On Sun, 26 Feb 2006 16:01:58 EST, Wirt Atmar <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Regarding my contention that very poor human populations have a much greater > impact on the environment than do wealthy ones, a friend wrote and suggested > I > mention the obvious differences that exist between Haiti and the Dominican > Republic. It only took a minute's searching to find this NASA > photograph: We could approach this the same way we try to answer questions in our research, if we really want to find the truth. i.e., we don't present a correlation between some measure of ecological health (our response variable) with wealth (our "explanatory" variable) as evidence that the two variables have a cause-effect relationship. We should rather try very hard to identify the cause-effect pathways that led to the correlations we see in things like that satellite image. We will probably find that those pathways have absolutely nothing to do with wealth per se, at least immediately, but a lot with social struggles for power and control of resources. Besides confusing correlation and cause-effect, Wirt's argument implies that poor countries have the *choice* to either protect or destroy their environment. Given the current world distribution of power (which goes hand in hand with wealth), it's clear that they didn't choose to destroy the environment because they're poor and ignorant. -- Sebastian Luque
