NRO's Jonah Goldberg takes a gander at the United Nations Millenium Ecosystem Assessment, and contrasts its gloomy view of global environmental trends with positive trends in the U.S. He suggests that developing countries could learn quite a bit from the American experience and that the UN report's mild consideration of market policies (discussed here) could be such a step in that direction.

Goldberg writes:

Broadly speaking, environmentalists want to end poverty, hunger, and disease, but they also want to keep indigenous cultures unchanged. But you can't have both simultaneously. It is the natural state of indigenous cultures, after all, to be constantly vulnerable to disease and hunger, and no man fighting to keep his children alive cares about "biodiversity."

For decades, environmentalists pointed to various calamities and boasted that they were identifying the problems, which is the first step for providing a solution. But they were wrong; environmental distress is a symptom of political and economic corruption. There's reason to hope the United Nations has finally recognized the real problem, and that's great news.