The Real Environmental Crisis by Jack Hollander, California University Press, £19.95/$27.50, ISBN 0520237889
Empires of Profit by Daniel Litvin, Texere, £18.99, ISBN 1587991160
Five Past Midnight in Bhopal by Dominique Lapierre and Javier Moro, Scribner, £7.99, ISBN 0743220358
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THE cover of The Real Environmental Crisis shows a shanty town in Manila, the capital of the Philippines. Over it towers a giant rubbish dump. Locals call it Smokey Mountain. Underneath the photo is the book’s subtitle: “Why poverty, not affluence, is the environment’s number one enemy”. The message seems clear. Poverty caused the rubbish dump; the shanty town dwellers are living in their own waste and polluting the planet.
The truth is different, of course. What Jack Hollander’s book never tells you is that the rubbish comes from the city’s middle-class suburbs. The shanty town is home to communities who survive by scavenging and recycling the junk. Far from being environmental villains, they are the clean-up squad.
I am sure Hollander never meant to convey such a lie. He says that rich countries, able to afford to care about their environment, have been quite successful in cleaning their rivers and city air. For poor people, “life’s basic necessities, often survival itself, take on a higher priority than environmental quality”. Making people richer is the best way to overcome the planet’s environmental ills, he argues.
But, like the cover photo, the story insinuates that the poor are to blame for the state of the world. And he stumbles down this road because he shows a breathtaking political naivety. He seems not to know that the rich use their wealth and power to visit their environmental problems on the poor.
Just as Manila’s monied folk visit their rubbish on the people of Smokey Mountain, we make sure our dirtiest mines and most dangerous factories operate in poor countries rather than in our own manicured backyards.
But Hollander goes beyond naivety. Discussing global warming, he first works hard to deny the problem exists at all. Then, he argues, if it turns out to be a real problem rich countries will cope best by adapting to the warming. So, rather than trying to stop it, those parts of the world less able to cope should hurry up and get rich too.
He does not consider the alternative proposition that those who caused the problem, the already rich countries, might be required to solve it. No wonder, as he says towards the end, “the road to affluence is, lamentably, littered with the detritus of human history, culture and repression,” and the process of getting rich is “protracted and painful”. He doesn’t, however, ask for whom and why?
It was a relief to turn to Daniel Litvin’s Empires of Profit. His themes are global corporations and their financial, imperial and occasionally philanthropic ambitions. Examples range from England’s East India Company, which once ruled a fifth of the planet’s people, to Nike, whose Third World sportswear factories bring a new meaning to the phrase “working up a sweat”, and to Rupert Murdoch’s Chinese media machinations.
His purpose is not to trash them, but he is appalled by their behaviour, bemused by their corporate blindness and not too distressed that most eventually get their comeuppance at the hands of their hosts. This is an important book, of use both as a primer for corporate bosses and ammunition for their enemies. And it’s fun to read. Nice to know that an Argentinian doctor called Che Guevara was in Guatemala to witness the United Fruit inspired coup there in 1954, and was prompted to take up arms against capitalism. And I was intrigued to discover that a village at the heart of Mexico’s Zapatista rebellion has elevated Coca-Cola to a ritual elixir and the resulting belches as a purging of evil spirits.
More directly damning of corporate culture is Five Past Midnight in Bhopal. This begins as a beautiful description of Indian daily life in the age of globalisation. So much so that you barely notice that the world’s worst industrial disaster, which left thousands dead after a night of terror, does not occur till almost three-quarters through its 400 pages. Forensic but forceful, this is investigative journalism in full flow.