With the economic crisis in the US and Europe, many businesses are looking to Asia Pacific, specifically China for future investments.
The Chinese economy is booming, property values are going through the roof. The Chinese are no longer the poor farmers we used to read about in textbooks. They are the ones with cash to save the world's economy.
However, behind all this glamor lingers an issue that can no longer be ignored - the devastating environmental impact this fast growing economy has made. Go to China and it's hard not to notice the pollution. Check out this link, the pictures are horrifying: http://www.chinahush.com/2009/10/21/amazing-pictures-pollution-in-china/
Ensuring Asia Pacific economic growth truly environmentally sustainable has to be top priority. Very strict environmental policies and regulations must be in place and dedicated manpower must be available to monitor compliance. Policies are useless if they are not monitored to ensure compliance and no amount of monitoring would be helpful unless reports are followed up and problems resolved. Decision makers should focus on what's really at stake. Even if the world suffered another economic crisis, the worst scenario is that we'd have less material goods to contend with and we'd go back to live like our grandparents, but if we destroyed this earth, that would be the end of all..everything, including us.
There are so many historic and current examples of countries going the path of unsustainability, and yet the developing world seems to gain little from these mistakes. Yet it makes perfect sense in that the rise of governments and the path of history is not methodically planned or rational, but more often the outgrowth of the the desires of the wealthiest among us. Despite China's huge growth, a vast majority of the people still live simple and unchanged lives. People want riches now, not later, and the desire for wealth is in many instances unquenchable. This mindset I believe is where the environment is destroyed and with the global economy we are all complicit. For instance, many of the rare earth minerals that run our laptops come from these mining operations in China. The question arrises: How can people from one country influence the environmental operations of another?
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