ECOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE
18
The fantasy of romantic protection blends perceptions of social reality
with desire and fantasy. The romantic can remain disdainful and ignorant of
systems of social oppression while pursuing the desire to protect Mother
nature’. However, removing the veil of romantic protection from population
debates reveals population imbalances to be the result of a continuing legacy
of patriarchy,
colonialism,
racism,
and
capitalism.
For
centuries,
while
suppressing indigenous cultural practices that regulate fertility, social and
political forces have created economic and cultural demands for increased
fertility. Throughout history, small scale cultures have been able to control
population through a range of medicinal, technical, and sexual practices
ranging from post-natal sexual taboos to herbal abortificants.^ However, as
capitalist wage economies emerged throughout Europe and the now Third
World, factors of poverty, high infant mortality, and religious reproductive
control unsettled cultural practices hat balance reproduction. Indeed, factors
including lack of reproductive health care, colonially induced religious taboos
against contraception, high infant mortality, poverty, and families, needs for
child labor within cash economies create a context in which women bear more
children than hey historically would have otherwise.
Moreover,
population
fetishists
rarely
highlight
he
fact
hat
‘overpopulation’ in he Third World contributes little to he overall depletion of
he earth’s resources. While one middle-class person in he U.S. consumes
three-hundred times he food and energy mass of one Third World person,
First World corporations and he U.S. military are he biggest resource
consumers and polluters. In 1992, with less han 5 percent of he world’s
population, he U.S, consumes 25 percent of he world’s commercial energy.7
As Bookchin stated as early as 1969, here is something disturbing about he
fact that population growth is given he primacy in he ecological crisis by a
nation which has a fraction of he world’s population and wastefully destroys
more than fifty percent of he world’s resources.8 Consistently, hose who
consume he most are held he least accountable while he poorest are blamed
for he world’s problems. Meanwhile he real corporate and state perpetrators
of ecocide remain hidden under a shroud of innocence. Statistical numbers
games that calculate national resource consumption to include a woman on
welfare as well as hat of General Motors, or people of color as well as whites,
create an illusion of a genetically human’ consumer. Such games serve to
focus on numbers and demographics rather han social relationships and
institutions such as capitalism.
Deep ecologists such as Bill Devall and George Sessions have also often
failed to address he social conditions of poor women. While heir writings
express a desire to protect ‘nature’, heir romantic approach to ecological