Bruce said:

You’re missing an important point, the circuit boards and dirty industries they have serve the first world. If it weren’t for the consumer consumption of places like New York, there wouldn’t be these circuit boards to process. There are many factories around the world that are really part of the ecological footprint of New York, serving its demand for consumer products. There aren’t factories around the world serving the much lower impact slums of Mumbai.

Burning and melting circuit boards are done to extract valuable metals like gold and copper, the metal is sold locally I doubt any is exported unless the country also has gold or copper mines.

And yes it’s illegal to sell waste as broken down cars or electronic to 3-world countries, because the recycling create lots of pollution and the waste usually end up in the air or in water unfiltered. You can however sell to any western country as they have pollution laws who are enforced. The most polluted places on earth are in 3-world countries or previous communist countries. How environmental friendly the combination of poverty and overpopulation is can be seen on satellite photos of Haiti.

See this article as not only offending to poor people; it’s best for you that you stay poor, but mostly as a perversion of the noble savage myth. Yes the noble savage myth is also wrong for a lot of reasons but it’s not offensive.

You can also spare me your simplistic notions of responsible development. India is a very old, and very social complex culture, it is also rife with endemic corruption to the point where it is a line item on many legitimate businesses books. Places like Dharavi are not ‘developed’ they are tolerated until they become a large enough nuisance that they are ploughed under, and the space occupied by those that are already we to do enough to afford it. This process will not improve the lot of all but a token few of those living there now, because members of the dalit cast fall somewhere between rats and ****roaches in the minds of most higher cast Indians. Nobody there will give a damn what happens to them, as long as they are not underfoot.

There is nothing romantic about these places, you can’t compare a Northern European squatters village, populated by young middle-class kids on remittance, pretending they are doing something relevant and profound in their gap-year, and the lives of squalor and deprivation of an Asian slum, filled with human detritus hard-scrabbling to just to survive.

        DV82XL said:

I don’t think so Bruce. Some of Brand’s vaunted slum industries, like burning old circuitboards for the metals, and in Dharavi, one of Mumbai’s biggest and longest standing slums most of the fuel used for this and everything else, is from burning cloth scraps which make for a constant haze about the place. The most polluting and biggest of the slum’s myriad industries are leather tanneries and potteries. The air, noise, and water pollution in Dharavi are well above tolerable levels. None of the human waste is processed, and there is only one toilet per 1,440 residents leading to endemic cholera and the highest infant death rate in Asia.

You’re missing an important point, the circuit boards and dirty industries they have serve the first world. If it weren’t for the consumer consumption of places like New York, there wouldn’t be these circuit boards to process. There are many factories around the world that are really part of the ecological footprint of New York, serving its demand for consumer products. There aren’t factories around the world serving the much lower impact slums of Mumbai.

I realize theres problems like Cholera. It would be great to get the basic infrastructure there to prevent such things, we can all agree on that. But it has to be developed in a responsible way that minimizes the resulting carbon output and minimizes the ecological footprint.

        Bruce said:

To be clear: I do not think that Mumbai’s slums are desirable from a human perspective. But from an environmental perspective, they are a lot lower impact on a per capita basis.

I don’t think so Bruce. Some of Brand’s vaunted slum industries, like burning old circuitboards for the metals, and in Dharavi, one of Mumbai’s biggest and longest standing slums most of the fuel used for this and everything else, is from burning cloth scraps which make for a constant haze about the place. The most polluting and biggest of the slum’s myriad industries are leather tanneries and potteries. The air, noise, and water pollution in Dharavi are well above tolerable levels. None of the human waste is processed, and there is only one toilet per 1,440 residents leading to endemic cholera and the highest infant death rate in Asia.

Dharavi is considered to be a growing threat to Mumbai, and plans are afoot to deal with it by eliminating the slum altogether. It is unlikely the the current residents of the slum will get much out of it, and because they belong to the dalit caste, nobody much cares.

Personally I am beginning to think that Brand pulled this whole thing out of his ass the night before he made the presentation, because it is no reflection of the reality on the ground in India.

        Joel Upchurch said:

Do you have documentation that the per capita consumption of resources by New Yorkers is higher than the average suburbanite? In terms of land resources it is obviously untrue. New York City consumes less energy per capita than any state.

http://e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2203

I just mean that New Yorkers consume a lot more then the people living in the Mumbai slums. The slums in Mumbai are much more green than New York is, the people there live with a much lower environmental impact.

        Bruce said:

Yes, but New York has a much higher ecological impact when you consider the amounts of goods consumed by the people living there.

Do you have documentation that the per capita consumption of resources by New Yorkers is higher than the average suburbanite? In terms of land resources it is obviously untrue. New York City consumes less energy per capita than any state.

http://e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2203

The most important thing is to try to improve the conditions of these slums and encourage them on the upward path. The first thing is creating basic utilities for these area. Reliable water and electricity would vastly improve the living conditions. Cell phones have already improved things greatly and cell phone services has evolved into a lot of basic banking services. Setting it up so they can pay for electricity in the same way would help a lot.

        Michael Karnerfors said:

Are you saying he just made up the numbers he is showing in the TED lectures?

/Michael

No, not necessarily but they are unsourced, and certainly taken out of context, and seem to be at odds with what can be found via a quick search of the web.

He claims Mumbai creates 1/6th of India’s GDP, the Government of Maharashtra State says it’s 1/20th

He implies that much of this is due to the economic action in the slums however the city accounts for 25% of India’s industrial output, 40% of her maritime trade, and 70% of the country’s capital transactions according the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority. Hardly the sorts of activities one would normally associate with slum-dwellers.

Which brings me back to what I wrote up-thread about TED talks; they are a poor substitute for scholarly discourse – they are the ultimate Appeal to Authority, and little else. Brand may well have found his numbers in some nominally legitimate source, but without being able to reference them, they are little better than conjecture.

Anyway the migration of surplus agricultural labor to urban areas is nothing new; it has been happening, more or less continuously since the dawn of civilization ( i.e. living in cities.) It is a well studied field with tombs of drydust data going back centuries. It’s highly unlikely that an intellectual gadfly, like Brand has developed anything all that novel on the subject.