When Gus Speth gets radical, it's time to start digging bunkers. For more than 30 years, Speth has labored as the consummate environmental insider, having founded an environmental think tank (World Resources Institute), co-founded a major green group (Natural Resources Defense Council), advised a president (Clinton), administered a United Nations agency (U.N. Development Program), and taught in the high echelons of American academia (Georgetown Law School, and now the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies). He's been a major player in the modern environmental movement -- and he says that movement is failing.
In his new book The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability, Speth argues that the progress of the green movement has been no match for the far larger tide of ecological destruction that now threatens to submerge humanity entirely. It's time to question the political economy that dominates the developed world, time to ask whether it's providing benefits commensurate with the massive environmental deterioration it generates. It's time to question capitalism.
I spoke with Speth by phone about his book, his work, and his vision for a more people-friendly economy.
David Roberts: With this latest book, you seem to be slipping over into something a bit more like radicalism. How much of that is response to circumstances, and how much is just frustration after so many years of work?
Gus Speth: Look at the data. Goodness knows we've won lots of battles, and we celebrate them in the environmental movement repeatedly, but if you do look at the real long-term trends, and go back and look at the aspirations people had when we started the modern phase of environmentalism in, say, Earth Day 1970, it's impossible not to conclude that it's not working. As a result, we're on the cusp of a tremendous planetary deterioration. I think these prescriptions that might look radical today aren't going to look very radical tomorrow.
DR: Are there groups out there doing the kind of things that 21st-century environmentalism needs done?
GS: Certain things are very promising. One for example is the work that's being done by 1Sky. I'm very excited to see what Van Jones is doing at the Ella Baker Center and Green for All. Of course we need to do a lot more of what the League of Conservation Voters is doing. The religious organizations are inspirational in these issues. I think everything Bill McKibben does is leading us in the right direction.
I see a lot of things happening out there. I see young people getting more and more interested in these issues. I think things are beginning to move, and it's very exciting.
DR: Any thoughts on how people can use alternative media to work around the sclerotic mainstream media establishment?
GS: It is important to use these alternatives. They're great for communicating among communities of preexisting interests. But we risk having everybody eventually ending up with just the news that suits them. In the end, we really do depend on the so-called mainstream media. It's very important to win that back.
DR: There's ecological destruction in China right now, India, Russia. Why focus your book on capitalism?
GS: You may be misjudging those systems. China is a form of state capitalism of the rawest type, I would say. There aren't really systems of economic management out there today other than capitalism. If there are, they're minor and fading pretty fast.
Capitalism is a system of political economy. It is not the idealized, theoretical system of a textbook. It's a system dedicated, overwhelmingly, to the production of profit for reinvestment and growth, and the capitalist economy is most successful at producing very rapid and very large amounts of economic growth. The fabulous expansion of the world economy since World War II has been accompanied by a devastating deterioration of the natural environment. The projection out into the future, with the doubling time of the world economy less than two decades, is not promising.
To maintain the highest possible profit, companies are driven to externalize their environmental costs and seek environmentally destructive subsidies from government. And they basically succeed at keeping costs off their books and keeping subsidies on the government's books. The result is that the prices that we pay are wildly out of whack. They're environmentally dishonest, because they don't include the cost of production, they don't include the environmental subsidies. This fabulously large economic system is running without the most basic environmental controls.
Add to that enormous power of giant corporations, our pathetic capitulation to consumerism, and government hooked on growth because it can generate more revenues without having to raise tax rates. Environmentalists try to swim against that current and they're just not strong enough, and so we keep losing.
DR: Some enviros say genuinely free markets are a friend of the environment. As opposed to rejecting capitalism, they advocate taking capitalism seriously.
GS: A lot of environmental economists think that all you have to do is get prices right by internalizing environmental costs and doing away with environmental subsidies. But that's a dream world. I go through the whole environmental microeconomics picture in some detail [in my book]. And if you could do all the things that I talk about, well, we'd have this problem more or less solved.
