Development economics for the most part has failed to recognize renewable environmental resources as economic goods. Yet the lives of the poor in developing countries are intimately tied to the fate of their local common-property resources—soil, fuelwood, water, and so on. Ignoring the loss of common-property renewable resources (via degradation, centralization, or privatization) in calculations of net national product can mask the destruction of resources available to a country's poor behind the false appearance of a growing national economy. This paper describes the difference between the problem of managing local common-property resources in developing countries and the problem of protecting the global commons such as the atmosphere and oceans. It outlines the calculations that would include the local commons in the national income accounting of capital assets and argues that the interests of those most dependent on the increasingly scarce local commons will be best served by placing control in their hands, while the centralgovernment provides intfrastructure and educational support. To control the pollution of the global commons, on the other hand, the paper sketches a plan in which most countries would have a high incentive to participate—a global allocation of limited, tradable permits to discharge defined pollutants.