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

by Jack Hollander

Drawing a completely new road map toward a sustainable future, Jack M. 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. Pointing to the great strides that have been made toward improving and protecting the environment in the affluent democracies, Hollander 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 takes a close look at the major environment and resource issues―population growth; climate change; agriculture and food supply; our fisheries, forests, and fossil fuels; water and air quality; and solar and nuclear power. In each case, Hollander finds compelling evidence that economic development and technological advances can relieve 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 the highly significant Endangered Species Act, which Hollander asserts never would have been legislated in a poor country whose citizens struggle just to survive.

Hollander asks us to look beyond the media's doomsday rhetoric about the state of the environment, for much of it is simply not true, and to commit much more of our resources where they will do the most good―to lifting the world's population out of poverty.

Genres: Sustainability, Science

252 pages, Paperback

First published August 9, 2004

Reviews

[Sooz · Rating 1 out of 5]

The best part of this book is that if you look at the shanty town on the cover, all of the waste is from things like car parts that were obviously dumped there by affulent people. Reading this book was a lot like watching Fox News for information.

[Florence · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lot of the environmental movement as it exists presently is caught up in promotion of low-resource, off the grid lifestyles and voluntary poverty. Not surprisingly, a lot of environmentalists handwringing about the impact it will have on the planet if the developing world successfully adopts a Westernized lifestyle. I'be even heard some well-meaning but ill-informed folks suggest that we shouldn't try to improve global poverty or world poverty at all, because the deaths caused reduce the overpopulation strain (!!). In many cases the sensibilities of this movement also block advances like nuclear power and GMO crops.

Jack Hollander blows those ideas out of the water with what the evidence actually shows-as people become more affluent, they demand greater environmental standards from their governments. Furthermore, many environmental losses, such as endangered species poaching and forest destruction, are a direct result of people at a subsistence level trying to survive. Even the overpopulation problem and high birth rates can be partially attributed to parents trying to ensure that they have surviving children in the face of Widespread childhood disease and death.

The policy recommendations Hollander recommends are eminently sensible, and include interventions for public health, universal voting access, and improved agricultural techniques, including GMOs. I can't speak to whether Hollander would identify as an effective altruist today, but it at least seems likely he'd be supportive of interventions like direct cash transfers.

Mostly where this book falls flat, and the reason I gave it 3 stars instead of 4, is that the data on climate change and related technologies has changed a lot since 2003. Hollander is, in the book, very much of the opinion that climate science and global warming is still contested. It is much less contested today, on the brink of 2016, when global warming is taken much more seriously as a catastrophic risk to humanity. Similarly, he is much more optimistic about fuel cells as a source of transportation energy than contemporary engineers are. Still, this is a good read if you are interested in becoming a more effective advocate for both global poverty and the environment.

[Vichmd · Rating 4 out of 5]

Any book touting the benefits of the best economic system in human history--capitalism--and explaining how we can employ that system to solve our environmental problems gets high marks from me.