We need to challenge consumerism. We need to challenge the way corporations are chartered and the structures within which they operate today. We need to challenge growth itself and ask, is it really benefiting us at this stage in our economic development? Or is growth imposing more costs on us than it is creating real benefits?
DR: There are people who say economic growth can be decoupled from greenhouse-gas emissions. I take it you're saying something stronger?
GS: I'm saying something very different. If you've got a really wasteful economy and you need to dematerialize it to increase eco-efficiency, and you adopt policies to force very rapid technological change, you could have a certain amount of growth and a certain amount of environmental improvement occurring simultaneously. But if you've got what we've got now, it doesn't look that way; the growth remains the enemy. Then you have to ask, if growth is the enemy and it's going to be part of the environmental problem for affluent countries, is it really creating the benefits people automatically assume it brings?
We've had tremendous amounts of jobless growth in this country. If you look at whether people are getting happier in their lives and feeling a stronger sense of personal satisfaction, it's flat-lined for decades. It doesn't go up with all that GDP per capita.
So what you have to ask is, is it really worth it? We have a serious social problem. It's gotten bad in the teeth of tremendous amounts of economic growth and large increases in per-capita GDP. And more of that is not going to make these problems go away. If you want to deal with these issues of social justice in our country, let's just do it. Let's not pretend that we're solving these problems by growing, or even that growth provides the means to solve those problems, which is a traditional formula. Make a list of all the things you would do with all the extra money growth is going to produce. And then ... let's just do them!
DR: A growing number of people are trying to make happiness or well-being a first-order goal of public policy rather than a hoped-for side effect. That involves trying to measure it. What are some promising methods along those lines?
GS: The first thing to do is to have a good system of national indicators of subjective well-being. We know that losing one's job, getting laid off, is terribly destructive to a sense of well-being, so you want to have policies with job retention and job-sharing and other things that keep people employed. We know that people's sense of well-being stems heavily from their associations with other people in their communities, their families, their churches and synagogues and mosques, so you want to have policies which give people the time and incentives to invest in those areas. We need to be investing heavily in social capital, in building up social connectedness.
DR: The typical response is that if you try to make happiness part of policy, you just end up imposing your values on people.
GS: I feel like somebody's trying to impose a lot of values on me right now. [Laughs.] They're just not my values. That's kind of a strange way of looking at it. Of course we can get better at measuring things that go into long-term social and environmental well-being. To deal with social issues is not something foreign from politics; it should be what our politics is all about, and when our politics is at its best, that's what it's trying to do.
DR: The reforms you advocate would sap corporations of a lot of that power, yet the only mechanisms through which you could possibly implement reforms are already heavily influenced by them.
GS: Exactly right. But to give up on these things is even worse. There's no reason to think we can't make major change. It's just going to take a struggle. People have to see how serious the environmental and social conditions are.
I hope we don't have to have a breakdown, a collapse. What we need to do and what we're not doing is get the environmentally concerned people and the socially concerned people and the politically concerned people together, because that's just one movement, in the end. Those communities are not talking much to each other today, but they're communities of shared faith. Each is trying to inject a sense of values into this valueless economic machine.
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Comments
View as Flat
LGT Posted 10:39 pm
09 Jun 2008
http://feww.wordpress.com/2008/06/06/unep-issues-some-co2 ...
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Jonas Posted 12:31 am
10 Jun 2008
In his opening speech the old man said that capitalism has been the greatest catastrophy ever brought about by mankind. He urged people to look at other cultures and their economic systems, which allow for a far more sustainable economy.
Back to the gift economy? Potlatch anyone? :-)
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Biodiversivist Posted 12:39 am
10 Jun 2008
Most of the environmental destruction in Russia and China was done when they were clearly "not" capitalist economies. The envrionmental destruction of India has happened despite it being a primarily organic agrarian economy where "consumerism" was practically unheard of.
