Environmental Movement in the Global South: The Pivotal Agent in the Fight against Global Warming

[espanol] 

By Walden Bello*

The developing
world's stance towards the question of the environment has often
been equated with the pugnacious comments of former Malaysian Prime
Minister Mohamad Mahathir, such as his famous lines at the Rio
Conference on the Environment and Development in June 1992:

When
the rich chopped down their own forests, built their poison-belching
factories and scoured the world for cheap resources, the poor said
nothing. Indeed they paid for the development of the rich. Now the
rich claim a right to regulate the development of the poor
countries…As colonies we were exploited. Now as independent nations
we are to be equally exploited .

THE ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT
IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH:

THE PIVOTAL AGENT IN THE
FIGHT AGAINST GLOBAL WARMING?*

Walden Bello**

 

The developing world's
stance towards the question of the environment has often been equated
with the pugnacious comments of former Malaysian Prime Minister
Mohamad Mahathir, such as his famous lines at the Rio Conference on
the Environment and Development in June 1992:

 

"When the rich chopped
down their own forests, built their poison-belching factories and
scoured the world for cheap resources, the poor said nothing. Indeed
they paid for the development of the rich. Now the rich claim a right
to regulate the development of the poor countries…As colonies we
were exploited. Now as independent nations we are to be equally
exploited." (1)

 

Mahathir has been
interpreted in the North as speaking for a South that seeks to catch
up whatever the cost and where the environmental movement is weak or
non-existent. Today, China is seen as the prime exemplar of this
Mahathirian obsession with rapid industrialization with minimal
regard for the environment.

 

This view of the South's
perspective on the environment is a caricature. In fact, the
environmental costs of rapid industrialization are of major concern
to significant sectors of the population of developing countries and,
in many of them, the environmental movement has been an important
actor. Moreover, there is currently an active discussion in many
countries of alternatives to the destabilizing high-growth model.

 

EMERGENCE OF THE ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT IN
THE NICS

Among the most advanced
environmental movements are those in Korea and Taiwan, which were
once known as "Newly Industrializing Countries" (NICs). This
should not be surprising since the process of rapid industrialization
in these two societies from 1965 to 1990 took place with few
environmental controls, if any. In Korea, the Han River that flows
through Seoul and the Nakdong River flowing through Pusan were so
polluted by unchecked dumping of industrial waste that they were
close to being classified as biologically dead. Toxic waste dumping
reached critical proportions. Seoul achieved the distinction in 1978
of being the city with the highest content of sulphuric dioxide in
the air, with high levels being registered as well in Inchon, Pusan,
Ulsan, Masan, Anyang, and Changweon. (2)

 

In Taiwan, high-speed
industrialization had its own particular hellish contours. Taiwan's
formula for balanced growth was to prevent industrial concentration
and encourage manufacturers to set up shop in the countryside. The
result was a substantial number of the island's 90,000 factories
locating on rice fields, along waterways, and beside residences. With
three factories per square mile, Taiwan's rate of industrial
density was 75 times that of the US. One result was that 20 per cent
of farm land was polluted by industrial waste water and 30 per cent
of rice grown on the island was contaminated with heavy metals,
including mercury, arsenic, and cadmium. (3)

 

In both societies, farmers,
workers, and the environment bore the costs of high-speed
industrialization. Both societies, it is not surprising, saw the
emergence of an environmental movement that was spontaneous, that
drew participants from different classes, that saw environmental
demands linked with issues of employment, occupational health, and
agricultural crisis, and that was quite militant. Direct action
became a weapon of choice because, as Michael Hsiao pointed out:

 

"People have learned that
protesting can bring results; most of the actions for which we could
find out the results had achieved their objectives. The polluting
factories were either forced to make immediate improvement of the
conditions or pay compensation to the victims. Some factories were
even forced to shut down or move to another location. A few
preventive actions have even succeeded in forcing prospective plants
to withdraw from their planned construction." (4)

 

The environmental movements
in both societies were able to force government to come out with
restrictive new rules on toxics, industrial waste, and air pollution.
Ironically, however, these successful cases of citizen action
created a new problem, which was the migration of polluting
industries from Taiwan and Korea to China and Southeast Asia. Along
with Japanese firms, Korean and Taiwanese enterprises went to
Southeast Asia and China mainly for two reasons: cheap labor and lax
environmental laws.

