Environment and Development in Latin America: The Politics of Sustainability (Issues in Environmental Politics) - Tapa dura

Latin America, even before its official "discovery", was looked upon by Europeans as the gateway to the Indies; it came to represent an apparently inexhaustible supply of everything that Europeans needed. Locked up within its jungles and mountain ranges was a store of natural resources that could be translated into wealth. It required ingenuity, and the hard labour of (largely) unwilling hands, to convert these treasures into tangible material benefits. The image of Latin America in European art, as Baddeley and Fraser (1989) demonstrate, is bound up with the "otherness" of the continent. This distance, usually portrayed as the distance between primitive and civilized values, justified the Spaniards and the Portuguese in their conquest of the Americas, and enabled them to put a seal on their conquest by destroying those whose lives were lived closest to Nature, the indigenous population of the continent. The development of Latin America was seldom "sustainable" and much of what was sustainable was destroyed, or degraded during the Colonial period. If the question is asked, "What is unsustainable about development in Latin America today?" , it becomes clear that the lessons of history have not been learned, for Latin America's development in the 1990s makes few concessions to future generations, to intergenerational equity and at the same time traps millions of poor people within a cycle of deprivation and missed opportunities. This raises a further question, namely, "Why has sustainability received so little attention in Latin America?". Between them, these question elicit a set of responses, which get to the heart of Latin America's ambivalent relationship with the developed world, and which form the central concern of this book.