Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
some diversity in production systems. In an individual region, only one resource,
whether it be the forests in upland Indonesia or cotton in Central Asia, is the
main focus. This imposes a direct strain, but it also means that when the resource
is eventually exhausted, there are no other arms of the economy to turn to in
order to help restore the regional economy, or to pay for restoration of the
environment. Particularly in the thinly peopled peripheral regions of Latin
American countries, the decline of a single regional resource, such as copper or
tin mines in the Peruvian or Bolivian Andes, or sugar plantations in northern
Argentina, leaves the region economically fragile and may cause a segment of
the population to emigrate permanently from the region.
The response
In developed countries, there is a long history of reponses to threats to the
environment, coming from different sources. In Victorian England, William
Morris sought to re-engage industrial humankind with the environment, claiming
that a whole life could not be lived in the abstract environment of the city. He
believed that people should always be engaged in direct contact with nature and
that their work should include making physical objects: that in following pre-
industrial lifestyles, we should be craftspeople, which would immediately bring
an awareness of environmental values.
In recent times, movements such as that for Development from Below (see
Ch. 2) have taken up comparable themes, seeking a rounded, internally organized
development process, which would also be conservative of natural resources for
the locality or region because it was organized by the local people. The problem
remains that this kind of grassroots movement remains very much a theoretical,
or if existing, then an artificial and supported kind of movement. An example was
given by Smith (1992) of Indian development projects. On the one side, he noted
the Narmada Valley programme in the northern Deccan. This top-down plan
involves the building of 30 large dams and thousands of small ones, and the
irrigation of 20,000 km
2
of land. It would be paid for by the World Bank, at a
cost of $40 billion. On the other side, a tiny grassroots project near Delhi is that
of the village of Dhanawas (population 300), where sustainable development
projects, worked out in cooperation with locals, include planting trees on poor
land, producing biogas for fuel for cooking, and use of solar-power cookers, to
limit the traditional use of dung and allow it to go back on to the fields. There is
no record that the Dhanawas experiment, supported by a large industrial
company, is extending into the countryside generally. Large projects with outside
finance remain the most likely.