 

ENVIRONMENTAL STRUGGLES IN SOUTHEAST ASIA

Unlike in Korea and Taiwan,
environmental movements already existed in a number of the Southeast
Asian countries before the period of rapid industrialization, which
in their case occurred in the mid-eighties to the mid-nineties. These
movements had emerged in the seventies and eighties in struggles
against nuclear power, as in the Philippines; against big
hydroelectric dams, as in Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia and the
Philippines; and against deforestation and marine pollution, as in
Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines. These were epic battles,
like the struggle against the Chico River Dam in the northern
Philippines and the fight against the Pak Mun Dam in the northeast of
Thailand, which forced the World Bank to withdraw its planned support
for giant hydroelectric projects, an outcome that, as we shall see
later on, also occurred in struggle against the Narmada Dam in India.
The fight against industries associated partly with foreign firms
seeking to escape strict environmental regulations at home was a case
of a new front being opened up in an ongoing struggle to save the
environment.

 

Perhaps even more than in
Northeast Asia, the environmental question in Southeast Asia was an
issue that involved the masses and went beyond being a middle-class
issue. In the Chico struggle, the opposition were indigenous
peoples, while in the fight against the Pak Mun Dam, it was small
farmers and fisherfolk. The environmental issue was also more
coherently integrated into an overarching critique. In the case of
the Philippines, for instance, deforestation was seen as an
inevitable consequence of a strategy of export-oriented growth
imposed by World Bank-International Monetary Fund structural
adjustment programs that sought to pay off the country's massive
foreign debt with the dollars gained from exporting the country's
timber and other natural resources and manufactures produced by cheap
labor. The middle class, workers, the urban poor, and
environmentalists were thrust into a natural alliance. Meantime,
transnational capital, local monopoly capital, and the central
government were cast in the role of being an anti-environmental axis.

 

The environmental movements
in Southeast Asia played a vital role not only in scuttling projects
like the Bataan nuclear plant but in ousting the dictatorships that
reigned there in the seventies and eighties. Indeed, because the
environment was not perceived by authoritarian regimes as
"political," organizing around environmental and public health
issues was not initially proscribed. Thus environmental struggles
became an issue around which the anti-dictatorship movement could
organize and reach new people. Environmental destruction became one
more graphic example of a regime's irresponsibility. In Indonesia,
for example, the environmental organization WALHI went so far as to
file a lawsuit for pollution and environmental destruction against
six government bodies, including the Minister of the Environment and
Population. (5) By the time the dictatorships wised up to what was
happening, it was often too late: environmentalism and anti-fascism
fed on one another.

 

The environmental movement
is at an ebb throughout the region today, but consciousness about
threats to the environment and public health is widespread and can be
translated into a new round of activism if the right circumstances
come together.

 

ENVIRONMENTAL PROTESTS IN CHINA

The environmental movement
in China exhibits many of the same dynamics observed in the NICs and
Southeast Asia.

 

The environmental crisis in
China is very serious. For example, the ground water table of the
North China plain is dropping by 1.5 meters (5 feet) per year. This
region produces 40 percent of China's grain. As environmentalist Dale
Wen remarks, "One cannot help wonder about how China will be fed
once the ground aquifer is depleted." (6) Water pollution and water
scarcity; soil pollution, soil degradation and desertification;
global warming and the coming energy crisis — these are all
byproducts of China's high-speed industrialization and massively
expanded consumption.

