Land-grabbing, enclosure of the commons, and social and environmental disaster

I am reposting from Raj Patel's excellent blog an article by Arundhati Roy about the Indian government's intended land-grab of resource-rich tribal areas. It sounds very ugly. I am also posting an interview of Iain Boal from Counterpunch magazine, in which he argues that much of the ecological deterioration on the planet is due precisely to this type of outside grabbing and intervention in local areas. He describes it as enclosure of the commons, that is to say the appropriation by powerful groups of resources that used to be shared in common by a local community.

Basically Boal's argument is that people that live in and make their living from a given landscape are not likely to deteriorate the ecological base upon which their existence depends. This means that no matter how arid or seemingly unproductive the land, and no matter how the population may grow, people usually find a way to live sustainably in their local environment. They live within their ecological means, because they've no other choice. According to this argument, the environmental disasters we're seeing today in much of the world are less a result of local people's misuse of their own land, and more a result of outsiders' unsustainable extraction of resources from landscapes that are not their own. These outsiders can be corporations, wealthy individuals, or a government (as we see in the case presented by Roy).

On the other hand, maybe the insatiable forces of land-grabbing, resource extraction, and urbanization aren't so bad after all, as we might conclude from this frivolous little article from the New York Times.