There's no place to dump your trash for free. There really is no longer any cost- free place to dump wastes that harm the air, water or soil. We will either have to pay rent for the increasingly limited space in which to store these harmful things, or find ways to produce wealth without creating so many of them. Scratch a financial crisis, find a real estate bubble. Entrepreneurs were borrowing all that money that was so recklessly flowing into their countries.
Cities can no longer afford to be inefficient.
The last decade has seen an unprecedented worldwide migration of poor people to urban centers, in search of economic opportunity. Urban land has become the most costly squandered natural resource in the world today. Global climate change is too likely to ignore. No one knows for sure whether the bills have already started to come due for rising sea levels and other climatic havoc, but almost all agree that they soon will. Yet these forests are being rapidly decimated, to benefit an exceedingly small group of landowners.