The world indeed can be a scary place, and a new study identifies some of the scariest places on the planet. They´re scary because of what human beings have done to the environment they´re living in.

 

A report conducted by the Blacksmith Institute, a New York-based environmental group, identifies the Top 10 "Killer Communities" in the world -- the most polluted places on earth. Calling them killer communities isn´t tree-hugger hyperbole, either. Those areas suffer a range of environmental maladies caused by excessive toxic industrialization. They include significantly lower life expectancy rates and significantly higher birth defects and health problems than the average population.

 

Six of those 10 communities are in China, India and Russia. Two more are in former Soviet Union countries, including Ukraine´s infamous Chernobyl. Those 10 communities account for 12 million people.

 

Russia and its neighbors being on the list won´t surprise too many people. While its impact on the world has declined since the Soviet breakup, Russia still is one of the more powerful industrial nations of the world. Its continued effect on the planet looms as large as its land mass.

 

But even scarier are China and India, the two biggest emerging economic giants on earth. Their poor environmental track records to date are common knowledge, so again, their prominence on the list should surprise no one. But it underscores that the environmental problems of the world stand a good chance of getting worse, not better.

 

We focus on what we can control and improve upon in our own national backyard, and that´s how it should be. But the Blacksmith study is a reminder that our planet is one big neighborhood. Some of our neighbors are doing a terrible job of keeping up their properties. We can´t lose sight of finding ways to get them to be better tenants -- especially ones whose power is growing by leaps and bounds.

 

Otherwise at the end of the day we´ll being saying, "There´s goes the neighborhood." But that won´t be some casual, wry statement. It´ll be a tragic one.

 

Allan Gerlat is editor of Waste News. Past installments of this column are collected in the Inbox archive.

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