ABSTRACT
In the Soviet Union there is a vast body of environmental law and regulation that purportedly protects the public interest. Water pollution in much of the Soviet Union is catastrophic. As Marshall Goldman has observed the great pollution problems in the Soviet Union stem from the fact that the government determined that economic growth was to be pursued at any cost. According to the Worldwatch Institute, more than 90 percent of the trees in the pine forests in China's Sichuan province have died because of air pollution. As the historian Paul Johnson remarked, "capitalism, being a problem-solving mechanism, could solve the problems of pollution not only technically but commercially, too, by writing environmental protection into its costs. The last refuge of those who would advocate socialistic solutions to environmental pollution is the claim that it is the lack of democratic processes that prevents the communist nations from truly serving the public interest.
