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The Real Environmental Crisis: Why Poverty, Not Affluence, is the Environment's Number One Enemy
 
 
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The Real Environmental Crisis: Why Poverty, Not Affluence, is the Environment's Number One Enemy (Hardcover)

by JM Hollander (Author) "Nearly everyone cares about the environment ..." (more)
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Product details

  • Hardcover: 251 pages
  • Publisher: University of California Press; illustrated edition edition (28 Mar 2003)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0520237889
  • ISBN-13: 978-0520237889
  • Product Dimensions: 22.9 x 16.5 x 2.5 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 1,980,251 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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"Hollander is saying that instead of wringing our hands about how our rich nations are raping the environment, we should be focusing on trying to raise the standard of living in poorer and developing countries.'"--"Publishers Weekly"

Product Description
Drawing a road map towards a sustainable future, this text contends that our most critical environmental problem is global poverty. It asks us to look beyond the media's doomsday rhetoric about the state of the environment and commit more resources to lifting the world's population out of poverty.
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2.0 out of 5 stars Optimistic but one-sided reframe of planet's plight, 23 Jun 2007
By Trevor Thompson (Bristol UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: The Real Environmental Crisis: Why Poverty, Not Affluence, Is the Environment's Number One Enemy (Paperback)
Rich western nations have done a lot to preserve natural habitats and clean up their air and water. People in poor countries are too busy surviving to worry about the environment, and even if they did, lack the resources to make a difference. This book takes these observations as the basis for a grand hypothesis - the answer to our global environmental crisis lies in the fostering of global affluence. As people get richer the problems of the environment will on the whole sort themselves out. For instance only in the affluent nations have we seen the brakes go on the exponential rise in human population. The book could also be taken as an antidote to the pessimism that surrounds aspects of the environmental movement. Hollander is relentlessly optimistic. He downplays or denies many of the things that environmentalists worry about such as peak oil, the dangers of GM food (a force for good), global warming (current changes may not be secondary to human industrial activity) and over-population (we can feed 10billion with better yields and better distribution). The book is scattered with interesting statistics such the fact that the Saudi desalinate 5million cubic metres of water per day, that 60% of food in the US is thrown away (surely not?) and 87% of Brazil's electricity is from hydro.

The problem with Hollander's thesis is that in its optimistic zeal it leaves a lot of important considerations unexplored. The word affluence is used throughout but never clearly defined or unpacked. For instance historically the affluence of some tends to depend on the poverty of others. We can't all be affluent - even in the US 15% of its citizens live in "official" poverty. Also though affluence tends to improve local environments it can have the opposite effect at distant out-of-sight locations. Though rainforests get chopped by desperate subsistence farmers they get even more chopped by big firms making pasture to raise beef for sale in affluent nations - particularly in the US. The polluting industrialists of China are making goods for markets in affluent countries. Hollander concludes "The world's fossil fuel supplies are plentiful. They will neither run out nor become scarce in the foreseeable future". While this may be true for coal it is not true of oil - yet oil is the central commodity underpinning Hollander's version Western affluence (including cheap transportation and abundant food).

The environmental dangers of poverty are well articulated in this book and Hollander is at his best explaining the investments that countries like the US have made in preserving their forests (healthier now than anytime in the last 100 years) and wildlife (implementing the Endangered Species Act has cost billions). I picture the author in genteel retirement in a lovely house in the hills of northern California - happily affluent. But the book feels overly and devoted to this ideal with statements such as "earth is not short of cropland - it short of affluence". Only on the topic of road congestion does a sense of pessimism creep in - even hydrogen-powered cars take up space. The book contains surprisingly little direct argumentation around poverty and focuses more on reframes of standard western environmental anxieties such as the role of nuclear, water security and depletion of fish stocks.

It is hard to get excited about affluence, abundance yes, but not affluence. And we need abundance of many things, not only material things, some of which are found in equal or greater abundance amongst the poor.




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