A good read for the growth skeptics! "Yet when people start to reach middle-income level, other species start to benefit. That is partly because as people get richer, their interests begin to extend beyond necessities towards luxuries: for some people that means expensive shoes, for others a day’s bird-watching. Green pressure groups start leaning on government, and governments pass laws to constrain companies from damaging the environment. In the West, a posse of pressure groups such as Greenpeace and the Environmental Defence Fund started up in the 1960s and helped bring about legislation in the 1970s and 1980s. Growth also has indirect benefits for biodiversity. People clean up their environment in ways that help other species: through building sewage-treatment plants, for instance, and banning factories from pouring effluent into rivers. Prosperity and peace tend to go together, and conflict hurts other creatures as well as man, as the wars in the Congo have shown. Richer countries generally have better governments, and conservation cannot work without an effective state. Agricultural yields rise, allowing more food to be produced on less land. Population growth rates fall: in East Asia, fertility has dropped from 5.3 children per woman in the 1960s to 1.6 now. One consequence is that in rich countries conditions for other species are, by and large, improving, and endangered creatures are moving away from the edge of the cliff. America’s bald eagle, for instance, was down to 412 breeding pairs in the 1960s. There are now 7,066. Whale populations are mostly recovering thanks to a moratorium on commercial whaling. More broadly, the Living Planet Index, a compilation of a wide range of indicators of biodiversity produced by the Zoological Society of London and WWF, has risen over the past 40 years in temperate (generally rich) countries and fallen in tropical (generally poor) ones. This is not just because rich countries export their growth to emerging markets. Look, for instance, at the fate of the forests on the Korean peninsula: in South Korea, one of the world’s fastest-growing countries in recent decades, forest cover is stable, whereas North Korea has lost a third of its forests in the past 20 years. Nobody exported their growth to North Korea...." economist/news/leaders/21586346-more-growth-not-less-best-hope-averting-sixth-great-extinction-hang?fsrc=nlw|hig|9-12-2013|6608170|113022451|AP
Posted on: Sun, 15 Sep 2013 08:53:41 +0000
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