accumulation. Early (1970s) environmental concerns focused on the exhaustion of nonrenewable resources, but more recently experts and activists have realized that the more serious problem is the effect of economic growth on natural processes that until now have been renewable and self-regulating. The way we use resources is undermining the basis of life. Over the last 50 years, industrial development has seriously degraded one-third of the planets arable lands, while eliminating one-third of tropical forests, one-quarter of available fresh water, one-quarter of fish reserves, and innumerable species of plants and animals vital to ecological stability. Another crucial impact, climate change, threatens to take on a life of its own and accelerate all the aforementioned negative impacts. And, on top of this, new kinds of persistent accumulative toxins further undermine human and environmental health (McGinn, 2000). This environmental crisis has, of course, major implications for social development. My angle on this is to focus on the role of our very structure of resource use and materials production. In underdeveloped and impoverished countries, where most people do not have their most basic needs met, it is not possible to assume that conventional resource-intensive market-driven economic growth is the answer. These countries need more direct (as opposed to trickle-down) solutions, and ones that employ and engage people, not displace them. And they need work that helps them restore ecosystems often degraded by their countries status as resource-extraction or cheaplabour zones for the industrialized countries. Throwing ones lot in with the global economy stands to be a risky game, since all indications are that the polarization of rich and poor is intensifying with globalization (Milani, 2000; Rees, 2001).