Proculation Proculation:
What do you suggest ? Restrain natality and industrialization to poor people ? That would be quite selfish.
You have a great point, we simply cannot tell the developing world to "stop developing". We have no such right.
But I believe we should buckle up ourselves, we should not destroy our own environment. We must make sure we do not rely on the poor world for our waste disposal as we do now, because when they say "we don't want your garbage anymore" we will be unprepared to deal with it. Computer disposal is a perfect example. We send most of it to West Africa for a fee, but as that region in the world is the fastest in population growth (the population explosion phenomenon), very soon we will find out that they are "no longer accepting applications". In turn we will not be sufficiently prepared to dispose of it because we were more than happy to ship it off and ignore investing in technology for recycling plants and appropriate waste disposal techniques(and by "we" I mean 700m Europeans, 330m North Americans, and eventually 1.3bn Chinese).
We should make it clear that the world's oceans are not a disposal site, and that dumping millions of cubic gallons of waste and toxic material into it annually will eventually lead to unmitigated disaster.
There needs to be an international executive body with strong tools at its disposal to oversee that countries, poor or rich, do not use the ocean as a toilet and garbage dump. It would go a long way in making sure our future waters aren't swarming with angry ex fisherman turned pirates, as well as generally clean ocean water for a better future etc etc.
Now it comes back to the oil sands and the overall Canadian environment. If we as a rich nation of 33 million cannot keep clean 9m square miles of land then the expectations that 4.05bn Asians, 1bn Africans, and 500m Latin Americans will is sincerely thrown out the window and we're all fucked royally.