 

Most of the environmental
destabilization in China is produced by local enterprises and massive
state projects such as the Three Gorges Dams, but the contribution of
foreign investors is not insignificant. Taking advantage of very lax
implementation of environmental laws in China, many western TNCs have
relocated their most polluting factories into the country and have
exacerbated or even created many environmental problems. Wen notes
that the Pearl River Delta and Yangtze River Delta, the two Special
Economic Zones where most TNC subsidiaries are located, are the most
seriously affected by heavy metal and POPs (persistent organic
pollutants) pollution. (7)

 

Global warming is not a
distant threat. The first comprehensive study of the impact of the
sea level rise of global warming by Gordon McGranahan, Deborah Balk,
and Bridget Anderson puts China as the country in Asia most
threatened by the sea level rise of up to 10 meters over the next
century. (8) 144 million of China's population live in
low-elevation coastal zones, and this figure is likely to increase
owing to the export-oriented industrialization strategies pursued by
the government, which has involved the creation of numerous special
economic zones in these very regions. "From an environmental
perspective," the study warns, "there is a double disadvantage to
excessive (and potentially rapid) coastal development. First,
uncontrolled coastal development is likely to damage sensitive and
important ecosystems and other resources. Second, coastal
settlement, particularly in the lowlands, is likely to expose
residents to seaward hazards such as sea level rise and tropical
storms, both of which are likely to become more serious with climate
change." (9) The recent spate of super-typhoons descending on the
Asian mainland from the Western Pacific underlines the gravity of
this observation.

 

In terms of public health,
the rural health infrastructure has practically collapsed, according
to Dale Wen. The system has been privatized with the introduction of
a "fee for service" system that is one component of the
neoliberal reform program. One result is the resurgence of diseases
that had been brought under control, like tuberculosis and
schistosomiasis. Cuba, in contrast, has won plaudits for its rural
health care system, which is ironic, says Wen, given that the Cuban
system was based on the Maoist era's "barefoot doctor" system.
(10)

 

Another big public health
issue has been food safety. The combination of the industrialization
of food production and the lengthening of the food chain from
production to consumption is strongly suspected to be the cause of
bird flu, which has migrated from China to other countries. The
government has become an unreliable actor in dealing with new
diseases such as bird flu and SARS, prone as it is to engage in
minimizing the threat if not promoting a cover-up, as it did in the
case of SARS.

 

As in Taiwan and Korea 15
years earlier, we see unrestrained export-oriented industrialization
bringing together low-wage migrant labor, farming communities whose
lands are being grabbed or ruined environmentally, environmentalists,
and the proponents of a major change in political economy called the
"New Left." Environment-related riots, protests and disputes in
China increased by 30 per cent in 2005 to more than 50,000, as
pollution-related unrest has become "a contagious source of
instability in the country," as one report put it. Indeed, a great
many of recorded protests fused environmental, land-loss, income, and
political issues. From 8,700 in 1995, what the Ministry of Public
Security calls "mass group incidents" have grown to 87,000
in  2005, most of them in the countryside.  Moreover, the
incidents are growing in average size from 10 or fewer persons in the
mid-1990s to 52 people per incident in 2004. (11) Notable were the
April 2005 riots in Huashui, where an estimated 10,000 police
officers clashed with desperate villagers who succeeded in repelling
strong vested interests polluting their lands.

 

As in Taiwan, people have
discovered the effectiveness of direct action in rural China.
"Without the riot, nothing would have changed," said Wang
Xiaofang, a 43-year-old farmer. "People here finally reached
their breaking point. (12) As in Southeast Asia, struggles around the
environment and public health may be leading to a more comprehensive
political consciousness.

