Aim Conservation Efforts at Leaders, Carter Says

Former President Jimmy Carter, addressing an environmental conference in Los Angeles, said Wednesday that Western countries can help developing nations conserve their natural resources only after persuading their leaders that conservation will best meet the needs of their nations.

“I don’t have any sense of impending doom, of giving up, of saying, ‘We can’t change things,’ ” Carter said. “I think things can be changed. . . . The Third World is not a hopeless case.”

He singled out Nicaragua as a possible recipient for environmentally sound assistance from developed nations. Once Nicaragua has free elections, he said, “the world ought to have a responsibility to rebuild what has been destroyed by an outside-financed war.” Carter criticized some U.S. efforts to assist developing nations as “inept,” saying too much of the aid goes to pay for administrative overhead.

Carter spoke at a conference sponsored by the Global Tomorrow Coalition, an umbrella group of major environmental and population control groups.