ABSTRACT
Search for an alternative paradigm for development began concomitantly with critiques of industrial development and questions on the nature of social progress. The basic tenets of these critiques originated in the 19th century radical political philosophies of Marxism, anarchism and Luddism. Radical thinkers as well as the Romantics understood that the Enlightenment’s promise of delivering humanity from fear, oppression and poverty had been foiled by capitalist development. The first voices of discord with the standard progressivism of the era came from Alfred Russell Wallace, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who were concerned about the ecological impacts of civilization. A pioneer of biogeography and co-discoverer of the theory of natural selection, Wallace expressed his concern for the vanishing species:
It seems sad that on the one hand such exquisite creatures should live out their lives and exhibit their charms only in these wild, inhospitable regions, doomed for ages yet to come to hopeless barbarism; while on the other hand, should civilized man ever reach these distant lands, and bring moral, intellectual and physical light into the recesses of these virgin forests, we may be sure that he will so disturb the nicely-balanced relations of organic and inorganic nature so as to cause the disappearance and finally the extinction of these very beings whose wonderful structures and beauty he alone is fitted to appreciate and enjoy. This consideration must surely tell us that all living things were not made for man. (Wallace 1962: 340)
