Abstract
The relation between poverty and environment is found to be complex and not as well
understood, as it needs to be. Poverty causes environmental degradation and environmental
degradation causes poverty. But it is not an egg and chicken question. This question has an
answer. It should be noted that apart from poverty, affluence also causes environmental
damage and still environmental damage causes poverty in return.
It has been rightly observed by many researches, that the people most gravely
affected by environmental problems are generally the poor. This may be seen in terms of
rising health bills due to water borne and air borne diseases; or in case of water logging and
salinity; or in terms of desertification and drought. For instance, a poor farmer tilling
ecologically fragile land is too resource poor to make required investments in resource
conservation. Hence, he keeps farming this already degraded land, which results in complete
loss of fertility. In this way, the poor become poorer, or in other words, by tilling ecologically
marginalized land the person himself / herself becomes economically marginalized. All these
problems hurt the poor the most and in response poor are bound to revert to unfriendly
environmental practices. It might be true that poverty causes environmental degradation,
because poor people have no choice but to live a life under some ‘set rules’ that their
‘absolute poverty’ dictates. in no way are we emphasizing that only the poor are responsible
for environmental damage. As it is explained in later sections of the paper, in a lot of places,
poor are seen as the very people involved in environmentally friendly practices.
There are other equally important causes to environmental degradation.
DR. QAIS ASLAM. (2006) POVERTY AND ENVIRONMENT - A VIEW, Paradigms , Vol 1-2, Issue 1.
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