Newsgroups: sci.environment

John McCarthy writes:

>Mr. Berry is mistaken in his belief that the whole world cannot sustain
>itself at a U.S. living standard including personal transportation.
>
>He is also mistaken in his belief that the high U.S., European and
>Japanese living standards depend on exploiting the resources of
>the poor underdeveloped countries.

Is John under the impression that the Japanese grow all of the wood they
use? Is he ignorant of the fact that they consume, most unsustainably, wood
from Malesian (southeast Asian) rainforest, Amazonia, and the Pacific 
Northwest? 

Numerous "poor underdeveloped countries" have postcolonial economies dependent
on a few cash crops established during colonial times. The cash crops -- e.g.
sugar, coffee, tea, tobacco, pineapples, etc -- have taken a tremendous toll 
on native ecosystems -- replacing them entirely over vast tracts. This has 
been a principle cause of past habitat destruction in third world countries. 
Many endangered tropical species -- including some of the most charismatic 
large-bodied mammals -- owed their initial threatened or endangered status 
to range reduction and local extinctions due to the planting of such cash 
crops. The developed world is the consumer of these crops, and is thus 
largely responsible for the original endangerment of these species -- now 
exacerbated further by increasing local population pressures on their
dwindling remaining areas.

Similar remarks also apply to third world economies dependent on a few
minerals. Again, a tremendous environmental toll is paid in the third world
countries to support the developed world's standard of living. Such minerals
and cash crops are almost always very cheap on world markets. Their prices
don't begin to reflect the environmental damage which their production has 
wrought.  This environmental cost is effectively exported away from Europe 
and Japan to these third world countries for free. In fact, the third world 
is a major part of the hinterland supporting the cities of Europe, Japan and 
the US, and absorbing the wastes and other hidden costs such as habitat 
destruction, loss of native food and medicinal resources, loss of ecosystem
services, and general loss of biological diversity associated with the 
production of resources those cities consume.

This, of course, is why the current standard of living of the developed world
cannot be extended to the whole planet -- there is no additional hinterland 
available for the third world to exploit. 

		*	*	*	*	*

Now, this is true *exploitation* of third world areas. -- Except, of course, 
for the Pacific Northwest, which is an example of the exploitation of
the resources of US and Canadian citizens to enrich Japanese boardrooms and 
bowling alleys with fine wood, and to enrich a small kleptocracy of north
American timber barons... er, businessmen with fine yen. 

Come to think of it, that's just how it works in the third world, isn't it?

Note, BTW, how convenient it is for such robber barons to have people believe
as John wants you to believe -- that no exploitation is going on at all. 

[No, I don't think that John is in their pay. He's just incredibly gullable.]


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Alan McGowen