Food or Clean Air ?
As the need for development grows more urgent, poor countries face an additional handicap: the cost of pollution control. The campaign to save our environment mounts pressure against those countries to pay an extra price, as they industrialize, for not duplicating the bad habits of the West.
In reality two environmental campaigns are going on. One centers primarily on protecting nature and its ecosystems. The second concerns itself with social ecosystems that produce hunger, disease, and crowded hovels. By logic these two indispensable campaigns deserve to unite and strengthen each other. They could instead collide.
The first campaign is being waged by those who are not so poor. One must surmise from their rhetoric that some of them are more, indignant about smog than about slums, more worried about the mistreatment of animals and lakes than about mistreated people. The effect of this may be to pit the rights of nature against human rights. A higher passion for nature is not surprising, because most U.S. citizens suffer from its abuse. Fewer of us are