Development, per se , is not necessarily a goal. Meeting people's basic needs is important. People should have enough to eat, to clothe themselves, to have a decent home and a decent livelihood. I think that an alternative type of development would be to be geared towards increased understanding of, and sympathy and communication with, other life forms. If we can have an ethic of having a closer relationship with other life forms, to appreciate them more, it would certainly give a greater amount of satisfaction.
Cities often seem sinkholes of consumption and a degraded ecology.
First of all, I think cities can be a great asset for the environment and ecological systems. Having a concentration of people in these cities is good in a way, because if people were spread out throughout suburbs and the countryside, I think we would find that those environments that were previously more lightly populated would become gradually impoverished ecologically. A healthy environment is very key to environmental justice. The incinerators are certainly an environmental justice issue, and we had a victory with the Bronx-Lebanon incinerator, which has been shut down. The other point is that cities are centers of a great deal of consumption and the important thing is that we somehow develop urban centers that do not consume as much.