Word: underground
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...desolate towns around Picher, Okla., and you might think differently. This is eco-assault on an epic scale. The prairie here in the northeast corner of the state is punctured with 480 open mine shafts and 30,000 drill holes. Little League fields have been built over an immense underground cavity that could collapse at any time. Acid mine waste flushes into drinking wells. When the water rises in Tar Creek, which runs through the site, a neon-orange scum oozes onto the roadside. Wild onions, a regional delicacy tossed into scrambled eggs, are saturated with cadmium--which may explain...
...Washington-based Cato Institute's $500,000 Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty. "Hernando sees strong entrepreneurs among the poor who make do in such horrible circumstances," says Cato's president, Edward Crane. "This is going to grow." And so, it's hoped, will the fortunes of those underground. --By Tim Padgett
Development schemes for Third World countries rarely benefit the poor, largely because aid is too often squandered by corrupt bureaucracies. That makes fresher, commonsense visions like those of Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto all the more welcome. De Soto has spent years looking deep inside the underground economies where poor people--who make up two-thirds of the world's population--eke out a living. He figures the value of their extralegal property, from cinder-block squatter homes to black-market street-vendor sales, at almost $10 billion. De Soto insists that bringing the poor and their assets into...
...Soto, 62, offers a simple solution: give these underground denizens legal title to their homes and businesses. That would grant them access to bank credit and investment capital, much as the property-title revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries enriched Western Europe and North America. A limited experiment in Peru in the 1990s proved the idea had merit when it brought in more than $1 billion in new tax revenue. Some 30 heads of state, from Egypt to Mexico, have hired de Soto for similar projects. "I think our time has come," says de Soto. "Four billion people exist...
...notion that economic progress and environmental protection are incompatible. The Earth Institute's approach is to bring together scientists, economists and policy makers to find the best developmental paths. For example, institute researchers will work on techniques that industries can use to slow down climate change by storing underground the carbon released from fossil fuels rather than letting it escape into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide...