Re: FARC & ELN was: Cheap electricity?

["Nestor Miguel Gorojovsky" <gorojovsky@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

En relación a Re: FARC & ELN was: Cheap electricity?,
el 5 Feb 00, a las 13:43, Macdonald Stainsby dijo,
comentando una broma de Louis Proyect:

>
> > Now that the World Bank has taken this position, [against dams] I
suppose it is
> > incumbent upon us to pressure the FARC and ELN to include the demand
> > "MORE DAMS FOR COLOMBIA" in their program.
>
> Although I know Lou was being facetious, It is important we recognise
> that it is not up to us to "pressure" these or any other
> revolutionaries (especially those actually engaged in something
> tangible) to do anything.

Yes, I agree with this by Macdonald. But I also believe that when we
revolutionaries in the South have our reasons to think of more dams
(or of serious intervention on nature, of which dams are just an
example) we may expect that our friends elsewhere suppose us to be
serious enough to take ecological issues into account also.

If the World Bank opposses the construction of what they are now used
to call "pharaonic",  "white elephant", projects in the Third World,
it is simply because capitalism cannot spell industrial development
to the Third World any more. So that my answer to the joke is "Yes
Louis, if the FARC decide that more dams must be built in Colombia
they must have good reasons for that". Please note the "if".

What is good witht the dams issue is the visibility of the issue.
Great, concentrated, amounts of human energy are placed at a
particular site in order to produce vast, global, change. Opposition
to dams (under some conditions, I would gladly extend this even to
nuclear plants) in the Third World may mean opposition to industrial
development. Ecology must be incorporated into the design process,
but ecologism such as presented by the World Bank does not aim at
ecological sanity of large projects. It aims at furthering the growth
of the global reserve army that the Third World is increasingly
becoming.

Now I must quit, because my neighbor has gone for a visit and I need
to build a dam to divert rainwater from my daughter Leila's room to
his appartment --no matter the amount of ecological damage I will
generate!





Néstor Miguel Gorojovsky
gorojovsky@xxxxxxxxxxx