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As a third world person now living in the first, I would like to offer this excerpt from Vandana Shiva's essay "The Impoverishment of the Environment: Women and Children Last." The complete essay is being reprinted in _The Environmental Materialist Reader_ (to be published next year). Lahoucine Ouzgane -------------------------------------------------------------------------- [Taken from Vandana Shiva and Maria Mies, _Ecofeminism_ (London: Zed Books, 1993)]. Dispensability of the last child: the dominant paradigm From the viewpoint of governments, intergovernmental agencies, and power elites, the 'last child' needs no lifeboat. This view has been explicitly developed by Garrett Hardin in his 'life-boat ethics'1: the poor, the weak are a 'surplus' population, putting an unnecessary burden on the planet's resources. This view and the responses and strategies that emerge from it totally ignore the fact that the greatest pressure on the earth's resources is not from large numbers of poor people but from a small number of the world's ever-consuming elite. Ignoring these resource pressures of consumption and destructive technologies, 'conservation' plans increasingly push the last child further to the margins of existence. Official strategies, reflecting elite interests, strongly imply that the world would be better off if it could shed its 'non-productive' poor through the life-boat strategy. Environmentalism is increasingly used in the rhetoric of manager-technocrats, who see the ecological crises as an opportunity for new investments and profits. The World Bank's Tropical Action Plan, the Climate Convention, the Montreal Protocol are often viewed as new means of dispossessing the poor to 'save' the forests and atmosphere and biological commons for exploitation by the rich and powerful. The victims are transformed into villains in these ecological plans--and women, who have struggled most to protect their children in the face of ecological threats, become the elements who have to be policed to protect the planet.2 'Population explosions' have always emerged as images created by modern patriarchy in periods of increasing social and economic polarizations. Malthus3 saw populations exploding at the dawn of the industrial era; between World War I and II certain groups were seen as a threatening deterioration of the human genetic stock; post World War II, countries where unrest threatened US access to resources and markets, became known as the 'population powderkegs'. Today, concern for the survival of the planet has made pollution control appear acceptable and even imperative, in the face of the popularized pictures of the world's hungry hordes. What this focus on numbers hides is people's unequal access to resources and the unequal environmental burden they put on the earth. In global terms, the impact of a drastic decrease of population in the poorest areas of Asia, Africa and Latin America would be immeasurably smaller than a decrease of only five percent in the ten richest countries at present consumption levels.4 1. Hardin, Garrett, _Bioscience_ Vol. 24 (1974) p. 561. 2. Shiva, Vandana, 'Forestry Crisis and Forestry Myths: A Critical Review of Tropical Forests: A Call for Action,' World Rainforest Movement, Penang, 1987. 3. Malthus, in Barbara Duden, 'Population', in Wolfgang Sachs (ed) _Development Dictionary_. Zed Books, London, 1990. 4. UNICEF, op. cit., 1990. --------------------------------------------------------------------