I wonder if we can still use the word ‘development’?
This is because ‘development’ has been a word that has excused much abuse of the world, and much harm.
While ‘development’ clearly has had many good consequences, such as better medical attention, longer average life spans and so on, it has also been the term for the change in a ‘nations’ orientation from working with the ecology and people, to unrestrained use of coal, massive hydropower, industrial farming, mining, over-fishing, deforestation, militarisation and so on. It has not been an unmitigated good.
Development formed a track which nations were almost forced to take into significant levels of destruction to gain their place in the modern world, and avoid more colonialist imperialism from others. It is a form of ordering which produces a disorder which is often easy to ignore or dismiss, because of the good being attempted.
One of the moral dilemmas of the last 20-30 years has focused on the argument as to whether India and China, were excused in the massive and dangerous amounts of emissions they released, and ecological destruction they engendered because they were ‘developing’. Objection by the developed world could easily be seen as imperialist and interfering, and as aiming to try and prevent them gaining power and influence and helping their people out of poverty.
Similar events have happened in South America, where forests have been stripped to boost development, and this too has affected the world. The Amazon forest is so devastated, that it may now be releasing more CO2 than it stores.
Development has led to massive pollution in countries and dispossession of people who lived well with forests.
Indeed, development seems to seek sacrifice. Who is it that that gets removed, or suffers so the nation may develop and become powerful? Are people who resist the changes to their landscape reduced to being mere ‘backward’ ‘obstacles’, who can be treated with patronisation, contempt or brutality? Is development a site of ‘class war’? Or even of ‘race war’ when, as in Australia, the Aboriginal people are continually dispossessed for development (even sometimes for development elsewhere in the world – a frequent argument seems to be that our fossil fuels are being sold to charitably help development and end poverty).
Likewise some development of Renewable Energy can also operate in the same way as development through coal, although perhaps less destructively in the long term. This should be born in mind to avoid ill-consequences.
Development has grown to include destruction, when it should involve consultation and political involvement of those who are being developed, and change of path when (or before) the destruction begins to have an effect.
But if development was to be abandoned as a term for attempts at improvement, what should replace it, that does not have these conventions around it?
Tags: development, disorder, politics
Climate, technology and chaos Blog 
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