http://www.spinifexpress.com.au/non-fict/wp.htm

One of the many gifts of Susan Hawthorne's Wild Politics is the unrelenting analysis and illustration of ways neocolonialism is promoted under the banner of Western liberalism and economic globalisation. Bringing together research and auguments from hundreds of sources and taking up the work of feminists, ecologists, and indigenous peoples, she challenges globalization and argues for biodiverse sustainability. – Sarah Lucia Hoagland, The Women's Review of Books.

"This is the book I wish I had written myself." - Our Paper

"Susan Hawthorne’s book is a major contribution, on several levels, to the definition of what we are fighting for" – The Paper

"Wild Politics is a great metaphor, signalling the need for change from western culture's false colonist universalism to life-oriented systems of connection, richness, texture, depth and meaning. Susan Hawthorne has written an inspiring book, drawing on feminist and indigenous knowledge to critique global capitalist practice and create a vision of a regenerative world sustaining the environment and all its people"– Prue Hyman

"A work of breathtaking erudition" – Diane Bell

"an impressive and far sighted book which is thoroughly, and very thoughtfully, researched. Susan Hawthorne writes with clarity, intelligence and humour" - Chain Reaction No 88

"Susan Hawthorne's Wild Politics – is passionate in conception and broad in scope. It is multi-layered and richly esoteric, in the best sense of this word. It bristles with ideas and possible strategies. Its sweeping and damning judgements and insistent focus on the closely related crises that are buikding in environmental and human afairs make it compulsive reading" - Allan Patience, Australian Book Review

‘In this incredibly compelling analysis of what is wrong with our world system today, she Color lays the foundations of how we could turn it around into a viable one, one in which life sharing, giving and exchange would replace violence, oppression and ultimately the destruction of the planet.’ - Evelyne Accad, Canadian Women’s Studies Journal

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION: A FEMINIST CRITIQUE OF WESTERN GLOBAL CULTURE 17
CULTURAL LOGIC 23
DECOLONISING SCHOLARSHIP 26
BIODIVERSITY AND SEEDS 28
THE SEED OF CULTURE 31
WEAVING THE STRANDS 33
DEFINING THE WILD 35
CHAPTER ONE: THE PRINCIPLE OF DIVERSITY 43
BEGINNINGS 44
THESIS, ANTITHESIS, SYNTHESIS 46
FEMINISM 47
CHANGE 51
CREATING FEMINIST KNOWLEDGE 52
WHO IS THE KNOWER? 58
STANDPOINT THEORY 64
ANALYSIS 65
SYNTHESIS 68
DISSOCIATION 70
ASSOCIATIVE THINKING 73
CHAPTER TWO: POWER AND KNOWLEDGE: GLOBAL MONOTONY OR LOCAL DIVERSITY? 77
POWER 77
THE POWER OF VIOLENCE 82
THE POWER OF REWARD 87
THE POWER OF BACKLASH 90
THE POWER OF OBSTACLES 92
THE POWER OF SYSTEMS 93
THE POWER OF ATTRACTION 96
THE POWER OF ATTITUDES 99
KNOWLEDGE 101
ASSIMILATION AND APPROPRIATION 103
A CLASH OF KNOWLEDGE SYSTEMS 107
NOT SEEING 111
THE PERCEPTUAL GAP 112
HOW KNOWLEDGE IS VALUED 114
CULTURAL HOMOGENEITY 116
IN DEFENCE OF DIVERSITY 119
CHAPTER THREE: ONE GLOBAL ECONOMY OR DIVERSE DECOLONISED ECONOMIES? 123
THE LOGIC OF NEOCLASSICAL ECONOMICS 123
HOW WOMEN ARE (AC)COUNTED 135
ECONOMIC HOMOGENEITY AND GLOBALISATION 140
DECOLONISING ECONOMICS 149
FEMINIST ECONOMICS 152
ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS 161
TOWARD A WILD ECONOMICS 167
CHAPTER FOUR: LAND AS RELATIONSHIP AND LAND AS POSSESSION 174
LAND AS RESOURCE OR RELATIONSHIP? 174
WILDERNESS 174
LAND 182
DEALING WITH WASTE 187
“FREEING” THE LAND, ENCLOSING THE COMMONS 188
FEMINIST CONCEPTIONS OF LAND 191
INDIGENOUS CONCEPTIONS OF LAND 194
LAND AS POSSESSION 198
TOURISM: LAND AND WILDERNESS AS COMMODITY 202
URBAN LAND 206
URBAN LAND AS WILD SPACE 209
STEPS TO DEVELOPING A WILD POLITICS OF LAND 212
CHAPTER FIVE: FARMING, FISHING AND FORESTRY: FROM SUBSISTENCE TO TERMINATOR TECHNOLOGY 216
FARMING IN KENYA AND NIGERIA 217
FORESTRY IN LITHUANIA, THE USA, BANGLADESH AND SRI LANKA 227
FISHING IN THE PACIFIC 239
DIGITISED AND GLOBALISED FARMING: WHAT THE FUTURE HOLDS 243
THE KYOTO PROTOCOL, PLANTATION FORESTS AND TERMINATOR TREES 257
FISHING WILD FISH TO FEED DOMESTICATED FISH 262
THE COMMODIFICATION OF “EVERYTHING” 267
WOMEN AS KEEPERS OF ECOSYSTEMS 268
CHAPTER SIX: PRODUCTION, CONSUMPTION AND WORK: GLOBAL AND LOCAL 270
PRODUCTION AND DISPARITY 270
CONSUMPTION AND DISPARITY 274
WORK AND DISPARITY 276
GLOBAL PRODUCTION 280
GLOBAL CONSUMPTION 289
GLOBAL WORK 299
LOCAL PRODUCTION 305
LOCAL CONSUMPTION 307
LOCAL WORK 309
MILITARY AS GROSS PRODUCER AND CONSUMER 316
CONCLUSION 317
CHAPTER SEVEN: MONOCULTURES AND MULTILATERAL TRADE RULES 321
PATENTS 321
MULTILATERAL TRADE AGREEMENTS AND THE SHAPE OF INTERNATIONAL LAW 330
MULTILATERAL TRADE NEGOTIATIONS AND THE CONVENTION ON BIOLOGICAL DIVERSITY 332
THE WORLD TRADE ORGANISATION (WTO) 338
TRADE RELATED INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS (TRIPS) 341
FOOD SECURITY 349
THE MULTILATERAL AGREEMENT ON INVESTMENT (MAI) 353
TRADITIONAL RESOURCE RIGHTS (TRRS) AND COMMUNITY INTELLECTUAL RIGHTS (CIRS) 358
HUMAN GENOME PROJECT (HGP) AND HUMAN GENOME DIVERSITY PROJECT (HGDP) 360
CONCLUSION 368
CHAPTER EIGHT: WILD POLITICS 370
WILD POLITICS: A VISION FOR THE NEXT 40,000 YEARS 376
ABBREVIATIONS 391
BIBLIOGRAPHY 394

