My assumption is developing nations relive variations of the past of the developed nations, while adding some new mistakes of their own.<p>In the industrial context, there's a whole bunch of worrying things that had to be learned not to do the hard way but were probably obvious and emergent discoveries making them likely to recur without sufficient intervention/education.<p>At least our mistakes were made with relatively small population multipliers. Repeating them on the scale of China or India's population, there's massive potential for environmental harm the likes of which we've never seen.