Customer Reviews

The Real Environmental Crisis: Why Poverty, Not Affluence, Is the Environment's Number One Enemy

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Jack Hollander has managed to write a book that is not only informative but also speaks to the general public. In an age where environmentalism has turned into either an intellectual debate (nobody can understand it) or a political agenda (nobody cares to understand it), Hollander has brushed aside the traditional jargon and the conventional perspective to find the underlying problem that plagues our planet and its environment. Writing with ease on all environmental subjects, from global warming to fossil fuels to agriculture, Hollander provides a solid and strong argument that poverty is the world's worst environmental problem. The text is lucid and reads like a novel, as it was intended to appeal to intellectuals and laymen alike. Yet the author goes well beyond rhetoric--he backs his arguments up with accurate data and appropriate evidence from reliable sources. Hollander doesn't just provide optimism for the future; he lays down a framework on which that optimism is based. For the avid environmentalist, this book should be read if only to get a different perspective based not on rhetoric, but on hard facts. For the layman, like me, this book will clarify the environmental debate that has been making headline news since the 70's and will continue well into the future.

This short book covers a huge amount of ground. In each chapter, the author focuses on a single issue that other authors covered with entire books. If you want to find out more about the oil crisis, global warming, the future of alternative energy, the sustainability of water resources it is all in here.

In each case, the author adopts a most informative approach. He shares with you the data, the scientific foundation, and the environmental outlook. As you read through these chapters, you'll find out we are not likely to run out of oil in the near future. This is because of the combination of increasing energy efficiency and improving technology that renders more geological terrain accessible for oil exploration. Similarly, nuclear energy and alternative energy have still a long way to go to become viable substitute for fossil fuel.

His chapter on global warming is excellent. I have studied several books and analyzed data on this subject. And, the author in just little over 20 pages covered this complex topic extremely well. His conclusion is far less dramatic than the media's. Most of global warming is due to natural long term climate oscillation. The rise in anthropogenic CO2 is unlikely to destabilize our climate. A potential rise of a couple of degrees is unlikely to hurt our ecosystems. Global warming has not been associated with a more volatile climate including rising occurrence of extreme events (tornadoes, hurricanes, etc...). Climate models, so far, are extremely poor predictors of climate parameters be it precipitation or temperature.

The author makes an interesting case that environment deterioration is associated with poverty. Some reviewers of this book argue the opposite, that environment deterioration is caused by the more affluent societies who exploit resources without enough environmental concern. They further argue that as the billions of Indians and Chinese individuals become more affluent, they will in turn exploit the environment to its detriment. The author's argument is founded on his three stages of development. The first one is associated with third world countries relying mainly on wood burning for fuel. The second one is industrialization associated with pollution and little environmental concern. The third one is advanced technology associated with the information age, greater energy efficiency, greater environmental protection that comes with affluence. He makes the case that third world countries have the opportunity to leapfrog the second stage (polluting industrialization) and reach out to the third stage (information technology).

Overall, I found this book easy to read, very informative, and interesting. Environmental activists who may disagree with him will have to accept that his opinions are well founded. Each of his arguments are well supported by references to peer reviewed scientific papers.

AMAZON has managed to eradicate virtually all of the voters for non-fiction by labeling them fans. This is so dumb I just shake my head. To find my buried reviews that summarize books in a useful way, use the online free bibliography at oss.net/PIG; just add the three w's.

I got this book at the same time as Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death and consider both to be very worthwhile. As much as I and others mocked The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World for its data manipulation and unsupported conclusions, I have to say that the push-back has been important, and I am particularly impressed by the devastating critique in the other book (Eco-Imperialism) on the lack of integrity among the non-profits who strive to force their agenda on the public without ethical substance.

The author focuses on challenging the assumption that affluence in the Third World will destroy the environment, and I have a note, "a thoughtful, remarkable review."

As with other books, DDT surfaces here as the poster issue for claims that it is bad for the environment versus claims that it is good for humanity.

I respect the core point on page 10: "The real enemies of environmental progress are poverty and tyranny, not technology and global markets." The author was ahead of his time, publishing in 2003, in 2004 the High Level Panel agreed with him and made poverty THE #1 threat to humanity above infectious disease, environmental degradation, and seven other threats. See A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility--Report of the Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change.

