OPINION/COMMENTARY

The Real Environmental Crisis: Why Poverty, Not Affluence, Is the Environment’s Number One Enemy

Global environmental conferences grabbed headlines throughout the 1990s, beginning with the Rio Conference in 1992. Rio developed ambitious blueprints for international forest policy and sustainable development while simultaneously birthing conventions on climate change and biological diversity. While foreign policy changed again with the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001, the environment still remains a concern for the global community. In The Real Environmental Crisis: Why Poverty, Not Affluence, Is the Environment’s Number One Enemy, Jack Hollander hopes to teach environmentalists that the key to protecting Planet Earth both locally and globally lies in understanding that poverty guides the poor. Hollander’s thesis is simple: wealthier nations and peoples improve environmental quality rather than degrade it. This runs contrary to the rhetoric of many environmental organizations. Professor Hollander is not the first to make such a claim. Bjorn Lomborg made this argument with his 2001 tome, The Skeptical Environmentalist. A host of economists, most notably the late Julian Simon, have argued along the same lines. But Hollander brings credentials to the table that might garner more respect among those in the hard sciences. Neither a statistician like Lomborg, nor an economist like Simon, Hollander was an early pioneer in the environmental sciences when ecological research focused more on ecosystem energy flows....

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