Pollution

Indur Goklany's The Improving State of the World offers a healthy corrective to the pervasive view that everything is getting worse. But its facile suggestion that further advances are all but inevitable misreads the true causes of progress.

Wild nature is in deep distress, and the international institutions charged with Earth's care are not managing it with an eye on sustainability. The conservation community must step forward to promote what governments will not: science-based conservation along with poverty alleviation at the fragile ecological frontier.

China gambled that economic growth would outpace environmental harm. It lost. Fixing the resultant damage may break the stalemate in U.S.-Chinese relations.

Forty-five hears after the Marshall Plan, America's foreign aid program is in shambles. The Clinton administration has the opportunity to make a new beginning with a clearly defined program to promote environmentally sound economic growth – for the benefit of the poorer populations of the world and the United States and other industrialized nations as well. Trade, technology and investment policies must be molded into an initiative that recognizes the limits to the carrying capacity of the globe.