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Environment and development
ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT
CLIFFORD S. RUSSELL Resources for the Future, Inc., 1755 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Washington, D.C. 20036, USA
A BSTRA CT
This paper is an attempt to shed some light on the environment/development debate which first really surfaced during the preparations f o r the Stockholm Conference (1972). The basic approach is simply to separate the issues into problems which both developing and developed nations share, and those which are concentrated in (if not unique to) the developing nations. Solution possibilities are similarly separated, and some modest prescriptions for action and non-action are suggested.
INTRODUCTION
Some of the bitterest and potentially most explosive debates going on in the world today concern issues raised by the links between economic development and environmental problems. At the heart of most of these debates is the conflict between the dangers which we of the wealthy countries see in many major steps taken by the developing nations and the need perceived by the people and governments of those countries for a higher material standard of living. In order to outline the arguments, I shall paraphrase two fairly extreme positions. (i) The environmentalists of the developed world : Development is all very well but it must not be done using western technology. New, non-polluting technologies must be developed and tied to aid projects. Big dams for power and irrigation development are out, especially in tropical areas, but especially where they threaten 'natural' ecosystems or significant relics of the human past. The 'green revolution' is at best a mixed bag, and probably farmers in developing countries should concentrate on traditional crop varieties and minimize use of pesticides and industrial fertilisers. For a really extreme example of this position see Geroudet (1970). This is the French translation of an open letter from Drs Darling, Huxley and Scott of England, criticising Uganda's intention of damming the White Nile at 227 Biol. Conserv. (7) (1975)--© Applied Science Publishers Ltd, England, 1975 Printed in Great Britain
228
CLIFFORD S. RUSSELL
Murchison Falls, the centre of a large and famous game park, and suggesting that the British government withdraw its financial support of the project and work to have international lending agencies do likewise. For another attack on development as the root of most, if not all, evil, see Hughes & Hunter (1972). (ii) The advocates of 'damn the environment, full speed ahead', are perhaps best represented by the Brazilian position as reported in the New York Times (13 February 1972, p. I 1): ' . . . "poor, unpolluted [sic] countries should have the right to do some polluting of their own for the sake of benefits that industry has already brought to rich, polluted countries . . . . Controlling pollution is the job of the countries that have caused it [the rich, industrial nations]." Brazilian delegates [to the UN] have served notice that their country is not going to slow her growth with pollution-control devices to pay for the sins of others.' Clearly, these are matters on which reasonable men may differ (though unfortunately, reasonable men seldom remain that way while discussing them) and there is much to be said on each side. Surely there is such a thing as a common human heritage of exotic flora and fauna, natural 'wonders' and ruins of ancient civilisations, the fate of which is of legitimate concern to all people, not just the citizens of the modern nation which happens to be sitting on them. Then, too, there are global environmental problems to which the developing nations have already contributed a significant share (e.g., persistent pesticide accumulations in natural systems). Nevertheless the developed world is in a precarious moral position from which to lecture the developing cotrntries about pollution. It has been responsible for very nearly all of the problem--certainly in the areas of combustion residuals (including the long-term, global problem, CO2) and exotic industrial wastes. (Fora discussion of international environmental problems in general, see Russell & Landsberg (197 l).) We have done very little by way of correcting our policies, and the prospects are that petroleum and natural gas shortages will, over the intermediate run, result in our doing even less. Finally, we do, at this moment, have a monopoly on the materially comfortable life, while the citizens of the developing countries are, on average, subject to all the problems attendant on serious poverty (malnutrition; chronic wasting diseases; high infant mortality and short life expectancies) and face very little prospect of improvement in their own or their children's lifetimes. Given the intensely emotional nature of the issues involved, is there any prospect that anything we can say or do will be helpful? I think there is, but we must be content with rather modest contributions. Accordingly, in this paper I shall try to do four things: (i) separate issues in an attempt to clarify the argument; (ii) dispel one or two persistent myths; (iii) suggest where quantitative analysis might be helpful; (iv) speculate on rudimentary institutional forms which might form the basis for some first positive steps.
ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT
229
First, however, I think it is necessary to dispose of a position which seems to hold an easy answer to this tangled problem: the claim that development in general is a bad thing; that the economically backward societies would be much better off without any of the trappings of industrial society; that if we would just leave them alone they would develop new and better life styles which would not be materialistic; and so on. Again, there are nuggets of truth, for surely the process of development wreaks havoc and creates very large human costs in societies which have been in some sort of equilibrium for hundreds of years. On the other hand, my own observations, though very limited, strongly suggest that bicycles and radios are intensely attractive things for the rural population of a developing country, and that the way of life being overturned by the market economy with its seductive goods is far from obviously superior to what is coming in. In any case the people of the developing countries must ultimately decide which they prefer. (It is reported that the Taos Pueblo in New Mexico reached an interesting compromise in a development/environment controversy. Electricity was installed, but all lines are buried and all lights must be placed so that they are not directly visible from the outside.)
SHARED PROBLEMS
One fundamental misunderstanding which interferes with a reasonable search for solutions is the idea that, apart from the problems introduced with foreign-aid development projects, developing countries really are unpolluted--or that such pollution as exists is only a problem for the sensitive nose or the eyes of the Western visitor. There are, of course, rural areas in developing countries where the population is sufficiently sparse for there to be no pollution of the environment at large. But where there is a population concentration larger than a small village there are problems of waste disposal and in the large cities of the developing countries these are frequently handled very badly--particularly the matter of sewage. This is not simply an aesthetic problem for Westerners; many of man's most serious diseases are spread most effectively via this route. Moreover, the cities of most developing countries already share other problems with us--auto congestion and emissions; combustion residuals such as SO2; high noise levels; and growing volumes of solid waste. In Brazil, for example, much recent development has been concentrated in the Rio-Sao Paulo area and has apparently created some really bad water and air quality conditions. Again, enough is known about the effects of high ambient concentrations of SO2 and suspended particulates for us to be certain that these conditions are causing significant damage. It is highly unlikely that these effects occur only among relatively wealthy populations. Two alternative hypotheses have been suggested by readers of an earlier draft of this paper. One position was that it might be impossible to disentangle any
230
CLIFFORD S. RUSSELL
pollution health effects from other problems in countries with low life expectancies. The other hypothesis is that the prior existence of malnutrition and debilitating chronic diseases will amplify the effects of a given insult to the respiratory tract. The lessons here seem to be to be the following: (i) Most developing countries probably already suffer some serious environmental degradation with human costs that are not merely aesthetic but include measurable community health damages. (ii) These damages may already be great enough in some urban areas to justify devoting scarce resources to their control in the interests of a healthy work force. (iii) Since further growth without controls will only make things worse, a case can be made that the alternatives are not those described by the Brazilians. Rather, real growth in well-being may be greater with controls in many places. I am here ignoring global problems and concentrating on those confined to limited regions or, indeed, to the interior of a single nation. For truly global problems, such as persistent pesticides and long-term CO2 build-up, the 'Brazilian' stance defined above is hard to fault. Since everybody stands to lose and since the rich countries cause most of the problem, it seems equitable that we incur most of the costs of whatever controls or limits are adopted now. (iv) Even though our own record in this field is less than brilliant, our experience may point the way to some lessons about solutions.
SHARED SOLUTION POSSIBILITIES
The first thing I would hope the developing countries would learn from our experience is that decisions about environmental quality are by their very nature intensely political in the best, not the pejorative, sense of that word. The reason for this is that environmental 'goods' and 'bads' are almost always what economists call 'public'--that is, they affect everyone. Thus, if air quality gets better in a city, all the citizens benefit to some extent, but there is, in general, no way to ration that benefit through a market. To achieve improvements, then, it is necessary for a government to decide on a level of quality to be achieved and on a way of distributing the costs, and to force the citizens to pay those costs. Once basic decisions have been made about the balance between material goods and environmental quality, there are broadly two ways of going about implementation: economic incentives (effluent charges) and reliance on rational economic reactions; or one or another version of physical planning (treatment method specification for individual discharges for example). Although in the US we have really never gone through the exercise of deciding how clean we want our environment to be, we have, with the 1972 water quality amendments, embarked on a complex process aimed at specifying 'acceptable' discharges at every individual industrial plant.
ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT
23l
Two other 'routes' to higher environmental quality ought to be mentioned because they have popular followings and appear to vitiate the necessity for government intervention asserted above. The first is 'recycling'; a case of confusion of cause and effect in my opinion. If the external costs of pollution were forced back onto dischargers, be they firms or households, there would be considerably more recycling undertaken because it would then pay to do it. The current system depends on voluntarism--always a weak reed. In fact, there is already considerable recycling going on in developing countries, but it is of a slightly different variety than that envisaged by environmental activists in the developed world. For example, liquid containers are normally used again and again in poor countries; large tin cans and bottles are usually actively traded in second-hand markets. This particular effect is related to the general lack of running water within houses as well as the costs of new imported containers. In addition, clothing and, indeed, cloth in general are recycled to extinction. The outlook in the short run, then, as development proceeds is probably for a decline in the amount of recycling. The second route is 'changing lifestyle', the arguments for which are outlined at the beginning of this paper.
UNSHARED PROBLEMS
It is not true, of course, that all environmental problems of the developing world are simple analogues of those the industrial nations have been experiencing. Clearing the lush rain forest to make way for agriculture generally exposes not a rich soil but a poor one, quickly exhausted of its nutrients by a few crops, subject to serious erosion during rainy seasons, and liable to bake to a hard crust under the sun. On the other hand, artificial water impoundments tend to be rather quickly taken over by lush crops of water hyacinth, destroying fishing possibilities and generally shortening reservoir lives. In addition, throughout most of the tropical world, creating expanses of still water and digging irrigation canals greatly encourages the spread of bilharziasis by providing a friendly environment for the snail host. The difficulties presented by these seemingly perverse ecological effects are made more severe by the scale on which development projects have typically been carried out. Thus, each African nation has to have its massive hydroelectric dam and several have gone through the agony of immense cultivation efforts which proved inappropriate. (Perhaps the best known is the ground-nut [peanut] scheme in what was then Tanganyika in the 1950s.) The fact that the projects are also very different from what has existed before in those places makes prediction of the effects difficult, The problem is recognised by major development lending agencies. See 'Environmental Standards Are Sought for Aid Projects in Developing Countries,'
232
CLIFFORD S. RUSSELL
New York Times, 13 June 1971. To my knowledge, the World Bank has published no guidelines in this area, though they have commissioned internal working documents and do have a section 'in charge of the problem. AID's position is that, while foreign development projects are not subject to the requirements of NEPA, the environmental effects of such projects should be considered in making the grants. To this end, an annex to the project proposal is required in which an assessment of these impacts is provided. The annex is submitted to the US Council on Environmental Quality for information only. (The requirements are set out formally in the Federal Register, Vol. 37, No. 204, 20 October 1972, pp. 187, 188.) A second type of environmental problem concentrated in, if not unique to, the developing world involves unusual and endangered examples of wildlife, particularly the larger and more spectacular species. Similarly, some developing countries have magnificent landscapes which are often still unspoiled, primarily because of the lack of industrial growth. These two issues come together in the 'national-parks' problem. That is, in many developing nations, especially in subSaharan Africa, there are large national parks which serve to protect entire ecological systems frequently in magnificent settings, but at the cost of keeping out the local citizen as cultivator and hunter. This is becoming a significant political problem for the governments concerned, while at the same time conservation organisations from the developed world are doing all they can to save the parks. (For an introduction to this problem and its literature, see Myers (1972). More specific examples are discussed in Myers (197i).) Where there are at present no parks, there may be pressures from the outside to create them. See, for example, 'Zambians Agree to Game Refuge', New York Times, 19 September 1971. There are some incentives for the local governments to maintain one or more parks where natural conditions warrant it. In particular, the parks are big tourist magnets, holding the promise of significant and growing foreign exchange earnings with growing leisure and income in the developed countries. There are also schemes for government or contract cropping of big game population surpluses in order that the government can capture the rents in meat, hides and ivory. This general problem may well be one on which an expansion of current international efforts could bring successful results.
