Cardinal John Henry Newman once said: ‘Progress is a slang term’. For many, it is a four-letter word. Vandana Shiva spits on the shoe of progress and development – including, not surprisingly, the Narmada dam.
‘What is currently called development is essentially maldevelopment, based on the … domination of man over nature and women. The economic “growth” that the masculinist model of progress has sold has been the growth of money and capital based on the destruction of other kinds of wealth such as the wealth produced by nature and women.’
She argues instead that ‘steadiness and stability are not stagnation, and balance with nature’s essential ecological processes is not technological backwardness but technological sophistication.’ ‘Chasing the mirage of unending growth, by spreading resource-destructive technologies, becomes a major source of genocide, the killing of people by the murder of nature is … today the biggest threat to justice and peace.’
(Jay Griffiths, Pip Pip: A Sideways Look at Time, Flamingo: London, 1999, p. 198)
amen, sister...
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