RAKESH SAHAI FOR TIME

Now consider another large country, poor and primarily agrarian. Suppose the government showers villagers with specially engineered methane collecting devices, which turn the gaseous by-products of beasts of burden into fuel for homes. Cooking with methane produces less pollution than using traditional wood fires.

Asia has many large countries--it accounts for more than 50% of the globe's population--and as prosperity swells through the region, so do the demands of Asians for the good life. A refrigerator becomes a must, an automobile no longer an impossible dream. But the fruits of prosperity, especially when reaped in vast numbers, can be disastrous for the environment, both locally and for the earth as a whole. A rain forest leveled on Borneo can no longer absorb carbon dioxide belched out of the U.S. or Europe. An explosion of car-buying in China, India and Southeast Asia will accelerate the greenhouse effect.

Averting disaster may depend on the alternatives to smoke-spewing power plants, such as the Three Gorges Dam that China (pop. 1.2 billion) is building on the Yangtze River, the largest such project ever constructed. Or programs in place in India (pop. 950 million) giving farmers backyard methane collectors--along with solar-powered curry crocks--so wives don't have to hack down already depleted forests for smoky firewood.

But Asia's record so far on projects gigantic or engagingly grass-roots is discouraging. The pervasive attitude toward the environment in Asian capitals, aside from Tokyo, is something between a yawn and a brush-off. Fast-growing countries believe that development comes first. In slow-growth South Asia, where environmental devastation has been as bad as in booming East Asia, officials plead poverty. A strident group, including Malaysia and India, wields the eco-colonialism argument: the industrialized West is largely responsible for such planetary woes as the shrinking ozone layer and the greenhouse effect. Therefore, the U.S. and Europe should get their smokestacks in order and stop nagging neighbors that have recently become rich enough for air-conditioners and aerosol hairsprays--even if some of that wealth comes from plundering vital rain forests. Put all those arguments together, and the resulting landscape is hardly pristine. "Asia," reports the Asian Development Bank in Manila, "is the world's most polluted and environmentally degraded region."

In three decades the continent has lost half its forests. A third of its farmland has been eroded, salinized or otherwise made less fit for agriculture. Scan the list of the world's 15 most polluted cities (in terms of air quality), and you'll find that 13 are in Asia. China is earth's second largest producer of greenhouse gas (behind the U.S.), much of it from coal-fueled power plants and fuming motor vehicles. And that's just China. An automobile boom is raging in Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines, and auto-lust is spreading to Indonesia (pop. 200 million) and even India, where only a few models were available for decades.