I wouldn't be riding a hybrid electric bike without markets providing me with the battery technology and low cost parts. We wouldn't be discussing any of this without markets providing us with affordable computers and the internet.
The problem is that there are 6.7 billion human beings being kept alive by inexpensive fossil fuel energy and soon there will be 9 billion. The only hope is for markets to find sustainable, environmentally benign technologies to replace the fossil fuel era, which replaced the wood burning era.
"The race is now on between the technoscientific forces that are destroying the living environment and those that can be harnessed to save it. We are inside a bottleneck of overpopulation and wasteful consumption. If the race is won, humanity can emerge in far better condition than when it entered, and with most of the diversity of life still intact."--E.O. Wilson
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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caniscandida Posted 1:13 am
10 Jun 2008
It has been pointed out in Gristmill discourse (rather over my head, of course) that the NRDC is a "conservative" organization. One wonders if Gus Speth would acknowledge that, or understand that.
On corporations still calling the shots, over against Speth's hope that "There's no reason to think we cannot make major change, it's just going to take a struggle": this also would seem to require more precision, on the basis of what we regularly read in Gristmill. Ads for the coal industry, agribusiness, and such petroleum companies as Chevron and BP are some of the most happy, beautiful, utopian bits of TV now made. Meanwhile, conservative think tanks with corporatist connexions themselves have a thriving industry in publishing denialist anti-environmentalist para-scientific literature.
So, where does Speth's sense of hope come from?
Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.
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amazingdrx Posted 1:35 am
10 Jun 2008
Real competitive capitalism is different.
Compare a local business to a Walmart. That is the difference.
Use the "free" markets, cry the free marketeers! Humans will be free and happy, prosperous according to their individual efforts. Unfettered by ineffective, inefficient, corrupt government.
In reality they will end up slaves to corporate feudalism. The value of their labor and their very lives determined by "free" markets.
Another approach, a direct infusion of cash to real capitalism, competitive small local business might be more helpfull for people and the environment. The human fund..money for people. Hehey.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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hapa Posted 1:53 am
10 Jun 2008
I wouldn't be riding a hybrid electric bike without markets providing me with the battery technology and low cost parts. We wouldn't be discussing any of this without markets providing us with affordable computers and the internet.
your bike is a clean drop in a dirty ocean, generating surfboard revenue in a world of transoceanic freighter-sized financial goals. if the net profit on your bike were like the profit margin on an SUV, it'd cost you more than $10,000, and modern capitalism would embrace clean transportation. let's say we sell one per person, instead of per few people, maybe then the cost would be $4,000. you'd pay that, right? to subsidize the existence of today's self-perpetuating corporate sector?
if this conversation were happening in person, in a cafe, it would be more effective. we would walk away from the meeting with goals and meet again to assess the progress on those goals. but this conversation's only goal is to have more conversations. the same conversation, again.
that's a very appropriate metaphor for what today's capitalism is about. it's why markets, with the same players in them, are in no way neutral or helpful how you're suggesting here:
The problem is that there are 6.7 billion human beings being kept alive by inexpensive fossil fuel energy and soon there will be 9 billion. The only hope is for markets to find sustainable, environmentally benign technologies to replace the fossil fuel era….
markets = people, thinking, working, accomplishing.
look at what you argued, from my point of view. i saw you argue that environmentalists and socialists are responsible for the problems the earth faces right now. i saw you argue that china was dirtier 30 years ago than it is now which is ridiculous. i saw you argue that because environmentalists argue against growth-without-physical-limit, that's why we lose arguments, not because corporations have most of the money in the world and the ear of regulators -- our employees, the guardians of our public welfare -- and by having their ear, corporations gain the political and financial means to treat the earth according to their own standards.
is their standard better than the performance of the soviet union? that's impossible to say. the soviet union was economically dying for the entire 45 years after the second world war. their warning to us is not about socialism, not about the limits on capitalism, it's about the resource-depleting lengths to which power will go to maintain itself.
today's capitalism can reduce its waste -- an admirable goal that would have been sufficient 30 years ago -- but it can't and won't shrink its financial goals if that's what needs to happen to get our resource use down. nature subsidizes big capitalism. the destruction of nature has been the process of overgrowing capitalism.
we borrowed money from the future, we borrowed resources from the future, we grew our markets. now they have to shrink to something that can exist in the present. "markets" won't do that without a fight.
