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"Crushing Identity Politics"
April 2, 2005
The
first time I heard the word “globalization” was during a presentation
by Marcus
Colchester at the 2nd annual World Rainforest Movement
meeting in Globalization, as Marcus explained it, was the ability for corporations and international funding organizations like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to move large amounts of capitol out of one economy and into another. Without proper safeguards, indigenous societies would have no way of defending themselves or the large unmolested forests that sustained them from the rising demands of a growing consumer culture without respect for international boundaries or international law. Globalization had, of course, been under way for some time by 1988, but very few conservationists were talking about the widespread impacts that this economic tsunami would have on the Earth’s biological and cultural diversity. Idris does not like to waste time; the World Rainforest Movement would be a campaigning organization and an ecological pressure group. Deforestation was a global problem that demanded both a global strategy and localized tactics. WRM decided to try to link the campaigns to block logging roads in the rainforests of Seventeen years later, the predictions of Marcus Colchester have been largely realized. But so the dream of Mohammad Idris has also been realized. A little over ten years later Martin Kohr, Vandana Shiva, and many other members of the “Club of Penang” would be in We no longer talk about a U.S .Conservation Movement or even a North American Conservation Movement, but of a truly international one. Since the early 80’s we have chiseled away at the erroneous arguments that logging old-growth forests is justified by the need for cheap lumber and many of the world’s largest corporations have signed agreements to end their involvement in the trade of ancient forest timber. Many more countries have signed on to the Convention on Biological Diversity and are implementing programs to address the problem. Our biggest problem was and continues to be the Advances in shipbuilding and navigation created an earlier wave of globalization, and the opening of the George W. Bush may be able to uphold his Flat Earth position that climate change, deforestation, the destruction of marine habitats and other threats to biological diversity are not urgent, but he is starting to look increasingly isolated in the eyes of an ever more skeptical world opinion on all of these issues. He and a handful of neo-conservative Republicans cannot stand against world opinion forever. They may soon look out their window and see what a lot of other dictators have seen over the last century; a mass of angry protestors and the end of their regime. For the time being, we are stuck with globalization, and many of its ecological and social impacts will be irreparable and irreversible. But I do not believe things can stay the way they are much longer. Global pressure for change will eventually give way, and another tsunami may reorder the landscape. There is a global thirst for new ways of looking and dealing with the host of complex problems we now face. A few years before the World Rainforest Movement meeting in
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