 

The strength of China's
environmental movement must not be exaggerated. Indeed, its failures
often outnumber its successes. Alliances are often spontaneous and
do not go beyond the local level. What Dale Wen calls a national
"red green" coalition for change remains a potential force, one
that is waiting to be constructed. Nevertheless, the environmental
movement is no longer a marginal actor and it is definitely something
that the state and big capital have to deal with. Indeed, the
ferment in the countryside is a key factor that is said to have made
the current Chinese leadership more open to suggestions from the
so-called "New Left" for a change of course in economic policy
from rapid export-oriented growth to a more sustainable and slower
domestic-demand led growth.

 

THE ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT IN INDIA

As in China, the environment
and public health have been sites of struggle in India. Over the
last 25 years, the movement for the environment and public health has
exploded in that country. Indeed, one can say that this movement has
become one of the forces deepening Indian democracy.

 

Environmental and public
health struggles go way back, but perhaps the single biggest event
that propelled the movement to becoming a critical mass was the
Bhopal gas leakage on December 3, 1984, which released 40 tons of
methyl isocyanate, killing 3,000 people outright and ultimately
causing 15,000 to 20,000 deaths. (13) The struggle for just
compensation for the Bhopal victims continues till this day.

 

There is today a
proliferation of struggles in this vast country.

 

There is the national
campaign against Coca Cola and Pepsi Cola plants for drawing ground
water and contaminating fields with sludge. There are local
struggles against intensive aquaculture farms in Tamil Nadu, Orissa,
and other coastal states. There is a non-violent but determined
campaign by farmers against GMOs, which has involved the uprooting
and burning of fields planted to genetically engineered rice. And, of
course, there are anti-big dam movements such as the Narmada Bachao
Andolan movement. These struggles have spawned outstanding leaders,
some of whom have become key figures in the international
environmental movement.

 

In public health, the key
issue has been the tremendous pressure from foreign pharmaceutical
companies to get India to adopt patent legislation that would be
consistent with the WTO's Trade Related Intellectual Property
Rights Agreement (TRIPs). The great fear is that this would affect
the ability of the country's pharmaceutical industry to produce
cheap generic drugs for both the home market and for export. With
between 2 million and 3.6 million people living with
HIV — putting India behind South Africa and Nigeria in numbers
living with HI — and with so many African countries with large
HIV-infected populations depending on cheap Indian drug imports, to
comply or not to comply with TRIPs has become a life-and-death issue.

 

Two years ago, key amendments pushed by
progressive forces were incorporated into the Indian Patents Act,
resulting in what one influential journal described as "a
relatively loose patents regime for now." (14) One key amendment
was that Indian companies could continue to produce and market drugs
they were producing before January 1, 2005, after paying a
"reasonable royalty" to the patent holder. They were banned from
doing this under the previous patent regime. Another important
amendment made the process of exporting drugs to another country less
cumbersome by eliminating the need for a compulsory license from that
country. (15) Some have said that the amendments do little to offset
the transnational corporations' offensive to privatize knowledge to
the detriment of public health. Others contend that while the
amendments may seem to be minor, in the byzantine world of TRIPs, the
devil is in the detail.

 

It would be worthwhile, at
this point, to look closely at what has become the most influential
of India's mass-based environmental movement: the anti-dam
movement.

Dams often represented the
modernist vision that guided many Third World governments in their
struggle to catch up with the West in the post-War period. The
technological blueprint for power development for the post-World War
II period was that of creating a limited number of power
generators–giant dams, coal or oil-powered plants, or nuclear
plants–at strategic points which would generate electricity that
would be distributed to every nook and cranny of the country.
Traditional or local sources of power that allowed some degree of
self-sufficiency were considered backward. If you were not hooked up
to a central grid, you were backward.

