Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique

This chapter presents a Third World critique of the trend in American environmentalism known as deep ecology, analyzing each of deep ecology’s central tenets. These are the distinction between anthropocentrism and biocentrism, the focus on wilderness preservation, the invocation of Eastern traditions, and the belief that it represents the most radical trend within environmentalism. The chapter argues that the anthropocentrism/biocentrism distinction is of little use in understanding the dynamics of environmental degredation, that the implementation of the wilderness agenda is causing serious deprivation in the Third World. It outlines the environmental movement in India, a country with an ecological diversity comparable to the US, but with a radically dissimilar cultural and social history. The chapter concludes that despite its claims to universality, deep ecology is firmly rooted in American environmental and cultural history and is inappropriate when applied to the Third World.