There are some great turns of phrase. The author characterizes the current debate as "grains of truth embedded in a sea of exaggeration."

I am totally impressed by the author's emphasis that for the five billion poor, the crisis is local and the threats within the threat of poverty are:

01 Hunger
02 Dirty water
03 Disease
04 Scarcity
05 Lack of Education
06 Social inequality, especially of women.

On #5, the UN IT folks just announced the opening of a free online university, which is a great start, now we just need for South Africa, China, India, and perhaps Chile to start call centers that offer all the poor education one cell call at a time. [And today Nokia announced a cell phone powered by ambient electro-magnetic waves in the atmosphere, i.e. it can continue running without having to be charged, a huge essential for the poorest of the poor).

On #6 I share the author's view that educating women and empowering women is a major aspect of assuring our future. I was much impressed by A Half Penny on the Federal Dollar: The Future of Development Aid and his emphasis on how the best return on investment for any aid dollar is from the education of women.

The author focuses on technological innovation (e.g. the Nordic hand-held device without energy needs that can filter feces water to produce clean drinkable water) and economic efficiency--this book does not mention corruption or "true costs" but the author is on track.

He is optimistic because of what we know and despite what we do not know, and I also am sharing his optimism as I see books like Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History Is Restoring Grace, Justice, and Beauty to the World and Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace.

He briefly discusses how poverty should be freedom of choice not only in economic terms, but in relation to political and other domains, as espoused by (he quotes) Amartya Sen, Nobel Laureate.

He spends a lot of time arguing that population growth is not inevitable and is not the doomsday scenario, capping this with a quote from the UN that suggests that population growth will be static by 2100, accompanying this with a compelling graphic that shows that affluence is the best way to end unreasonable or out of control population growth.

In the food section he extols the benefits of biotechnology while ignoring the crimes against humanity, such as Monsanto selling seed that kills its offspring so that the seed has to be bought again.

From this book I draw out the urgency of ending the sequestration of technology such as is now prevalent among many patent systems that do not have a "use it or lose it" clause in their schema.

There are good discussions of the oceans as the vital commons of the future, of global warming (Al Gore is starting to take a lot of hits for being facile with the truth), on water (water wars, women and water management, underpricing of water negating its efficient use), and on renewable energy.

While the author credit innovation with bringing the price of renewable energy down to a tenth of what it was, his knowledge is a bit dated as presented in this book, and I would add that similar gains have been made with respect to the desalination and purification of water from the sea, down from $10 a cubic meter to under 50 cents a cubic meter.

Moore's Law is going to apply to environmentally-relevant technologies, in my view.

He provides a thoughtful conclusion and lists seven goals on page 194:

01 Freedom and democracy are core foundations for the eradication of poverty
02 Gender equality is essential (I would actually return to matriarchies)
03 The poor must receive the education and the tools (I add: free cell phones, education by the call as espoused by the Earth Intelligence Network)
04 New wealth must be created in sustainable equitable manner that lifts the poor.
05 Massive effort is needed to cut diseases in half
06 World economy must become truly global, instead of current predatory neo-colonialism
07 Foreign aid needs to be targeted at the poor (see my briefing at oss.net/HACK, add the w's).

See also:
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Wharton School Publishing Paperbacks)
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
The New Craft of Intelligence: Personal, Public, & Political--Citizen's Action Handbook for Fighting Terrorism, Genocide, Disease, Toxic Bombs, & Corruption
Election 2008: Lipstick on the Pig (Substance of Governance; Legitimate Grievances; Candidates on the Issues; Balanced Budget 101; Call to Arms: Fund We Not Them; Annotated Bibliography)

Mr. Hollander provides many well researched and compelling facts about the contribution of poverty to environmental degradation and the state of the global environment. However, many times through the book his facts and theories stand in direct contradiction to each other. For example, one of his most basic premises of his thesis is the necessity of democratic government, yet he repeatedly cites China as both a wild success and dismal failure depending on the current point he is trying to prove. This often creates a situation where it is difficult to discern exactly what he is advocating.
By addressing different issues in individual chapters the book is written with an easy to read layout, but as a by product it often fails to address how many of these issues are inter-related.
Also unfortunately for Mr. Hollander, many of the facts which he has cited from research conducted up until 1999 have since been updated to disprove some of his theories (such as the incidence of a rising number of hungry people since 2003, and the well documented spike in oil prices).
Overall, the book adds a valuable perspective in a debate that is increasingly becoming one-sided, but his lack of a cohesive well-rounded argument makes it difficult to view this book with as having any serious scientific clout.

