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TODAY Thursday 24 July 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site.

 

TODAY IN THE WORLD: Top and Bottom

Alan Durning has said that most long-term environmental damage comes from the richest one-fifth of the world's population and the poorest one-fifth. The richest one-fifth owns all the cars, occupies most of the land, and consumes more than 80% of the fuels and materials. Since almost all Americans qualify for the top one-fifth, we tend to define environmental problems from this perspective.

But the poorest one-fifth does a lot of damage, too. People too poor to buy bottled gas gather firewood to cook their food. People too hungry to wait any longer uproot young trees and immature crops. And people too marginalized to demand sanitation systems expose themselves and others (sometimes even us) to the spread of infectious pathogens.

There is news in the papers pertinent to both fifths. The day before yesterday, the most powerful man in the world -- Alan Greenspan -- professed himself satisfied with the soundness of the American economy and its stock market. His anxiety of last December, when he worried about the "irrational exuberance" of Wall Street, was tactfully mothballed, even though the Dow rose a record 1,600 points in the interim. The market celebrated yesterday with a 27-point rise.

Did Greenspan turn about-face? Not really, says Richard Stevenson in this morning's New York Times. Greenspan's anxieties of last December were based on the supposition that companies would have a hard time turning profits handsome enough to justify sky-high investor confidence. As it's turned out, though, the investors had it right. Corporate earnings are way up in 1997, often spectacularly so, and in both of this year's quarters.

It is a rare person who, invested in the market, does not feel pleased by the boom and grateful for the lightened burden of retirement planning and care for dependents. Sectors of society not known for "irrational exuberance" about capitalism -- tenured professors, for example, or administrators of large non-profit organizations -- are enriched beyond their dreams, set up for life. Good or bad, you hear a lot less these days about the virtues of confiscatory taxes and the redistribution of wealth. And you hear virtually nothing about the environmental evils of over-consumption, at least not in public. Almost all the civic discourse about reducing greenhouse gases, for example, takes as its point of departure that economic growth, as measured in dollar figures, is an absolute good, and that emissions caps will be made possible by technological efficiencies and reconfigured financial incentives. This is not a criticism; I say the same.

Meanwhile, though, the bottom fifth struggles on. Yesterday's paper brought word of a new report from Unicef, documenting the death of 2.2 million children a year from easily-preventable diarrheal disorders. Half the world's population has no access to sanitary toilets and the bottom fifth has no access to potable water. "Today," writes Barbara Crosette, "about 300 million more people lack sanitation than in 1990." Environmentalists worry about the pressure on natural ecosystems exerted by the rural fraction of the growing global population of poor people. Public health officials worry that the newly-urbanized fraction, without basic sanitation, will occasion the emergence of new plagues and the revival of old ones. Perhaps the growth in the wealth of the global economy and the growth in the numbers of the world's impoverished are necessary parallel developments, and that the latter will be solved only by the former. We shall see, perhaps in our lifetimes, and we shall see the costs exacted on nature and the costs she exacts in return.

TODAY ON THE SITE

May we mention that population is an abiding environmental issue? For basic information on worldwide population dynamics, plus even-handed summaries of conflicting positions, look into the Population feature of our In The Trenches section. Dianne Sherman serves as your guide.

Recent "Today" columns:

7/23: Smart Exxon
7/22: Climate Chess
7/21: Don't Know Much About Conservation
7/18: All Aboard
7/17: Downward and Outward Mobility
7/16: A Muggy Day on The Hill
7/15: Plug for Planet Ark
7/14: Follow Me
7/11: Blood Sports
7/10: Oil and Taxes

To access more "Today" columns, click "Archives" below.