When I attended the Joni Adamson,”Rethinking the Commons” lecture, she discussed many topics.  Some of them were more in depth than others and some were very confusing.  Due to this variety of topics, I have chosen to write this blog about one topic that I felt most familiar and interested by.  The topic I chose was the issue of “who has access to the global commons”.   The specific example that she gave was that the Amazon forest is considered a “global common”.  She mentioned how many people in Northern America view the Amazon rainforest as the “lungs” of the planet.  While the people in Northern America and other more industrially developed countries are rather passionate about the conservation of the rainforest, this often pits them against the native people who reside in the Amazon.

This reminded me of an essay I recently read by Ramaehandra Guha entitled “Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation:
 A Third World Critique”.   This article critiques the American practice of deep ecology.  As Adamson mentioned in her lecture, Guha agrees that Northern American practices of deep ecology can put less privileged or native peoples at a disadvantage.  Both Adamson and Guha mentioned that at times wilderness preservation in the Third world can seem too much catered to tourists while ignoring the needs or wishes of the local populations.  While Adamson briefly skimmed over this topic, I was not able to glean a solution or final conclusion to her thoughts on what should be done.  Guha asserts that instead of focusing on more trivial matters of wilderness preservation in the Third world (such as tiger preservations in India), American deep ecologists should be focused on the two most environmentally detrimental issues at hand, which he classifies as overconsumption by industrial elites in the Third world and growing militarization.

In class, we have not discussed much about environmental justice.  However, to me, it seems like an interesting topic.  Which do you consider more important, the conservation of wilderness as free of humans, or the consideration of local or native peoples?  To what extent should these peoples’ welfare and rights be taken into account when dealing with environmental issues?  While many of the authors we have read in class seem to have an appreciation for wilderness as undisturbed by man (ex: Emerson, Thoreau), they don’t seem to take much into account the fact that people once did live in the places they see as wilderness.  They (Native Americans) were simply removed before the authors lived there.  Thoreau does seem to acknowledge that the Native Americans did once live there, however it seems a minute portion of his thoughts. This leads to the question: to what lengths should we go to in order to achieve preservation, and who should decide which land is or is not preserved?