Customer Reviews

Plundering Paradise: The Struggle for the Environment in the Philippines

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The authors writing style reveals the passion with which they had when they traveled throughout the country and met with the locals. However, their lack of quantitative data was a shortcoming. I bought this book to use as reference material for a research paper on resource management in the Philippines, but it wasn't the right tool for that job. Fortunately, there are other books which do grind through the maze and inconsistencies of quantitative data necessary analysis of development activities in that country.

One strongpoint was the writing style, which really makes you feel like you are there, grinding along twisting roads in overcrowded busses and jeepneys, boating to remote locations, meeting with locals. The limitations of the transportation infrastructure are readily apparent throughout their writings. A weakness is that the models the authors proposed for peasant upheavals in the political and economic arenas are based on building power bases laterally, very little emphasis is given to the vertical integration, via the system of patronage, which is prevalent throughout the Philippines. It would be interesting to see what level of change has occured in their study areas since the research was done, over 15 years ago.