Wild Politics Feminism, Globalisation and Biodiversity

Looking for a new way forward, or a different explanation of what is currently happening? Susan Hawthorne challenges the universal endorsement of global western culture with her concept of biodiversity, arguing that biodiversity is a useful metaphor for understanding social, political, and economic relations in the globalised world of the twenty-first century. She provides a visionary outlook and proposes ways forward that emphasise social justice, multiversity, and an ecologically-grounded feminist philosophy.

Susan Hawthorne is the author/editor of 29 books of non-fiction, fiction, and poetry. Her most recent non-fiction is Vortex: The Crisis of Patriarchy. She is known internationally for her radical feminist books. She is Adjunct Professor in the School of Humanities at James Cook University, Townsville.

Contents Acknowledgements Permissions Preface to the 2022 edition INTRODUCTION A Feminist Critique of Western Global Culture Cultural Logic Decolonising Scholarship Biodiversity and Seeds The Seed of Culture Weaving the Strands Defining the Wild CHAPTER ONE The Principle of Diversity Beginnings Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis Feminism Change Creating Feminist Knowledge Who is the Knower? Standpoint Theory Analysis Synthesis Dissociation Associative Thinking CHAPTER TWO Power and Knowledge: Global Monotony or Local Diversity? Power The Power of Violence The Power of Reward The Power of Backlash The Power of Obstacles The Power of Systems The Power of Attraction The Power of Attitudes Knowledge Assimilation and Appropriation A Clash of Knowledge Systems Not seeing The Perceptual Gap How Knowledge is Valued Cultural Homogeneity In Defence of Diversity CHAPTER THREE One Global Economy or Diverse Decolonised Economies? The Logic of Neoclassical Economics How Women Are (ac)Counted Economic Homogeneity and Globalisation Decolonising Economics Feminist Economics Ecological Economics Toward a Wild Economics CHAPTER FOUR Land as Relationship and Land as Possession Land as resource or relationship? Wilderness Land Dealing with Waste "Freeing" the Land, Enclosing the Commons Feminist conceptions of land Indigenous conceptions of land Land as possession Tourism: land and wilderness as commodity Urban land Urban land as wild space Steps to developing a wild politics of land CHAPTER FIVE Farming, Fishing and Forestry: from subsistence to terminator technology Farming in Kenya and Nigeria Forestry in Lithuania, the USA, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka Fishing in the Pacific Digitised and globalised farming: what the future holds The Kyoto Protocol, plantation forests and Terminator Trees Fishing wild fish to feed domesticated fish The commodification of "everything" Women as keepers of ecosystems CHAPTER SIX Production, consumption and work: global and local Production and disparity Consumption and disparity Work and disparity Global production Global consumption Global work Local production Local consumption Local work Military as gross producer and consumer Conclusion CHAPTER SEVEN Monocultures and multilateral trade rules Patents Multilateral trade agreements and the shape of international law Multilateral trade negotiations and the convention on biological diversity The World Trade Organisation (WTO) Trade related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) Food security The Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) Traditional Resource Rights (TRRs) and Community Intellectual Rights (CIRs) Human Genome Project (HGP) and Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP) Conclusion CHAPTER EIGHT Wild Politics Wild Politics: A vision for the next 40,000 years Appendix Tables 1. World’s 100 largest economic entities (2001) 2. Companies, countries and name changes 3. Areas of highest cultural and biological diversity Glossary Abbreviations Bibliography