Some other books:

There is An Alternative:  http://www.spinifexpress.com.au/non-fict/tia.htm

September 11, 2001: Feminist PerspectivesSeptember 11, 2001: Feminist Perspectives with Bronwyn Winter:  http://www.spinifexpress.com.au/non-fict/s11.htm

Radically Speaking: Feminism Reclaimed: Diane Bell/ Renate Klein (eds):  http://www.spinifexpress.com.au/non-fict/rs.htm


(...) "In writing my book I was really inspired by numbers of different women who were writing things that challenged my perception, ideas that made me think differently. What I started with was the idea of the ‘wild type.’ And I thought of that both as a concept in genetics, but also as a social concept. So that feminists are ‘wild types’ – we’re the irritants, we’re the political and social reminders that things need to be different. Artists also play that role as do other people on the margins, outside the dominant culture.
So what I came to, in terms of thinking about the world, is that we need something so different -- we need to really turn it over -- and in doing so we need to move from a society motivated by profit, to a society that is inspired by biodiversity.

Because if we are inspired by biodiversity, that is where our conceptualisation begins. For a start it deals with a whole lot of problems immediately. It gets rid of biotechnology which is inconsistent with biodiversity; it gets rid of war which destroys not only human environments but nature is also poisoned. It gets rid of the idea that you can just produce things because they make money or because they are popular with an American consumer or that they are a passing and fashionable thing. So in that sense it seemed to undermine the capitalist project. The other connection is the way in which women’s work is structured quite differently from most men’s work.

That is, ‘most women and most men’ in most of the world have work that is structured differently because of their sex. Women in the Pacific fish, but their fishing is not counted because it is mostly for domestic use. Men who fish use petrol in motor boats and sell their catch at the end of the day. The occupation is the same, but men fish while women don’t. The same is true of farmers in much of the world. Women farm in ways that maximise biodiversity and sustenance, while men’s farming tends to focus on cash crops and export.

Most of us are concerned in some way or another with the whole sense of continued being, sustenance – whether that is in an emotional and caring sense, or ‘feeding the family’ or maintaining the local environment, whether that’s a household, or fields or forests or whatever. And so there are a whole lot of other elements in there that bring women together at different stages of our lives.

Another thing I found important was the notion of ownership, and what we have in the global world at the moment is increasingly privatization and increasing cutting up into smaller and smaller parts of ownership, (such as patents) but also massive ownership. So that in the smaller bit it is ownership of parts of the body, molecular colonisation, and this is also reflected in ownership of active ingredients in plants. In the massive ownership, it is big corporations that are buying up huge areas of land and products and so on and so forth.

And in terms of challenging that, I know that amongst many indigenous people, the idea of ownership – it just is not an idea! It is , rather, that there are places that people come from and people live in, and they are in relationship to that place and they are responsible for that place. And any – I don’t like the term – but any ‘rights’ they have over that land, they have only because they have responsibilities also. This is the practise of Indigenous peoples in Australia, and is maintained as an ongoing system in Indigenous communities. So that for me is a big challenge to the whole sense that one can own anything really. It is more like a tenancy on land. Occupation involves responsibility. Of course you can’t institute that sort of thing overnight, you have to change peoples’ heads.

Finally I wrote about patents and international trade rules. I never thought I would be excited by international trade rules, but I’ve become really obsessive. What has been happening in Australia in the last nearly 12 months is a proposal to have an Australia - US Free Trade Agreement, which is really bad news. It would effectively turn Australia into another state of America. We already have Canada and Mexico within NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), and by 2005 all of South America will join in as well through the FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas). The result will be the dismantling of social services such as health, education and welfare programs. It also threatens Australia’s biodiversity as quarantine rules are considered by the US government as a “barrier to free trade”. This in a country where rabbits, cane toads, European bees and non-native plants such as lantana have already wrecked havoc with the environment. It will make it easier to introduce GM crops, increase monoculture farming with the result of increased soil salinity. But the biotechnology companies see salinity simply as a new business opportunity, one that allows them to develop salt resistant plants to fill the gap created by their failure."(...)

 http://www.womenandlife.org/WLOE-en/information/globalization/16oktberlin.html