Who pays the price?

Today's environmental constraints are more complex than the threats which structured our ancestors' lives; altitude, climatic extremes, soil fertility, or water availability. They might include these biophysical conditions, but the nature and degree of environmental degradation is a result of direct, recent, and intense human action. Thus, humanity is struggling to survive in the face of growing deserts, decreasing forests, declining fisheries, poisoned food, water, and air, and climatic extremes and weather events which continue to intensify - flood, hurricanes, and droughts. Many of these crises lack tangibility - they are difficult to see and to define, and their origins and consequences are difficult to understand. In many places of the world, information about environmental crisis is withheld from those who experience its adverse effects. And, environmental crises are not experienced equitably. Human action and a history of social inequity leaves some people more vulnerable than others. Who Pays the Price? is a treatment of indigenous rights issues, of the problems associated with development, of abuses occurring in the name of national security, of the shortcomings inherent to our system of response, and of the complex issues involved in determining responsibility.