Ecological Crisis and the Burgeoning Economies of the Third World

What are the ecological consequences of the economic development of countries like India, China and Brazil? Who are the major contributors to the current concentration of greenhouse gases and warming of earth? Jason Cowley answers these questions in his Editor’s Letter column of Granta, (Issue 102), which specializes on The New Nature Writing. While situating the special issue of the magazine in the geocultural panorama of the present day world and introducing the recent tissues of nature writing, especially from Europe and America, Cowley brings out a neo-orientalist and Eurocentric interpretation to the current ecological crisis that unambiguously articulates the West’s discomfort over the developing economies of the third world countries like India. He calls our attention to the fact that we are living at a time of emergency as the world’s population is continuing to record a fast upward spiral that eventually result in the warming of earth and absorption of greenhouse gases, and warns us that the humanity seems to destroy itself. In his opinion, this is also caused by a “fundamental shift in power away from the West” whereby “the emergence of China, India and Brazil, with their new wealth and aspirational middle classes, is putting an intolerable strain on the world’s futile resources.” (p.10) Thus Jason Cowley puts the blame of the intensity of the crisis squarely on the developing and developed nations, willfully forgetting the western origin and practice of the ideational arena of the Judeo-Christian worldview that propagated humans to subdue earth for their material progress, which has caused enough damage to mother earth. He seems to have forgotten history of the devastating pace with which the European colonisers exercised ecological imperialism over the resourceful countries in the world for a long period of time, and the fact that it is the countries in the east that resisted, and is continuing to resist, the overwhelming presence of materialistic cultural practices and commodity fetish which had its origins in the west. Moreover, the eastern religious and cultural practices are predominantly ecocentric while the western culture as a whole was basically egocentric or human centred. He seems to reflect that the westerners have caused enough damage to the biosphere and that the entire world should cooperate in bringing down its devastating consequences. In other, words the west had been keeping divine right over the resources on earth, and any use of such rights by the formerly subaltern societies and countries on the periphery need to be dealt with severely. In fact the Western intelligentsia has no moral right to theorise the ecological crisis as something caused by the economic development of countries like India.

What is Reading You

Reading in some circles are a fashion. As one may may be tempted to attend a concert because many of his or her friends do that, some read often what they find others read. This creates a situation where they slowly lose their original taste, or the ability to select what is suitable for them.
Often it comes out in the way that it is not you that select the book but the book selects you. That is you are not reading, rather something is reading you, or something or someone is prevailing over the domain of what you read.
One interesting thing here is the books our kids are reading. Kids sometimes engage in a preposterous reading habit where they start with a book that should reach them at a later stage in their reading experience. Reading becomes preposterous when a kid who did not read Alice in Wonderland is forced to devour Harry Porter. Preposterous reading often kills the growth of a person's sensibility. The kid grows out to be one lacking in the basic ability to understand the aesthetic value of a literary work.
Books are to be selected based on the mental age of a person. Even some adults fall victims to preposterous reading. If an Indian reader of English books who has not read the novel of R.K Narayan jumps directly into reading Salman Rushdie's novels, he/she would experience a feeling of being postmodern before becoming modern. Moreover, the sensibility of a person has to develop through exposure to a series of books that include some early books that are treated "must read" by eminenet readers.
However, the question of preposterous reading becomes insignificant if some read a book because their neighbors, friends, teachers or enemies are reading it. If the purpose is to divulge into the field of aesthetics with a genuine interest in it preposterous reading will only help negatively.