Until we arrive at the day when our society learns how to balance economic prosperity with moral and aesthetic sensitivity, environmentalists will be forced publicly to emphasize the inferior element of their work. Mass. Mark Sagoff was too optimistic. He evidently ignores the loss of temperate and tropical rain forest, the acute water shortages in our Southwest and in Africa, accumulating waste and pollution, topsoil loss, overpopulation, and so forth. As if to refute my thesis that the North excludes imports from rather than exploits the resources of the South, Hammond points out that smaller industrial nations are heavily dependent on imports of raw materials. They import raw materials, however, predominantly from other industrialized countries.
Industrialized nations trade, even for raw materials, nearly exclusively among themselves.
Yet in doing so environmentalists embrace the cost-benefit framework that is likely in the long run to undermine attempts to preserve the natural environment.