Pollution and Overpopulation

An editorial in today's London Guardian, The planet's polluters should be put in the dock, laments pressure on the world's environment from callous corporations and an exploding population in the developing world. ("The UN projects global population to rise to 9.3 billion by 2050, by which time almost 90% of the world's people would live in developing countries.") While the article's suggestsions go beyond merely proposing a new international court to prosecute environmental offenders, I think the author's press for criminalization comes from the expectation that nations will not implement the legal and regulatory reforms he sees as necessary to reign in some of the worst corporate practices.

Left unmentioned is the fact that, no matter how many new regulations or criminal penalties are imposed on corporations, no corporate reform is likely to affect population growth. With much of the population growth likely to occur in nations which already have grave difficulty providing sufficient food and potable water to their present populations, this population growth could leave us facing environmental, political, and probably military pressures that we have only just started to acknowledge.

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