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wgartist Posted 2:15 am
10 Jun 2008
My favorite line of Speth's was : We need to challenge consumerism.
He's just now figuring this out? Presumable people have been paying him for his thinking over the years. I hope they don't feel too bad about wasting their money like that. Or Roberts in investing his time interviewing a clown like this. It's obvious that this guy (good bureaucratic player as he is) is just sensing a change in the wind and tacking to get a little more "green" in his sails.
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redambrosia99 Posted 2:34 am
10 Jun 2008
Oh, and while we're on the topic of women and such, how I do love my wonderful education! Golly, where would I be without it? Probably barefoot and pregnant.
So, we've got a decreased labor load, less babies, longer life expectancy, a very nice education... And before everyone starts saying "Democracy!", it just so happens that our little democracy here in the good ol' US was put in place to protect capitalists.
So, while we've got all these problems caused by capitalism (eco-destruction, social inequity, reasource depleation, rampant greed, etc.) we also have some significant gains.
I would say that the biggest challenge the environmental movement has right now is keeping all those gains while getting rid of the bad things. It's very well for neo-hippies to want everyone to live in communes where we wash our laundry by hand, but, well, have you ever washed thick wool by hand? I mean, ouch! We'd prefer it if we could keep our gains, so we can continue using our brains and not just being mules, but still have clean laundry.
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archigeek Posted 3:11 am
10 Jun 2008
The mellotron is your friend.
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redambrosia99 Posted 4:49 am
10 Jun 2008
All that talk of libery? A tool, used to get the popular support of "the People" (i.e. poor folk) who would actually fight the war.
I'm not saying that its all empty and that all those people were just greedy bastards though. But their primary motivation for starting their own country was so that they didn't have to pay taxes to the England. They could then use all their money and power to further their own interests.
But they left us (i.e. the poor folk, again) a great set of tools to continually wrest power from them and challenge them. Their mistake. ;^)
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Biodiversivist Posted 5:22 am
10 Jun 2008
I'm for free markets. Capitalism is just a word, one that often causes testosterone levels to peak in a kind of Pavlovian response to it.
This "capitalism" argument has passed the blog dozens of times. The word "capitalism," like the word atheist, took on a negative connotation long ago.
Because of capitalism's fuzzy definition, like a broken record, the Soviet Union, the antithesis of a capitalist society, inevitably gets labeled as a capitalist society in sheep's clothing, China's half century of relentless environmental degradation all happened as a result of its decade long semi-free market economy, and the environmental degradation of India's environment and conversion of its rivers into open sewers by its nearly consumerless agrarian society is the result of blah, blah.
Communist China, the former Soviet Union, and the agrarian society of India are stark, unavoidable evidence that the simplistic arguments blaming consumerism and capitalism for the world's environmental woes are barking up the wrong tree.
The answer of course is ...[insert vague diatribe punctuated with half a dozen strawman arguments here using the pinnacle of free market accomplishments, the computer we are typing on and the internet].
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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redambrosia99 Posted 6:45 am
10 Jun 2008
As I understand the term it means "trade" without regulations. As in, I can outsource my paper mill to bagladesh where labor is cheap and the government doesn't require me to control my waste.
In which case the free market most certainly has screwed over most of the "developing" world.
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Jon Rynn Posted 7:16 am
10 Jun 2008
As for the word "capitalism", Robert Heilbroner wrote a whole book (well, a short book) trying to define the term. You could define it mainly in terms of the relations between owners and employees; so that my friend, the late Professor Seymour Melman, wrote a book called "After Capitalism", which meant, employee-owned-and-operated firms. A society made up of worker coops would not be capitalist, according to his definition.
