NONFICTION - May 22, 1994

MORTGAGING THE EARTH: The World Bank, Environmental Impoverishment, and the Crisis of Development by Bruce Rich (Beacon Press: $29; 376 pp.). The Catholic church in Brazil refers to them as inhabitants of the “Fourth World”--the millions of refugees created, rather than housed and fed, by global development programs. It’s a problem grossly undercovered in the West, mainly because Western-style growth is assumed to be an unalloyed blessing, but in “Mortgaging the Earth” Bruce Rich catalogues its unexpected, nasty underside. Rich, an attorney for the Environmental Defense Fund, is no disinterested observer, but his account of the Fourth World--largely created by the World Bank, for which Rich once consulted--is as credible as it is shocking. With “blanket paternalism and breathtaking naivete,” Rich writes, the World Bank has for decades attempted to remake undeveloped countries in the West’s image, regardless of native culture and economic realities--a road the bank can follow because it controls tens of billions of dollars that poor, self-interested governments hope to tap. “Mortgaging the Earth” is overlong and over-detailed--the parallels Rich makes between the World Bank and Goethe’s “Faust,” for example, are too wooden to be effective--but nonetheless important, for the World Bank (which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year) has operated for decades without significant oversight. “Mortgaging the Earth” should change that . . . though considering the bank’s entrenched power and wealth, that hope may be forlorn.