One of the legacies of the centrally planned economies throughout Eastern Europe, the former USSR and China is the advanced state of environmental deterioration. Lopsided investment in heavy industrialization with little regard for the environment has produced rising morbidity and mortality rates throughout the East. The deceptively green landscape is contaminated with heavy metals, radioactive fallout, and incredibly high levels of deposits of the oxides of sulfur and nitrogen from the smokestacks of industry. In many command economies water is so polluted that it is often unfit even for industrial cooling applications, and air is so foul that school children must periodically be removed from their homes to more hospitable climes to cleanse their lungs of airborne contaminants. Destruction of the environment points to a critical failure of communism.
