This issue of Development Dialogue consists entirely of a long essay by Pat Roy Mooney discussing three of the most decisive and fateful issues that societies around the world will be confronted with in the 21st century: Erosion (environmental and cultural), Technology (as future technologies transform society) and Concentration (of corporate power and class dominance) – in short: ETC. Erosion includes not only genetic erosion and the erosion of species, soils, and the atmosphere – but also the erosion of knowledge and the global erosion of equitable relations. We are losing both our biological resources and our eco-specific knowledge of those resources. Ecological destruction increases the commercial importance of dwindling genetic ‘raw materials’. Paradoxically, this is occurring just when new technologies have the greatest need for (and capacity to utilise) the endangered biomaterials. A broad socio-cultural perspective on these challenges is needed, to come to grips with the problems. A United Nations Human Rights/Erosion Inventory is proposed as one way of tackling the situation.
Publication
The ETC Century: Erosion, Technological Transformation and Corporate Concentration in the 21st Century
Issue no.1999:1-2 (42) of Development Dialogue presents an essay by Pat Roy Mooney discussing three decisive issues of the 21st century: Erosion, Technology, and Concentration.