 

Centralized electrification
with its big dams, big coal-fired plants, and nuclear plants became
the rage. Indeed, there was an almost religious fervor about this
vision among leaders and technocrats who defined their life's work as
"missionary electrification" or the connection of the most
distant village to the central grid. Jawaharlal Nehru, the dominant
figure in post-World War II India, called dams the "temples of
modern India," a statement that, as Indian author Arundhati Roy
points out, made its way into primary school textbooks in every
Indian language. Big dams have become an article of faith
inextricably linked with nationalism. "To question their utility
amounts almost to sedition." (16)

 

In any event, in the name of
missionary electrification, India's technocrats, Roy observes in her
brilliant essay, The Cost of Living, not only built "new
dams and irrigation schemes…[but also] took control of small,
traditional water-harvesting systems that had been managed for
thousands of years and allowed them to atrophy." (17) Here Roy
expresses an essential truth: that centralized electrification
preempted the development of alternative power-systems that could
have been more decentralized, more people-oriented, more
environmentally benign, and less capital intensive.

 

The key forces behind
central electrification were powerful local coalitions of power
technocrats, big business, and urban-industrial elites. Despite the
rhetoric about "rural electrification," centralized
electrification was essentially biased toward the city and industry.
Essentially, especially in the case of dams, it involved expending
the natural capital of the countryside and the forests to subsidize
the growth urban-based industry. Industry was the future. Industry
was what really added value. Industry was synonymous with national
power. Agriculture was the past.

 

While these interests
benefited, others paid the costs. Specifically, it was the rural
areas and the environment that absorbed the costs of centralized
electrification. Tremendous crimes have been committed in the name of
power generation and irrigation, says Roy, but these were hidden
because governments never recorded these costs. In India, Roy
calculates that large dams have displaced about 33 million people in
the last 50 years, about 60 per cent of them being either
untouchables or indigenous peoples.

 

India, in fact, does not
have a national resettlement policy for those displaced by dams. The
costs to the environment have been tremendous. As Roy points out
"the evidence against Big Dams is mounting alarmingly —
irrigation disasters, dam-induced floods, the fact that there are
more drought prone and flood prone areas today than there were in
1947. The fact is that not a single river in the plains has potable
water." (18)

 

Things changed when the
government announced its plans to dam the mighty Narmada River in the
late seventies. Instead of quietly accepting the World Bank-backed
enterprise, the affected people mounted a resistance that continues
to this day. The Narmada Bachao Andolan movement led by Medha Patkar
at the Sardar Sarovar Dam and Alok Aggarwal and Silvi at the
Maheshwar Dam drew support from all over India and internationally.
The resistance of the people, most of them adivasis or
indigenous people, succeeded in getting the World Bank to stop
funding the project and saddling it with delays, making the
completion of the dam uncertain. The Supreme Court,
for instance, ordered rehabilitation for all those affected by the
Sardar Sarovar Dam's construction, and in March 2005 ruled to halt
construction on the dam until this had happened. Construction of the
dam has now been halted at 110.6 meters, a figure that is much higher
than the 88 metres proposed by the activists, and lower than the 130
meters that the dam is eventually supposed to reach. It is unclear at
this point what the final outcome of the project will be or when it
will be completed, though the entire project is meant to be finished
by 2025. (19) The fate of the Maheshwar Dam is similarly unclear.

 

Equally
important was the broader political impact of the Narmada struggle.
It proved to be the cutting edge of the social movements that
have deepened India's democracy and transformed the political
scene. The state bureaucracy and political parties must now listen
to these movements or risk opposition or, in the case of parties,
being thrown out of power. Social movements in the rural areas
played a key role in stirring up the mass consciousness that led to
the defeat in 2004 of the neoliberal coalition led by the Hindu
chauvinist BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) that had
campaigned on the pro-globalization slogan "India Shining."
While its successor, the Congress Party-led coalition, has turned its
back on the rural protest that led to its election and followed the
same anti-agriculture and pro-globalization policies of the BJP, it
risks provoking an even greater backlash in the near future.

