Ellis, E.C. 2008. Environmental Revolution
Starts at Home.
Science 320(5883; June 20):1587
Environmental Revolution Starts
at Home
The title of J. Liu and J. Diamond's Policy Forum,
"Revolutionizing China's environmental protection"
(4 January, p.
37), implies a novel solution to China's
environmental problems, but suggesting that China
must reform its environmental governance is nothing
new (
1). What's more,
criticizing a nation because economic performance is
still its main criterion for choosing government
leaders hardly seems fair. What criterion guides
U.S. national leadership? If the U.S. economy
appears greener than China's--and less pollution and
greenhouse gases are indeed generated per dollar of
U.S. GDP--this is only because the United States has
exported the "dirty" industries that produce most of
what it consumes to China and other nations that
need hard currency from abroad to develop their
economies.
China's environmental failings reflect the same
basic challenge faced by all governments: how to
enforce environmental regulations when these
conflict with economic development. Even Liu and
Diamond admit that China's government has already
attempted to couple environmental performance with
governance and has a plethora of environmental
regulations on the books. The main problem seems to
be an inability to enforce most of these in the face
of overwhelming economic pressures.
The reason that China has dramatic environmental
problems is not a mystery. China's once small
economy is booming, moving large numbers of people
into a modern consumer life-style. Given that this
development is linked to the expansion of China's
industry and energy use, as it has been everywhere
else, and that a large share of this is dedicated to
manufacturing what the rest of the world consumes,
those busy consuming the fruits of all of this
industrial production should share some of the
responsibility for the environmental results.
This would indeed be a revolution: finding a way
to make consumers pay for the environmental costs of
their consumption, even when they are incurred on
the other side of the world. In a globalized
economy, the environmental revolution ought to begin
at home.
Erle C. Ellis
Department of Geography and Environmental Systems
University of Maryland
Baltimore County
Baltimore, MD 21250, USA
Reference
-
V. Smil, China's Environmental Crisis:
An Inquiry into the Limits of National
Development (M. E. Sharpe, Armonk, NY,
1993).