Some brief thoughts on Economic Development

Hi everyone, so as mentioned I just had a few thoughts which I have had which I wanted to share while I remembered.

First of all, for those of you who don't know I took a course on the Development of Environmental Thought last semester. It was very interesting, and very broad in scope but we did manage to dig into the sustainable development argument briefly. Following the Brundtland report, sustainable development became a fairly often (mis)used term. The big idea or change however that it brought to light was that economic development and environmental viability are not completely in conflict. A good example of this is Haiti, where low economic development has certainly caused great environmental damage in terms of deforestation, simply because the forests were poorly managed, and the people were not very well off: hence the over dependence on firewood.

From my experiences so far, I can see what they were getting at. It still astounds me how much garbage collects on the ground and in the ditches. There is little regard for the effect that has, since recycling and garbage collection seem to be viewed as a luxury or not important. Also the cars do not have very good exhaust systems...I have lost track of how many times I have held my breath while a truck or mutatu drives bye, because of the black cloud that is emitted from the tailpipe. I completely understand that higher consumption which the "Western" model seems to thrive on has many negative effects on the environment, but I have seen some pretty strong evidence that low development is not ideal either. The issues are certainly different, both in terms of scale and in terms of type, but the concepts are still pretty similar. "Sustainable development", if it is possible, will require more intelligent use of the natural world by people on both ends of the development spectrum (neither can shoulder the load on their own). It will likely require some re-allocation of wealth and knowledge, and will not be without some costs or hardship, but also will create many benefits.

That's all I had for now since it is getting pretty late here, but please feel free to comment :)
Cheers,
Graham

ps. one last random thought for the day: Kenyans seem to have the most amazing knack for getting random clothes. We saw a Tim Horton's t-shirt today (small world eh), and have seen more than a few people wearing some fairly nice dress pants or nice shirts...with the odd small hole in them.