Fascinating and well written. Americans should realize how blessed they are to be wealthy enough to have relative luxury: "clean" air, water, etc. There is still much to do for poor Americans and for the developing nations. How we achieve a better standard of living for the world will not be due to tearing down wealthy nations, but rather lifting up the poor ones out of their poverty.

As I have pointed out in my reviews of this important book (in ENVIRONMENT magazine and in POPULATION AND DEVELOPMENT REVIEW), Hollander provides badly-needed balance and perspective to contentious issues of environmental quality and resource adequacy -- issues that, all too often, are drowned out in a swirl of dogmatic and ideological rhetoric and posturing, to which neither the political left or right are immune. The author addresses topics critical to a sorting out of the many strands entering into the environment-resources-economic growth debate: population, agriculture, air quality, energy, transportation, among others. Although the author believes that environmental progress and threats to resource abundance aren't nearly as dire as sometimes depicted, there are indisputably major challenges to be confronted. But improved management, emerging technologies, market incentives, and reforms in governance (especially in developing countries, where many environmental and resource dilemmas will manifest themselves in the years to come) can all contribute to a more reassuring future.

No book can escape some critical dissent. While I agree that rising income typically gives rise, in turn, to a demand for enhanced environmental amenities, it can also make the solution of some problems -- say, traffic congestion -- less tractable. And my "precautionary" instincts would probably have me move more aggressively on dealing with the possibility of climatic disruption than Hollander. Overall, however, this book -- judiciously melding natural and social science, and eloquently written, to boot -- is one I can unhesitatingly recommend.

Joel Darmstadter
Economist
Resources for the Future
Washington DC

Despite some very important and true points, The Real Environmental Crisis has the potential to be a dangerous book.

The volume's central argument -- that the environment can be improved by eliminating or reducing poverty -- does at least in part stand to reason. Several important environment-related issues (e.g., water and air quality, deforestation, and over population) clearly improve in countries as they become wealthier. And while I'm not sure I agree with author Jack Hollander's claim that fighting poverty may be the single most important environmental step available to us, it is certainly among the most important steps.

But the idea that poverty is responsible for all of our environmental ills is a simple-minded and counter-productive argument. If that were so, how does one explain that 80 percent of the world's greenhouse gasses (which most scientists link to global warming) are produced by only 25 wealthy and industrialized countries? How many developing countries have had nuclear reactor accidents? Why are cancer rates higher in wealthy nations? What percentage of the world's bunker fuels (toxic transport-related pollution, mostly from jet airplanes) is released by groups based in Africa, Latin America, or unindustrialized Asia?

Even taking all of that into account, the scale is tilted even more toward the environmental culpability of wealthy nations than is apparent. Witness the biggest environmental disasters of the last generation: Shell in Nigeria, Dow Chemical in India, and Texaco in Ecuador, to name three. They all took place in the developing world, true, but only with the money, technology, and personnel paid for by companies from wealthy countries.

The most damning evidence against Mr. Hollander's thesis may be related to climate change. It is accurate to say that the developing world burns unfiltered fossil fuels, which, gram for gram, release more CO2 into the atmosphere than natural gas, refined petroleum, or even coal. But how many small fires designed to keep a family warm during a cold desert night are needed to balance out the smelters and factories of Pittsburgh, Manchester, or Turin? Yes, the third world is still using polluting leaded gasoline that most wealthy countries outlawed a decade ago, but does anyone think that all the old cars on the streets of Havana or Nairobi can produce the same pollution in a week that a single hour of traffic on the highways of Los Angeles or Hong Kong releases into the atmosphere?

Of course, poverty issues must be addressed, but addressing them will not produce an environmental panacea. In fact, it would likely do the opposite: the quickest route to wealth for most poor countries is a rapid industrialization, simply because that takes advantage of cheap labor and it sidesteps the need for a widely educated workforce. But that route usually involves the purchase of outdated equipment, the use of cheep (and usually polluting) fuel sources. And third-world governments bent on industrialization rarely have a desire to pass and enforce environmental rules.

