Environmental justice and harm to humans - Environmental Harm: An Eco-justice Perspective - page 62

content (toward biofuels), but so-called 'unproductive' or forested lands
are being transformed into profit-making ventures. These are not only
agricultural in nature. Big disputes are occurring in the Amazon over
the impact of mining and pastoral industries in regards to deforestation
(Boekhout van Solinge, 2010a, b). Meanwhile in developed countries
there is much consternation over the environmental impact of 'fracking',
a technique that involves the use of toxic chemicals to extract coal
seam gas (Cleary, 2012). The main protagonists are, on the one side,
companies, and on the other farmers and environmentalists. Profit and
power are the key determinants in these debates, as is the extent of
community mobilisation and politicisation of the issues.
There are different cultural understandings and meanings attached
to 'land' and 'country' that reflect traditional, cultural and livelihood
interests. However, where the dominant social construction of 'property'
is a relationship of exclusive use based upon documented ownership,
then any sense of a 'commons' and community interests is diminished
(see Chapter Five). Moreover, in the context of rhetoric supporting
the 'national interest', there is also impetus for commercial production
to take place on what is formally considered 'public lands', including
in some cases what has ordinarily been treated as 'traditional' shared
lands. Indeed this is the biggest target for worldwide land grabs and
includes, for example, the majority of land in Africa, Indonesia and
the Philippines. The land grabs described above are for all intents and
purposes not simply about governance, but about the very basis of land
sovereignty - the effective control over the nature, pace, extent and
direction of surplus production, distribution and disposition (Borras and
Franco, 2010). It is about ownership and control over land resources.
Land grabbing is occurring at the hands of many different agents, and
for different purposes worldwide. Not all of the changes to land use are
'bad'; in exceptional circumstances, for example, industrial production
has been transformed back into small-scale production designed for
local consumption and sustainable living (Borras and Franco, 2010).
It is also important to acknowledge the complexities of changes in
land use by closely considering how land is being reconfigured, by
whom and for what purposes. Transnational corporations and 'foreign'
governments are not the only or even necessarily always the central
players in the land use shuffle. National bourgeoisie and state elites are
frequently willing partners in the plunder, and may well encourage
foreign investment and take-overs as a key platform of economic
development. The 'national interest' is linked with the idea of 'bio-
security' in ways that ideologically and materially tend to prop up the
most powerful sectors of state and private enterprise.