UNSHARED SOLUTION POSSIBILITIES
It would be a boon to the developing countries, if there was a unique set of solution possibilities to complement their unique problems. Unfortunately, this does not appear to be the case, unless one is willing to take seriously the option of retreat from development. Even this, of course, would have to be linked to a drastically lowered birth rate or a relaxation of efforts to keep the death rate down. Otherwise the weight of population growth would, by itself, reduce whatever 'quality' was left
ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT
233
to life. It seems rather that the same hard, political questions face the developing and developed nations though the answers found will almost certainly differ widely because of the obvious differences in incomes, cultural backgrounds, industrial structures, etc. On the institutional front it is tempting to express optimism. Since in most developing nations the organs of government and administration are still evolving, there are openings for the creation and adaptation of institutions designed specifically to: (i) gather the information necessary to illuminate the costs and benefits, and their distributions, of alternative political decisions about environmental quality; (ii) develop and administer the means of achieving the levels of ambient quality decided on; and (iii) make sure that new development projects are assessed as accurately as possible and that their predicted consequences are known to the political decision-makers. On reflection, however, such optimism seems extremely na'we. It appears that unfettered industrial development will have its constituency within the administrative structure of the state, more or less regardless of the situation of the population at large.
SOME CONCLUSIONS
Where does all this bring me out? I would stress six points: (i) We should not and probably could not 'stop' development. (ii) We cannot and should not make the political decisions for developing countries on the appropriate balance between their own environmental quality and material goods production. This simple assertion conceals a more complex issue, since developing countries are usually at the mercy of foreign experts and corporations and may have no independent sources of information on impacts and alternatives. (iii) In cases of global environmental problems, the developed nations are almost always the major culprits and are, in any event, much better able to afford the costs of control measures. Hence the industrialised world should act unilaterally to cut down its own contribution to such problems. (iv) We should not, however, be embarrassed to point out wherever appropriate that there are real environmental costs, not just aesthetic losses, to uncontrolled growth, urbanisation and industrialisation. (v) We should, in providing development loans and grants, help the recipients to explore a range of choice in output mixes, including predicted environmental damages. This will at least permit an informed choice among paths--a judgement by the country itself as to what monetary cost is justified to attain what mix of material and environmental goods. This is an area in which great contributions can be made since the techniques for predicting these effects are currently rudimentary and underdeveloped themselves. In short, project analysis needs a new dimension
234
CLIFFORD S. RUSSELL
that can only be provided by biologists, zoologists, sanitary engineers, etc., who are willing to w o r k in multidisciplinary teams. (vi) Finally, we should work to set up a formal and reasonably efficient mechanism for transferring income from richer to poorer nations specifically to pay for the preservation of endangered species, habitats, natural landscapes, etc. Voluntary conservation organisations are currently doing some of this, but not nearly enough. If we want to save Murchison Falls, we should be willing to pay a large part of the bill. In the resolution of the conflicts between development and environment, there are no easy answers. Just as in so m a n y other problem areas, the hard decisions must ultimately be taken in the political milieu. Some people will win and others will lose and measurement of the gains and losses resulting from changes in environmental quality will be supremely difficult, if not impossible. The prediction of effects, even in physical terms, from specific choices of action (such as a particular development project) is still largely beyond us. In one area it does seem to me our duty is c l e a r - - w e of the industrialised world should be paying for species and landscape preservation.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This paper was prepared for a panel on The limits to g r o w t h a n d the ecological imperative, Mt Holyoke College, March 1974. 1 would like to thank my colleagues, especially Allen Kneese, Hans Landsberg and Jeff Vaughan, for comments on an earlier version.
REFERENCES Federal Register, 37(204), 20 October 1972, 187, 188. GEaOUD~r, PAUL(1970). Murchison Falls en Ouganda: Destruction ou protection, Biol. Conserv., 2, 309- !0. HUGHES,C. C. & HUNTER,J. M. (1972). The role of technologicaldevelopment in promoting disease in Africa, Ecologist, September/October. MYERs,N. (1971). Wildlife and development in Uganda, BioScience, 21, 1071-5. MYEas, N. (1972). National parks in savannah Africa, Science, N. Y., 178, 1255-63. RUSSELL, C. S. & LANDSBEaG,H. L. (1971). International environmental problems: a taxonomy, Science, N.Y., 177, 1307-14.