There are important areas where eliminating poverty would help the environment: wealthier farmers are more likely to rotate crops to assure the long-term viability of the land (and give less reason for deforestation) and less likely to pollute the water supply with harmful fertilizers. Population growth rates are lower in rich countries because children cease being an economic asset (free labor) and start to become an economic cost (another person to feed and clothe). And of course there is the incontrovertible injustice of those of us in wealthy countries doing nothing while millions around the world are at risk of starvation.

But framing this in an environmental context is just wrong. Not only is it inaccurate, but it can also be spun into a dangerous diverting tactic, an excuse for rich countries to do nothing about their own environmental sins and instead point a gnarled finger at the Third World and claim those countries must act first.

The "get rich, save the environment" thesis that Hollander advances is seductive but deeply flawed and incongruent with contemporary empirical research. It is a valid assertion, of course, that poverty and localized environmental degradation and change are tightly linked. But, what Hollander fails to recognize is that those countries that have exhibited upward mobility and economic development have increasingly relied upon natural resource assets from the less developed countries, thus off-shoring or displacing many of the environmental burderns of upward mobility. In turn, it is poverty AND affluence that contribute to global environmental change in the modern world--the latter a significant contributor to the latter. Hollander's empathy for the world's poor is admirable, but unless one has a clear conception of the underlying factors that contribute to uneven development in the modern world economy, including the ecological dimensions, it is easy to fall into the trap of conceptualizing poverty as the single, overarching driver of environmental degradation and change.

Rich western nations have done a lot to preserve natural habitats and clean up their air and water. People in poor countries are too busy surviving to worry about the environment, and even if they did, lack the resources to make a difference. This book takes these observations as the basis for a broader hypothesis - the answer to our global environmental crisis lies in the fostering of global affluence. As people get richer the problems of the environment will on the whole sort themselves out. For instance only in the affluent nations have we seen the brakes go on the exponential rise in human populations. The book could also be taken as an antidote to the pessimism that surrounds aspects of the environmental movement. Hollander is relentlessly optimistic. He downplays many of the things that environmentalists worry about like peak oil, the dangers of GM food (a force for good), global warming (current changes may not be secondary to human industrial activity) and over-population (we can feed 10billion with better yields and better distribution).

The problem with Hollander's thesis is that in its optimism it leaves a lot of important considerations unexplored. The word affluence is used throughout but never clearly defined or unpacked. For instance historically the affluence of some tends to depend on the poverty of others. We can't all be affluent - even in the US 15% of its citizens live in "official" poverty. Also though affluence tends to improve local environments it can have the opposite effect at distant out-of-sight locations. Though rainforests get chopped by desperate subsistence farmers they get even more chopped by big firms growing feed crops to raise beef for sale in affluent nations. The polluting industrialists of China are making goods for markets in affluent countries. Hollander concludes "The world's fossil fuel supplies are plentiful. They will neither run out nor become scarce in the foreseeable future". While this may be true for coal it is not true of oil (Hollander doesn't mention important evidence like the artifical hike in purported reserves by OPEC nations in the 1980s) - yet oil is the central commodity underpinning the author's version of Western affluence (including cheap transportation and abundant food).

It is good to be reminded of the environmental dangers of poverty but Hollander is at his best explaining the investments that countries like the US have made in preserving their forests (healthier now than anytime in the last 100 years) and wildlife (implementing the Endangered Species Act has cost billions). The author seems to have quite narrow vision despite his global agenda - I imagine him as happily affluent in a beautiful retirement house in the hills of northern California. But the book feels overly devoted to this ideal with statements such as "earth is not short of cropland - it short of affluence". Only on the topic of road congestion does a sense of pessimism creep in - even hydrogen-powered cars take up space. The book contains surprisingly little direct argumentation around poverty and focuses more on reframes of standard western environmental anxieties such as the role of nuclear, water security and depletion of fish stocks.

It is hard to get excited about affluence, abundance yes, but not affluence. And we need abundance of many things, not only material things, some of which are found in equal or greater abundance amongst the poor.