Poverty Endangers Environment

Jack Hollander: Poverty Endangers Environment

RUSH: The simple fact of the matter, you go and look around the world, as I have done, and you will find that the slow economies, or the nonexistent economies, the true poverty-ridden countries on this planet are the filthiest, the dirtiest, the most polluting cesspool places that you'll ever run into on the planet, and yet they try to make our country out as the culprit. Jack Hollander has written a book called The Real Environmental Crisis: Why Poverty, Not Affluence, Is the Environment's Number One Enemy. "Drawing a completely new road map toward a sustainable future, Jack Hollander contends that our most critical environmental problem is global poverty. His balanced, authoritative, and lucid book, challenges widely held beliefs that economic development and affluence pose a major threat to the world's environment and resources." Of course, without even giving any details and having read it, he's exactly right. Common sense would tell us this. The attack on all the industrialized nations, including us at the top of the list, ought to be the biggest giveaway as to what's really at stake here.

"Hollander points to the great strides that have been made toward improving and protecting the environment in the affluent democracies. He makes the case that the essential prerequisite for sustainability is a global transition from poverty to affluence, coupled with a transition to freedom and democracy." The Real Environmental Crisis is the title of the book, "takes a close look at the major environment and resource issues: population growth, climate change, agricultural and food supply, fisheries, forests, fossil fuels, water and air quality, solar and nuclear power. In each case, Hollander finds compelling evidence that economic development and technological advances can reveal such problems as food shortages, deforestation, air pollution, and land degradation and provide clean water, adequate energy supplies, and improved public health. The book also tackles issues such as global warming, genetically modified foods, automobile and transportation technologies," and so forth and so on. "The significance of the Endangered Species Act, which Hollander asserts never would have been legislated in a poor country whose citizens struggle just to survive." So whereas in this country the bald eagle is protected, in a poor country where it's not you go out and capture whatever you can to eat because that's all you can do because you don't have refrigeration, you don't have transportation. It's still catch what you can and eat it tonight. And whatever you can catch, you eat.

He asks us "to look beyond the media's doomsday rhetoric about the state of the environment because most of it is simply not true and commit much more of our resources where they will do the most good, lifting the world's population out of poverty." Amen. Spread capitalism around. So here's Der Schlick Meister running around in Denver, "Yeah, the only way we're going to save the planet from greenhouse gases and global warming is we gotta slow down our economy." Who in their right mind ever talks about that? Look at the panic this country goes into when you tell 'em we're headed to a recession, and here's Clinton out there basically, "Yeah, we gotta slow it down, maybe not full-fledged recession out there, Limbaugh, but at least slow it down some." It's absurd. Patently absurd.