CLIFFORD S. RUSSELL Resources for the Future, Inc., 1755 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Washington, D.C. 20036, USA
A BSTRA CT
This paper is an attempt to shed some light on the environment/development debate which first really surfaced during the preparations f o r the Stockholm Conference (1972). The basic approach is simply to separate the issues into problems which both developing and developed nations share, and those which are concentrated in (if not unique to) the developing nations. Solution possibilities are similarly separated, and some modest prescriptions for action and non-action are suggested.
INTRODUCTION
Some of the bitterest and potentially most explosive debates going on in the world today concern issues raised by the links between economic development and environmental problems. At the heart of most of these debates is the conflict between the dangers which we of the wealthy countries see in many major steps taken by the developing nations and the need perceived by the people and governments of those countries for a higher material standard of living. In order to outline the arguments, I shall paraphrase two fairly extreme positions. (i) The environmentalists of the developed world : Development is all very well but it must not be done using western technology. New, non-polluting technologies must be developed and tied to aid projects. Big dams for power and irrigation development are out, especially in tropical areas, but especially where they threaten 'natural' ecosystems or significant relics of the human past. The 'green revolution' is at best a mixed bag, and probably farmers in developing countries should concentrate on traditional crop varieties and minimize use of pesticides and industrial fertilisers. For a really extreme example of this position see Geroudet (1970). This is the French translation of an open letter from Drs Darling, Huxley and Scott of England, criticising Uganda's intention of damming the White Nile at 227 Biol. Conserv. (7) (1975)--© Applied Science Publishers Ltd, England, 1975 Printed in Great Britain
228
CLIFFORD S. RUSSELL
Murchison Falls, the centre of a large and famous game park, and suggesting that the British government withdraw its financial support of the project and work to have international lending agencies do likewise. For another attack on development as the root of most, if not all, evil, see Hughes & Hunter (1972). (ii) The advocates of 'damn the environment, full speed ahead', are perhaps best represented by the Brazilian position as reported in the New York Times (13 February 1972, p. I 1): ' . . . "poor, unpolluted [sic] countries should have the right to do some polluting of their own for the sake of benefits that industry has already brought to rich, polluted countries . . . . Controlling pollution is the job of the countries that have caused it [the rich, industrial nations]." Brazilian delegates [to the UN] have served notice that their country is not going to slow her growth with pollution-control devices to pay for the sins of others.' Clearly, these are matters on which reasonable men may differ (though unfortunately, reasonable men seldom remain that way while discussing them) and there is much to be said on each side. Surely there is such a thing as a common human heritage of exotic flora and fauna, natural 'wonders' and ruins of ancient civilisations, the fate of which is of legitimate concern to all people, not just the citizens of the modern nation which happens to be sitting on them. Then, too, there are global environmental problems to which the developing nations have already contributed a significant share (e.g., persistent pesticide accumulations in natural systems). Nevertheless the developed world is in a precarious moral position from which to lecture the developing cotrntries about pollution. It has been responsible for very nearly all of the problem--certainly in the areas of combustion residuals (including the long-term, global problem, CO2) and exotic industrial wastes. (Fora discussion of international environmental problems in general, see Russell & Landsberg (197 l).) We have done very little by way of correcting our policies, and the prospects are that petroleum and natural gas shortages will, over the intermediate run, result in our doing even less. Finally, we do, at this moment, have a monopoly on the materially comfortable life, while the citizens of the developing countries are, on average, subject to all the problems attendant on serious poverty (malnutrition; chronic wasting diseases; high infant mortality and short life expectancies) and face very little prospect of improvement in their own or their children's lifetimes. Given the intensely emotional nature of the issues involved, is there any prospect that anything we can say or do will be helpful? I think there is, but we must be content with rather modest contributions. Accordingly, in this paper I shall try to do four things: (i) separate issues in an attempt to clarify the argument; (ii) dispel one or two persistent myths; (iii) suggest where quantitative analysis might be helpful; (iv) speculate on rudimentary institutional forms which might form the basis for some first positive steps.
ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT
229
First, however, I think it is necessary to dispose of a position which seems to hold an easy answer to this tangled problem: the claim that development in general is a bad thing; that the economically backward societies would be much better off without any of the trappings of industrial society; that if we would just leave them alone they would develop new and better life styles which would not be materialistic; and so on. Again, there are nuggets of truth, for surely the process of development wreaks havoc and creates very large human costs in societies which have been in some sort of equilibrium for hundreds of years. On the other hand, my own observations, though very limited, strongly suggest that bicycles and radios are intensely attractive things for the rural population of a developing country, and that the way of life being overturned by the market economy with its seductive goods is far from obviously superior to what is coming in. In any case the people of the developing countries must ultimately decide which they prefer. (It is reported that the Taos Pueblo in New Mexico reached an interesting compromise in a development/environment controversy. Electricity was installed, but all lines are buried and all lights must be placed so that they are not directly visible from the outside.)
SHARED PROBLEMS
One fundamental misunderstanding which interferes with a reasonable search for solutions is the idea that, apart from the problems introduced with foreign-aid development projects, developing countries really are unpolluted--or that such pollution as exists is only a problem for the sensitive nose or the eyes of the Western visitor. There are, of course, rural areas in developing countries where the population is sufficiently sparse for there to be no pollution of the environment at large. But where there is a population concentration larger than a small village there are problems of waste disposal and in the large cities of the developing countries these are frequently handled very badly--particularly the matter of sewage. This is not simply an aesthetic problem for Westerners; many of man's most serious diseases are spread most effectively via this route. Moreover, the cities of most developing countries already share other problems with us--auto congestion and emissions; combustion residuals such as SO2; high noise levels; and growing volumes of solid waste. In Brazil, for example, much recent development has been concentrated in the Rio-Sao Paulo area and has apparently created some really bad water and air quality conditions. Again, enough is known about the effects of high ambient concentrations of SO2 and suspended particulates for us to be certain that these conditions are causing significant damage. It is highly unlikely that these effects occur only among relatively wealthy populations. Two alternative hypotheses have been suggested by readers of an earlier draft of this paper. One position was that it might be impossible to disentangle any
230
CLIFFORD S. RUSSELL
pollution health effects from other problems in countries with low life expectancies. The other hypothesis is that the prior existence of malnutrition and debilitating chronic diseases will amplify the effects of a given insult to the respiratory tract. The lessons here seem to be to be the following: (i) Most developing countries probably already suffer some serious environmental degradation with human costs that are not merely aesthetic but include measurable community health damages. (ii) These damages may already be great enough in some urban areas to justify devoting scarce resources to their control in the interests of a healthy work force. (iii) Since further growth without controls will only make things worse, a case can be made that the alternatives are not those described by the Brazilians. Rather, real growth in well-being may be greater with controls in many places. I am here ignoring global problems and concentrating on those confined to limited regions or, indeed, to the interior of a single nation. For truly global problems, such as persistent pesticides and long-term CO2 build-up, the 'Brazilian' stance defined above is hard to fault. Since everybody stands to lose and since the rich countries cause most of the problem, it seems equitable that we incur most of the costs of whatever controls or limits are adopted now. (iv) Even though our own record in this field is less than brilliant, our experience may point the way to some lessons about solutions.
SHARED SOLUTION POSSIBILITIES
The first thing I would hope the developing countries would learn from our experience is that decisions about environmental quality are by their very nature intensely political in the best, not the pejorative, sense of that word. The reason for this is that environmental 'goods' and 'bads' are almost always what economists call 'public'--that is, they affect everyone. Thus, if air quality gets better in a city, all the citizens benefit to some extent, but there is, in general, no way to ration that benefit through a market. To achieve improvements, then, it is necessary for a government to decide on a level of quality to be achieved and on a way of distributing the costs, and to force the citizens to pay those costs. Once basic decisions have been made about the balance between material goods and environmental quality, there are broadly two ways of going about implementation: economic incentives (effluent charges) and reliance on rational economic reactions; or one or another version of physical planning (treatment method specification for individual discharges for example). Although in the US we have really never gone through the exercise of deciding how clean we want our environment to be, we have, with the 1972 water quality amendments, embarked on a complex process aimed at specifying 'acceptable' discharges at every individual industrial plant.
ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT
23l
Two other 'routes' to higher environmental quality ought to be mentioned because they have popular followings and appear to vitiate the necessity for government intervention asserted above. The first is 'recycling'; a case of confusion of cause and effect in my opinion. If the external costs of pollution were forced back onto dischargers, be they firms or households, there would be considerably more recycling undertaken because it would then pay to do it. The current system depends on voluntarism--always a weak reed. In fact, there is already considerable recycling going on in developing countries, but it is of a slightly different variety than that envisaged by environmental activists in the developed world. For example, liquid containers are normally used again and again in poor countries; large tin cans and bottles are usually actively traded in second-hand markets. This particular effect is related to the general lack of running water within houses as well as the costs of new imported containers. In addition, clothing and, indeed, cloth in general are recycled to extinction. The outlook in the short run, then, as development proceeds is probably for a decline in the amount of recycling. The second route is 'changing lifestyle', the arguments for which are outlined at the beginning of this paper.
UNSHARED PROBLEMS
It is not true, of course, that all environmental problems of the developing world are simple analogues of those the industrial nations have been experiencing. Clearing the lush rain forest to make way for agriculture generally exposes not a rich soil but a poor one, quickly exhausted of its nutrients by a few crops, subject to serious erosion during rainy seasons, and liable to bake to a hard crust under the sun. On the other hand, artificial water impoundments tend to be rather quickly taken over by lush crops of water hyacinth, destroying fishing possibilities and generally shortening reservoir lives. In addition, throughout most of the tropical world, creating expanses of still water and digging irrigation canals greatly encourages the spread of bilharziasis by providing a friendly environment for the snail host. The difficulties presented by these seemingly perverse ecological effects are made more severe by the scale on which development projects have typically been carried out. Thus, each African nation has to have its massive hydroelectric dam and several have gone through the agony of immense cultivation efforts which proved inappropriate. (Perhaps the best known is the ground-nut [peanut] scheme in what was then Tanganyika in the 1950s.) The fact that the projects are also very different from what has existed before in those places makes prediction of the effects difficult, The problem is recognised by major development lending agencies. See 'Environmental Standards Are Sought for Aid Projects in Developing Countries,'
232
CLIFFORD S. RUSSELL
New York Times, 13 June 1971. To my knowledge, the World Bank has published no guidelines in this area, though they have commissioned internal working documents and do have a section 'in charge of the problem. AID's position is that, while foreign development projects are not subject to the requirements of NEPA, the environmental effects of such projects should be considered in making the grants. To this end, an annex to the project proposal is required in which an assessment of these impacts is provided. The annex is submitted to the US Council on Environmental Quality for information only. (The requirements are set out formally in the Federal Register, Vol. 37, No. 204, 20 October 1972, pp. 187, 188.) A second type of environmental problem concentrated in, if not unique to, the developing world involves unusual and endangered examples of wildlife, particularly the larger and more spectacular species. Similarly, some developing countries have magnificent landscapes which are often still unspoiled, primarily because of the lack of industrial growth. These two issues come together in the 'national-parks' problem. That is, in many developing nations, especially in subSaharan Africa, there are large national parks which serve to protect entire ecological systems frequently in magnificent settings, but at the cost of keeping out the local citizen as cultivator and hunter. This is becoming a significant political problem for the governments concerned, while at the same time conservation organisations from the developed world are doing all they can to save the parks. (For an introduction to this problem and its literature, see Myers (1972). More specific examples are discussed in Myers (197i).) Where there are at present no parks, there may be pressures from the outside to create them. See, for example, 'Zambians Agree to Game Refuge', New York Times, 19 September 1971. There are some incentives for the local governments to maintain one or more parks where natural conditions warrant it. In particular, the parks are big tourist magnets, holding the promise of significant and growing foreign exchange earnings with growing leisure and income in the developed countries. There are also schemes for government or contract cropping of big game population surpluses in order that the government can capture the rents in meat, hides and ivory. This general problem may well be one on which an expansion of current international efforts could bring successful results.