 

The environmental movement
faces its biggest challenge today: global warming. As in China, the
threat is not distant either in space or in time. The Mumbai deluge
of 2005 came at a year of excessive rainfall that would normally
occur once in a hundred years. (20) The Himalayan glaciers have been
retreating, with one of the largest of them, Gangotri, receding at
what one journal described as "an alarming rate, influencing the
stream run-off of Himalayan rivers. (21) Six per cent, or 63.2
million, of India's population live in low elevation coastal zones
that are vulnerable to sea-level rise. (23) On the Gujarat coast, sea
level rise is displacing villages, as it is many more places along
India's 7,500 km-long coastline. One report claims that in the
"Sunderbans, two islands have already vanished from the map,
displacing 7000 people. Twelve more islands are likely to go under
owing to an annual 3.14 sea level rise, which will create 70,000
refugees. Five villages in Orissa's Bhitarkanika National Park,
famous for the mass nesting of Olive Ridley turtles, have been
submerged, and 18 others are likely to go under." (23)

 

As in China, the challenge
lies in building up a mass movement that might be unpopular not only
with the elite but also with sections of the urban-based middle class
sectors that have been the main beneficiaries of the high-growth
economic strategy that has been pursued since the early 1990s.

 

NATIONAL ELITES AND THIRD WORLDISM

The reason for tracing the
evolution of a mass-based environmental movement in East Asia and
India is to counter the image that the Asian masses are inert
elements that uncritically accept the environmentally damaging
high-growth export-oriented industrialization models promoted by
their governing elites. It is increasingly clear to ordinary people
throughout Asia that the model has wrecked agriculture, widened
income inequalities, led to increased poverty after the Asian
financial crises, and wreaked environmental damage everywhere.

 

It is the national elites
that spout the ultra-Third Worldist line that the South has yet to
fulfill its quota of polluting the world while North has exceeded its
quota. It is they who call for an exemption of the big rapidly
industrializing countries from mandatory limits on the emission of
greenhouse gases under a new Kyoto Protocol. When the Bush
administration says it will not respect the Kyoto Protocol because it
does not bind China and India, and the Chinese and Indian governments
say they will not tolerate curbs on their greenhouse gas emissions
because the US has not ratified Kyoto, they are in fact playing out
an unholy alliance to allow their economic elites to continue to
evade their environmental responsibilities and free-ride on the rest
of the world.

 

This alliance has now become
formalized in the so-called "Asia Pacific Partnership" created
last year by the US, China, India, Japan, Korea, and the United
States as a rival to the United Nations-negotiated Kyoto Protocol.
Having recently recruited Canada, which is now led by Bush clone
Stephen Harper, this grouping seeks voluntary, as opposed mandatory
curbs on greenhouse gas emissions. This is a dangerous band of
states whose agenda is nothing else than to spew carbon as they damn
well please, which is what voluntary targets are all about.

 

THE NEED FOR GLOBAL ADJUSTMENT

There is no doubt that the
burden of adjustment to global warming will fall largely on the
North, and that this adjustment will have to be made in the next 10
to 15 years, and that the adjustment needed might need to be much
greater than the 50 per cent reduction from the 1990's level by
2050 that is being promoted by the G 8. In the eyes of some experts,
what might be required is in the order of up to 90 to 100 per cent
cuts from current levels-meaning zero emissions. (24) Whatever the
real figure, it is inescapable that the South will also have to
adjust, proportionately less than the North but also rather
stringently.

 

The South's adjustment
will not take place without the North taking the lead. But it will
also not take place unless its leaders junk the export-oriented,
high-growth paradigm promoted by the World Bank and most economists
to which its elites and many middle strata are addicted.

 

People in the South are open
to an alternative to a model of growth that has failed both the
environment and society. For instance, in Thailand, a country
devastated by the Asian financial crisis and wracked by environmental
problems, globalization and export-oriented growth are now bad words.
To the consternation of the Economist, Thais are more and
more receptive to the idea of a "sufficiency economy" promoted by
popular monarch King Bhumibol, which is an inward-looking strategy
that stresses self-reliance at the grassroots and the creation of
stronger ties among domestic economic networks, along with
"moderately working with nature." (25)

 

Thailand may be an exception
in terms of the leadership role for a more sustainable path played by
an elite and, even there, the commitment of that elite to an
alternative path is questioned by many. What is clear is that in most
other places in the South, one cannot depend on the elites and some
sections of the middle class to decisively change course. At best,
they will procrastinate. The fight against global warming will need
to be propelled mainly by an alliance between progressive civil
society in the North and mass-based citizens' movements in the
South.

