Paradigm Wars: Indigenous Peoples' Resistance to Globalization

Description

Best-selling author and cultural critic Jerry Mander has challenged dominant cultural mind-sets in books such as Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television and In the Absence of the Sacred. In Paradigm Wars, he and coeditor Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, a leader of the global indigenous peoples movement and chair of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, have gathered an impressive international roster of contributors to document the momentous collision of worldviews that pits the forces of economic globalization against the Earth’s surviving indigenous peoples. Many of the planet’s dwindling resources are located on lands inhabited by native communities. Those resources are now the direct target of giant global corporations who desperately need them to fuel their own unsustainable growth. The World Trade Organization and other global structures of trade and finance have written the rules of trade to make life easier for these corporate resource-hunters—accelerating the loss of native lands, autonomy, and rights, and creating millions of refugees.Paradigm Wars comprehensively illuminates this shameful scenario in firsthand reports that detail its devastating impacts. The book also highlights how indigenous communities are strongly resisting the onslaught, often with amazing and inspiring success.