by Elizabeth M Young

Created on: December 29, 2009   Last Updated: March 18, 2010

Developed countries have based their development on the destructive and oppressive greed that they demonstrated and still demonstrate toward developing countries. What hypocrisy to ask that developing countries, many of them perpetually on the edge of destabilization, to do anything that diverts resources from building their economies and societies. If we want environmentalism, it needs to come in a holistic restoration of what we have taken.

Unless the interfering developed countries redirect concern that has always been more for the natural resources, animals, strategic value, and low cost human labor value of developing countries than it is for the human beings who live there, then they need to deal with the situation on a holistic level, including repaying for what was taken, ceasing their destabilizing interference in the governments, and helping to redistribute the wealth that has been aggregated toward the elites, many of them who are not even citizens of the oppressed civilizations that they milk for money, while continuing to deny opportunities to the actual citizens.

There is no way that our shopping malls would be filed with cheap goods, our military would have the materiel, or our economy would run if it were not for the looting, pillage and deliberate political destabilization of countries that are barely able to keep a stable government in power. From Thailand to Zimbabwe, there is interference from Europe, the Americas, India, Russia, China, and the Arab states that has served to be far more intense and devastating in its consequences than any pollution ever will be.

There are more peoples in the world who are developing a well deserved distrust, disrespect, and outright disgust with the so called "developed world" that makes any pleas for environmental improvements sound simply irrelevant and silly.

If we westerners and other developed nations do not accompany our "pleas" with the ethics, money, material, technology, advice and support necessary to reduce pollution, then we deserve a resounding "NO!" and  to have it all pile on us, as the worst polluters, the greediest consumers of human and natural resources, and as the causes of instability in country after country around the world.

We need to get realistic and holistic in our approach to demonstrating that we are worthy of telling other countries what is best for them. In the overall scheme of things, people want to know that their best interests are being served by those who profess to tell them what they should be doing.

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