ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on political ecology and describes about the difficulties which Asian countries may encounter in their process of economic development. It reflects the author's belief that the dependence of human life upon other forms of life present at the surface of the earth is insufficiently stressed. Indian economic development starts under conditions of extreme abundance of population relative to natural resources. Long before the United States, England transferred a gradually increasing fraction of its increasing population from agricultural to nonagricultural work; and its nonagricultural population used increasing quantities of raw materials in the process of production. The machine population made its first appearance in a small corner of the world, in Western Europe, and spread out at first in certain privileged directions and then in others. The chapter argues that the best method of raising the standard of living of the Europeans is to bring the European demographic structure nearer to that of America.
