Santiago Olivier argues that Latin America currently suffers widespread degradation of its natural environment. Among the examples he cites are deforestation in Mexico and the Amazon Basin, pollution of ocean waters in proximity to large coastal cities, widespread erosion, and the poisoning of soils from herbicides, pesticides, and industrial wastes. Since few of these examples are treated in any detail, however, it becomes difficult for a reader to decide independently how serious and widespread the degradation is. An early part of the book is devoted to fundamentals of ecology—water cycles, trophic levels, biochemical exchanges, and so forth. The author derives a number of lessons from this review, among them that the limited carrying capacity of ecosystems should not be exceeded, that long-term productivity should not be compromised by efforts to increase short-term productivity, and that an ecosystem should be self-regulated and not manipulated from the outside. Although most of the information in this introductory section is ignored in the remainder of the book, the lessons themselves are put to a very specific purpose: to find the developed nations, and their commercial agents in and out of country, responsible for the ecological crises of underdeveloped nations.
Olivier’s argument, of course, is not new, but it is welcome. Latin Americans are quite tired of the presumption by developed nations that responsibility for environmental problems rests solely with the nation where the problem occurs. The underdeveloped nations are accused of ignorance, and the usual corollary is that only the developed nations can provide the badly needed knowledge. While the United States and Europe clamor for limitations on forest cutting in the Amazon Basin, for example, their commercial interests (timber, minerals, forest products) simultaneously contribute to the deforestation. Although the author’s examples are mostly contemporary, he makes it clear that the exploitation of resources by outsiders is not new. Where previously almost no one in the developed nations showed concern over the deleterious consequences of resource exploitation, now suddenly and quite emphatically they do. Underlying this, oftentimes, is the colonial sentiment that the world belongs to the powerful and that it must be protected by them.
Olivier finds no incentive within the prevailing free-enterprise economies of Latin America to repair the damage that has already occurred. Instead, he argues, ecological stability will result from an economic and political system that values human welfare above “profits.” Unfortunately, his treatment of this issue is frequently inadequate, for there is only a cursory attempt to describe quite how ecosystems could be better managed in a different political system. There is a tendency to use dependency theory as a handy explanation, without any attempt to elaborate the complicated means by which dependency may or may not contribute to environmental degradation. This is doubly unfortunate because the need is obviously great to understand the precise social and political correlates of resource mismanagement.
