"We are very fond of blaming the poor for destroying the environment. But often it is the powerful, including governments, that are responsible"

The statement challenges a convenient narrative: that environmental degradation springs chiefly from the actions of the poor, charcoal burning, small-scale farming on fragile lands, informal settlements. These activities can be visible and immediate, making them easy targets for blame. Yet they are often survival strategies in contexts shaped by scarcity, dispossession, and limited alternatives. The deeper drivers tend to lie with those who make and enforce the rules, own the resources, and set the terms of development.

Powerful actors, governments, large corporations, financial interests, shape landscapes through policy and capital. Logging concessions, extractive mining, industrial agriculture, and mega-infrastructure projects can obliterate forests, pollute waterways, and disrupt ecosystems at scales unimaginable for subsistence communities. Lax regulation, perverse subsidies, and corruption entrench these harms, while the costs are externalized onto vulnerable people and future generations. Even urban elites’ consumption patterns, high energy use, waste generation, imported commodities, reverberate through global supply chains that compel deforestation and degradation far from the cities where benefits are enjoyed.

Blaming the poor obscures the structural conditions that force ecologically risky choices: unequal land tenure, displacement from fertile areas, lack of access to clean energy, and the absence of credit or markets for sustainable livelihoods. It also erases the fact that many rural and Indigenous communities act as de facto guardians of biodiversity, managing commons with knowledge accumulated over generations. Meanwhile, those least responsible for environmental harm often bear its brunt, droughts, floods, crop failures, amplifying injustice.

Shifting the lens to responsibility and capacity invites a different response: hold decision-makers accountable; reform incentives that reward extraction; secure land and resource rights for communities; invest in clean energy, agroecology, and restoration; and ensure participatory governance so those affected can shape outcomes. Environmental protection thrives where power is checked, transparency is real, and people have dignified options. The path to healing ecosystems runs through justice, narratives included.