the eagle chick saw its sibling: a threat to its own bottom less appetite and monopolistic control overglobal environmental resources. That is right; global. The West does not want to treat the environment as a source of national resources bounded by territorial sovereignty A na tional perspective is, by definition, too restrictive, because any nationalistic control over environmental resources would erect cosdy barriers to the unfettered access the West sorely needs to sustain the march of its capitalist globalism. So, in a typical colonial fashion, the West sees the environment