Edited by Jerry Mander and Victoria Tauli-Corpuz
Sierra Club Books, 2006

Best-selling author and cultural critic Jerry Mander has challenged dominant cultural mind-sets in books such as Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television and In the Absence of the Sacred. In Paradigm Wars, he and co-editor Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, a leader of the global indigenous peoples movement and chair of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, have gathered an impressive international roster of contributors to document the momentous collision of worldviews that pits the forces of economic globalization against the Earth’s surviving indigenous peoples.

Many of the planet’s dwindling resources are located on lands inhabited by native communities. Those resources are now the direct target of giant global corporations who desperately need them to fuel their own unsustainable growth. The World Trade Organization and other global structures of trade and finance have written the rules of trade to make life easier for these corporate resource-hunters–accelerating the loss of native lands, autonomy, and rights and creating millions of refugees.

Paradigm Wars is the first major work to comprehensively illuminate this shameful scenario. In firsthand reports by twenty-five indigenous and nonindigenous writers, the book details the devastating impacts of extractive industries and bioprospecting, the degrading of cultural artifacts and languages, even the damage done by some well-meaning conservation groups. The book also highlights how indigenous communities are strongly resisting this onslaught, often with amazing success. Anyone concerned with environmental or social justice will find inspiration in their resistance.

Antonia Juhasz contributed the chapter “Global Water Wars.”