ENVIRONMENT, Page 63Special Report: Greening of GeopoliticsHow the U.S. Can Take The Lead in the Third WorldFirst: stop sending mixed signalsBy Eugene Linden
The missionary spirit has always hovered over the U.S.'s
relations with far-off, backward lands. In the mid-19th century,
New England ministers went abroad to save souls. A century later,
foreign aid technocrats preached the virtues of hydroelectric dams
and other megaprojects. Now a new generation of globe-trotting
officials is spreading the gospel of environmentalism.
The crusade has encountered resistance and stirred resentment.
Emil Salim, Indonesia's Minister of Environment, asks how Americans
can berate tropical nations for deforestation when U.S. trade
barriers discourage development of small industries that might
provide an alternative source of exports.
Third World spokesmen may simply be trying to deflect the
criticism they deserve, but they have a point: the U.S.'s actions
tend to undermine its words. The U.S. is the biggest culprit in the
buildup of gases that threaten to disrupt the global climate.
Princeton University's Center for Energy and Environmental Studies
has concluded that by using existing technologies, such as more
energy-efficient automobiles and manufacturing methods, the U.S.
could reduce its CO2 output 40% over 40 years. That action alone
would take more greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere than a total
shutdown of industry in all of Latin America and Africa.
Meanwhile, the U.S. has virtually withdrawn from the battle
against overpopulation. Until the Reagan years, the U.S. championed
the cause of family planning in poorer countries. Then antiabortion
lobbyists persuaded the White House to halt U.S. participation in
overseas programs that sanctioned abortion. Nowhere is the slogan
pro-life more cruelly inappropriate than in the vast
famine-stricken regions of the Third World, where birth and death
rates are entwined in a vicious spiral. Lester Brown of the
Worldwatch Institute notes that 40,000 babies die each day from
malnutrition and disease, and that many of these deaths occur in
areas where overpopulation has destroyed ecosystems vital for human
survival.
Too often in developing nations the U.S. has inadvertently
contributed to the environmental problem rather than the solution.
In the early 1980s, the U.S. Agency for International Development
helped build the Mahaweli Dams in Sri Lanka -- a multibillion-
dollar construction typical of AID's past tendency to define
development in terms of steel and concrete. The project has flooded
forests and destroyed tea plantations. Washington's Environmental
Policy Institute cites the dams as one of the 18 most destructive
water projects on earth.
After many such debacles, AID has started assessing the
environmental impact of its funding. Other Executive Branch
agencies, such as the Treasury Department, which oversees U.S.
contributions to international lending institutions like the World
Bank, should follow suit.
The White House might empower one body -- most logically the
President's Council on Environmental Quality -- to coordinate
environmental policy and to apply tough standards throughout the
Government. Partly because it has no such mechanism, the Bush
Administration's record has often seemed to reflect the short-term
interests of the business community rather than presidential
promises to provide international leadership. For example, some
African nations were outraged last spring when the U.S. seemed to
be dragging its feet on a convention limiting the dumping of toxic
wastes on the shores of developing countries.
Some nations, notably West Germany, are considering a new
bookkeeping system to take account of the environmental costs of
economic production. Present measures of gross national product
were developed in the 1930s, when natural resources seemed
infinite. In the Philippines today, renegade coastal villagers
harvest fish by dynamiting tropical reefs. Under current accounting
methods, this practice shows up as contributing to the GNP, with
no adjustment for the depletion of the fisheries that results from
the destruction of the reefs.
That kind of shortsightedness, writ large, afflicts the entire
globe. This year the U.N. Statistical Commission will undertake a
periodic 20-year review of the way it monitors the world economy.
The World Resources Institute, a Washington-based think tank, is
urging the U.S. to press the commission to adopt a new system to
take account of activities that harm the environment and thus to
encourage policies that will save it. The opportunity will not
arise again until the year 2010. By then, according to nature's own
accounting, mankind may be environmentally bankrupt.
