Quote:
Originally Posted by Ramona_A_Stone
Mazer, at last, the real villains are revealed! 
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Cute, but you know I didn't mean it that way. Africa, China, South America, and many other places are rich in resources and are developing as a result. Most of those places don't have the benefit of our environmental protection laws, not to mention our labor and human rights laws. Because of their weak economies they will develop their industries with little regard to public health as we did more than a hundred years ago. Our economy went up when we started taking public health seriously because our natural resources are totally worthless without a strong labor force. Cleaning the air, the water, the soil, all make economic sense in the long run. But when a poor nation suffers a market correction or a recession, environmental issues go on the back burner in favor of the short term issues. That nation's industries will pollute and abuse the environment for as long as it takes for the economy to recover. When they are poor they are sloppy and reckless. When they are not then they're like us, not only concerned about the environment but able to do something about it.
We should be helping poor nations develop for humanitarian reasons, those are more pressing and more immediate than the environmental ones. Along the way we can give them the benefit of our experience, help them preserve their environments now so they won't have to restore them later. But we've become so jaded that we believe the environment is of greater moral concern than world wide poverty. Unfortunately we can't solve poverty by protecting the environment. But knowing that we can protect the environment by solving poverty I think it's time to put the "Oh No, capitalism and greed and free trade is going to
destroy the World" argument to bed. Those things won't necessarily save it but the rest of the world
will industrialize eventually. Everyone will harvest their ores and their coal beds and their forests and their farm lands, and if we don't help them then we can't stop them from repeating our mistakes.