 

As in the North, the
environmental movements in the South have seen their ebbs and flows.
It appears that, as with all social movements, it takes a particular
conjunction of circumstances to bring an environmental movement to
life after being quiescent for some time or to transform diverse
local struggles into one nationwide movement. In the case of global
warming, the challenge facing activists in the North and South is
even greater: it is that of bringing about those circumstances that
will trigger the formation of a global mass movement that will
decisively confront the greatest threat of our time.

 

* The assistance of my
colleagues Afsar Jafri and Dale Wen in the preparation of this
article is gratefully acknowledged. They are not, however,
responsible for any possible errors of fact or interpretation.

 

** Walden Bello is
Distinguished Visiting Professor of International Development Studies
at St. Mary's University, Halifax, Canada; Professor of Sociology
at the University of the Philippines (Diliman); and senior analyst
and former executive director of Focus on the Global South, Bangkok,
Thailand.

 

NOTES

1. Mohamad Mahathir, Speech
at United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, Rio de
Janeiro, June 13, 1992.

2. The environmental crisis
in Korea is treated at length in Walden Bello and Stephanie
Rosenfeld, Dragons in Distress: Asia's Miracle Economies in Crisis
(San Francisco: Food First, 1990), pp. 95-118.

3. See ibid., p. 195-214.

4. Ibid, p. 213.

5. Frieda Sinanu, "Coming
of Age: Indonesia's Environmental Network Faces Dilemmas as it
Turns 25," Inside Indonesia, 2007;
http://insideindonesia.org/content/view/72/29/

6. Interview with Dale Wen,
Focus on the Global South website,
http://www.focusweb.org/interview-with-dale-wen

7. Ibid.

8. Cited in R. Ramachandran,
"Coming Storms," Frontline, Vol. 24, No. 7 (April 7-20, 2007);
http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fl2407/stories/2007042001609000.htm

9. Quoted in ibid.

10. Email communication,
Sept. 25, 2007

11. Fred Bergsten et al.,
China: What the World Needs to Know now about the Emerging Superpower
(Washington: Center for Strategic and International Studies and
Institute for International Economics, 2006), pp. 40-41.

12. "Increase in
Environmental Unrest Causes Instability in China," Green Clippings,
http://www.greenclippings.co.za/gc_main/article.php?story=20060906170952367

13. ""Bhopal Disaster,"
Wikipedia; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_Disaster

14. V. Sridhar Siddharth
Narrain, "A Tempered Patents Regime," Frontline, Vol. 22, No. 8
(2005); http://www.flonnet.com/fl2208/stories/20050422004602800.htm

15. Ibid.

16. Arundhati Roy, The Cost
of Living (London: Flamingo, 1999)

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid

19. "Narmada
River,"Wikipedia; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narmada_River

20. R. Ramachandran,
"Himalayan Concerns," Frontline, Vol. 24, No. 4 (2007);
http://www.flonnet.com/fl2404/stories/20070309006201000.htm

21. Ibid.

22. R. Ramachandran, "Coming
Storms…"

23. Dionne Busha, "Gone
with the Waves," Frontline, Vol. 24, No. 14 (2007);
http://www.fllonnet.com/fl2414/stories/20070727000206600.htm

24. Catherine Brahic, "Zero
Emissions Needed to Avert ‘Dangerous' Warming," New Scientist,
http://environment.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn12775&print=true.

25. Thailand Human
Development Report 2007: Sufficiency Economy and Human Development
(Bangkok: United Nations Development Program, 2007), pp. 48-49.