Geographers, colonialism, and development strategies: The case of Puerto Rico

The growing literature on environmental racism has to date paid little attention to racism's influence upon natural resources, population, and development planning, or to links between yesterday's colonialist research and today's environmental degradation. Puerto Rico's ''Operation Bootstrap'' was the pioneering ''Third World development through export-led industrialization'' program. It was shaped by allegations, chiefly by North American academics (including geographers), that the island was too small, too overpopulated, and too lacking in both natural and human resources to sustain a less dependent and more integrated strategy. These allegations have had a number of negative consequences: (I)the economic strategy has resulted in significant environmental degradation and threats to human health; and (2) although recent Puerto Rican research portrays local resources in a more careful and positive light, current efforts to gain popular islandwide support for alternative strategies must also contend with the enduring power of the old assumption of nonviability.