UNSHARED SOLUTION POSSIBILITIES
It would be a boon to the developing countries, if there was a unique set of solution possibilities to complement their unique problems. Unfortunately, this does not appear to be the case, unless one is willing to take seriously the option of retreat from development. Even this, of course, would have to be linked to a drastically lowered birth rate or a relaxation of efforts to keep the death rate down. Otherwise the weight of population growth would, by itself, reduce whatever 'quality' was left
ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT
233
to life. It seems rather that the same hard, political questions face the developing and developed nations though the answers found will almost certainly differ widely because of the obvious differences in incomes, cultural backgrounds, industrial structures, etc. On the institutional front it is tempting to express optimism. Since in most developing nations the organs of government and administration are still evolving, there are openings for the creation and adaptation of institutions designed specifically to: (i) gather the information necessary to illuminate the costs and benefits, and their distributions, of alternative political decisions about environmental quality; (ii) develop and administer the means of achieving the levels of ambient quality decided on; and (iii) make sure that new development projects are assessed as accurately as possible and that their predicted consequences are known to the political decision-makers. On reflection, however, such optimism seems extremely na'we. It appears that unfettered industrial development will have its constituency within the administrative structure of the state, more or less regardless of the situation of the population at large.
SOME CONCLUSIONS
Where does all this bring me out? I would stress six points: (i) We should not and probably could not 'stop' development. (ii) We cannot and should not make the political decisions for developing countries on the appropriate balance between their own environmental quality and material goods production. This simple assertion conceals a more complex issue, since developing countries are usually at the mercy of foreign experts and corporations and may have no independent sources of information on impacts and alternatives. (iii) In cases of global environmental problems, the developed nations are almost always the major culprits and are, in any event, much better able to afford the costs of control measures. Hence the industrialised world should act unilaterally to cut down its own contribution to such problems. (iv) We should not, however, be embarrassed to point out wherever appropriate that there are real environmental costs, not just aesthetic losses, to uncontrolled growth, urbanisation and industrialisation. (v) We should, in providing development loans and grants, help the recipients to explore a range of choice in output mixes, including predicted environmental damages. This will at least permit an informed choice among paths--a judgement by the country itself as to what monetary cost is justified to attain what mix of material and environmental goods. This is an area in which great contributions can be made since the techniques for predicting these effects are currently rudimentary and underdeveloped themselves. In short, project analysis needs a new dimension
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that can only be provided by biologists, zoologists, sanitary engineers, etc., who are willing to w o r k in multidisciplinary teams. (vi) Finally, we should work to set up a formal and reasonably efficient mechanism for transferring income from richer to poorer nations specifically to pay for the preservation of endangered species, habitats, natural landscapes, etc. Voluntary conservation organisations are currently doing some of this, but not nearly enough. If we want to save Murchison Falls, we should be willing to pay a large part of the bill. In the resolution of the conflicts between development and environment, there are no easy answers. Just as in so m a n y other problem areas, the hard decisions must ultimately be taken in the political milieu. Some people will win and others will lose and measurement of the gains and losses resulting from changes in environmental quality will be supremely difficult, if not impossible. The prediction of effects, even in physical terms, from specific choices of action (such as a particular development project) is still largely beyond us. In one area it does seem to me our duty is c l e a r - - w e of the industrialised world should be paying for species and landscape preservation.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This paper was prepared for a panel on The limits to g r o w t h a n d the ecological imperative, Mt Holyoke College, March 1974. 1 would like to thank my colleagues, especially Allen Kneese, Hans Landsberg and Jeff Vaughan, for comments on an earlier version.
REFERENCES Federal Register, 37(204), 20 October 1972, 187, 188. GEaOUD~r, PAUL(1970). Murchison Falls en Ouganda: Destruction ou protection, Biol. Conserv., 2, 309- !0. HUGHES,C. C. & HUNTER,J. M. (1972). The role of technologicaldevelopment in promoting disease in Africa, Ecologist, September/October. MYERs,N. (1971). Wildlife and development in Uganda, BioScience, 21, 1071-5. MYEas, N. (1972). National parks in savannah Africa, Science, N. Y., 178, 1255-63. RUSSELL, C. S. & LANDSBEaG,H. L. (1971). International environmental problems: a taxonomy, Science, N.Y., 177, 1307-14.