Chinnagounder's challenge

"Deane Curtin examines the dual legacy of the great nineteenth-century utilitarian reformers, Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, and John Stuart Mill, who advocated radical social change at home while they endorsed, indeed invented, colonial social and environmental policies for the East India Company. This colonial logic is then connected to twentieth-century attempts to export "progress" to the "third world": the green revolution, and provisions of GATT that allow for privatization of human genes and seeds.

Asking whether the American debate over the proper relationship of culture to nature can be exported to other parts of the world, Curtin articulates a response in terms of a new, distinctively American, postcolonial, environmental ethic."--BOOK JACKET.