It's a dilemma that gets trickier daily.
How do we deal with the twin problems — twins joined at our wallets — of keeping our economy viable, yet also paying big environmental bills that are coming due after nearly three centuries of miraculous but messy industrialization?
It's hard enough for us and other rich nations. However, most of the world's 6.6 billion people still live in countries struggling to escape from economic instability, if not abject poverty — including nearly all of our neighbors in the Americas. Yet, like everywhere else, the seas around them are rising, their growing seasons are less predictable, and their soils and water are less plentiful.
This spring, 10 UA student reporters traveled to Argentina, the second-biggest and third-most-populous Latin American country. Their assignment: to see how a nation still trying to emerge from economic turbulence is addressing — or ignoring — growing global environmental priorities.
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Their trip was an annual UA program in international journalism offered by the journalism department and the Center for Latin American Studies, co-sponsored this year by the UA's Institute for the Study of the Planet Earth. I am an associate professor and accompanied them. My background in covering Latin America and the environment includes the books "La Frontera: The United States Border With Mexico" and "The World Without Us."
As you will read in their articles over the coming weekends, the UA team encountered reasons to be both concerned and hopeful. They found an example of each as soon as they arrived and boarded an airport taxi, which turned out to run on alternative fuel.
In 2001, still recovering from nearly two decades of ruinous military dictatorship, Argentina had defaulted on its international loans. The resulting collapse of the Argentine peso led to near disaster, but it also presented a chance to help revive the economy and to preserve the environment. Argentina had good sources of natural gas, a relatively clean-burning fossil fuel. Subsequently, 1.5 million cars and taxis were converted or built to use it.
The result was clearer skies over Buenos Aires — until the program proved so popular that gas supplies unexpectedly peaked, leaving the country with an energy crisis resulting in costly fuel imports.
Conversely, an economic success is having unanticipated environmental drawbacks. Having recently become one of the world's biggest producers of soybeans, nearly all for export, Argentina's vast pampas are being ploughed into fields so quickly that both wildlife and its famed grass-fed beef cattle are endangered — along with that vanishing Argentine horseback icon, el gaucho.
Two days after our team arrived, Argentina's government increased export taxes to persuade landowners to grow food for local consumption rather than ship all the fruits of their soil to more profitable global markets. Growers responded by blocking highways nationwide — a protest fortunately suspended just in time for student reporters to return from far corners of the country to catch their flight back to Tucson.
Since then, Argentina's farm strikes have been renewed, with further unexpected environmental implications that you will read about in these articles.
Some will seem the exotic stuff of a distant country, others disturbingly familiar — but all are about the only planet we have. In the 21st century, no place is distant anymore.
the series
• Today: A pulp mill divides neighbors.
• Tomorrow: Soybeans replace the famed pampas grasslands.
• Next weekend: Glacier tourism
