Greens and Greenbacks
RUBIN, CHARLES T.
Greens and Greenbacks We can fix the environment by fighting poverty. by CHARLES T. RUBIN Of the writing of books about the environment there is no end, and not entirely due to vanity. New issues...
...Start with a survey of the history of "American environmen-talism," then spend a chapter each on various kinds of pollution, ecosystem issues, and symptoms of doomsday...
...Rightly making a major theme of the link between economic development and political freedom, Hollander is perhaps too sanguine in speaking of "the inexorable movement toward human freedom that has been occurring for more than a century," a belief that stands in some ironic contrast with his heavy reliance on United Nations analyses of how to promote development...
...A chapter on biodiversity acknowledges that the issue is very poorly understood, yet argues that policy should defer to the informed intuitions of those biologists who believe in the seriousness of the threat of species loss, a far lower evidentiary standard than Hollander usually employs...
...New issues and new information call for constant updating...
...For this slim but intellectually weighty volume's examination of today's environmental hot topics is informed by a direct confrontation with a central tenet of many self-styled environmental activists, who see Western affluence as a major source of environmental degradation...
...Even when he thinks that a given issue is properly defined, he may set out alternative ways of thinking about solutions that link them to wealth generation...
...Hollander's book conforms to this model in form but not in substance...
...While the history of books that question environmentalist orthodoxies is practically coterminous with the development of those orthodoxies, the appearance of Hollander's book means that over the past couple of years, two major university presses have published solid books in this genre...
...In making this case Hollander shifts our understanding of a variety of environmental problems...
...He doubts we understand global climate change well enough to make sensible policies, and he believes that concerns about overpopulation are overblown...
...As he also acknowledges, "the road to affluence is lamentably littered with the detritus of human history, culture and oppression...
...While perhaps not destined for success on the scale of Bj0rn Lom-borg's The Skeptical Environmentalist, Hollander's The Real Environmental Crisis deserves a wide audience both for its merits and for the irresistible commercial message it would send to strapped university presses about the benefits of introducing genuine diversity in their offerings about the environment...
...Hollander's examination of a wide range of issues suggests that today poverty is a far more likely cause of environmental degradation...
...The outline of books about environmental science and policy is pretty well established...
...Whether the United Nations has genuinely found less-cluttered routes to affluence remains an open question...
...A professor of politics at Duquesne University, Charles T. Rubin is the author of The Green Crusade: Rethinking the Roots of Environmentalism...
...Nations where the majority are living on the knife's edge of necessity cannot afford such measures, and there is unlikely to be any call for them when people have the short time horizons that go along with being primarily concerned with getting by...
...Furthermore, because Hollander thinks that it is important to identify clearly what science genuinely knows, he is skeptical about the conventional wisdom on many eco-problems...
...There may be epochs where economic development brings with it high environmental costs, as a society becomes wealthier and more people desire the amenities that are traditionally reserved for the rich...
...Because environmental quality is an increasingly desired and affordable good in wealthy nations, problems such as air pollution, water quality, and deforestation simply do not exist any longer on the scale that they often do in poor nations...
...Given its author's thesis, The Real Environmental Crisis necessarily closes with a chapter about methods of poverty reduction...
...A chapter on transportation is rather blithe about the ability of poor nations to solve urban congestion problems with which even wealthy nations have not had much luck...
...Not all the chapters in The Real Environmental ^-risis are equally strong or develop the poverty connection with equal rigor...
...The argument is not complex, and Hollander is aware that the basic insights are not original...
...Success breeds the desire for more success, and leads to the perception of ever more refined threats to our well being and nature's...
...He sees free political institutions as central to environmental improvement along with economic growth...
...And, oddly, nothing is said about local and private efforts in developing countries to use species preservation as a tool for economic development—a case where the poor may have something to teach the wealthy...
...Even more important, as Berkeley emeritus professor Jack Hollander notes in The Real Environmental Crisis, is that environmental quality is a moving target...
...Furthermore, Hollander recognizes, in many such places the desires of the general population are hardly relevant to what governments do...
...An economically successful society has a greater ability to legislate and regulate as environmental concern grows...
Vol. 8 • June 2003 • No. 39