On the other hand, the term is usually mixed up with the term "free market", whatever that is. So, you could say that "capitalism" is really "private capitalism", that is, private firms own the "means of production", or the capital, of the society, as opposed to "society as a whole", or more generally, the government -- which was "actually existing socialism" or communism, central-planning -- which did not work.
Now, despite what some may think, even left-type thinkers are not calling for central planning (in fact, the biggest central planning apparatus is now the Pentagon). So, unless you have an alternative definition, the term is not useful. Melman had an alternative definition; I'm not sure whether Speth does, because unfortunately I haven't read the book. Anybody know?
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Sam Wells Posted 11:26 am
10 Jun 2008
The most damning thing is that the older people are now from those same exact days - and look where we are! We failed. We went soft and abandoned our ideals for nice houses, cars, money, jobs, and all the stuff the Merkin Dream is made of, including the cotton candy.
If there is any hope, it ain't us. It is the next generation that has to live with the dire consequences of our dismal failures. I hope they kick our proverbial butts. -sammie
Onward through the fog
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Delay And Deny Posted 2:39 pm
10 Jun 2008
GS: A lot of environmental economists think that all you have to do is get prices right by internalizing environmental costs and doing away with environmental subsidies. But that's a dream world. I go through the whole environmental microeconomics picture in some detail [in my book]. And if you could do all the things that I talk about, well, we'd have this problem more or less solved.
Ever hear of the old East Germany? Or Poland..or any Iron Curtain country before the fall of Berlin?
These countries were among the most horrific environmentally...along with all the border states of the U.S.S.R.
During that same time, the US began its development of EPA policies and new technologies to greenify industry.
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hapa Posted 5:32 pm
10 Jun 2008
lawsuits and regulation.
our civil court system: older than capitalism, and way more fair.
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Jason D Scorse Posted 2:10 am
11 Jun 2008
The simple fact is that 99% of the people who bemoan capitalism are those at the top of the pecking order- who have all the modern comforts, technology, and travel the world- it has always been this way. The 99% of the world that doesn't enjoy these things wants them, and no one is going to stop them from getting them.
Environmentalists are left with only 1 option: figuring out how to provide a high material quality of life without destroying the world's ecosystems for everybody. Very difficult task, but this is our job, and all the talk of changing consumer culture is not going to stop a single Chinese or Indian or Brazilian from wanting a car, a refrigerator, and the ability to take a vacation overseas or send their child to a top university.
P.S. One commenter above posited that free markets are markets free of regulation- this is 100% wrong! I don't want to get into a long discussion of what a free market is, but unregulated it is not- and no economist has ever said this.
J.S.
I teach environmental economics and blog at http://www.voicesofreason.info.
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Colin Wright Posted 3:55 am
11 Jun 2008
I haven't read the book either, but from the interview I suspect Speth is most concerned with the growth aspect of capitalism. (Namely, the reinvestment of profits in a positive feedback loop in a machine-like way.) His book opens with a series of J-curves which show dramtiacally the assault on natural systems, particularly since WW2.
So I would imagine the alternative that Speth argues for is a kind of no- or low-growth market system that allows for democratic participation to question the growth dynamic. I suppose you could call it cooperativism or plain old sustainability?
This is probaly slghtly different from Melmann. Did M. have much of an environmental outlook?
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Jon Rynn Posted 4:13 am
11 Jun 2008
As you can tell from occasional diatribes from some our friends such as Jonas, the "Left" can be just as obsessed with growth of whatever kind as the Right. I don't think Melman was aware of the sheer level of destruction and peak oil that we are now (or at least, I am now).
The positive feedback process of profits back into growth -- I believe Marx referred to this as accumulation -- is actually a characteristic of our species, from the first tool-makers on, it seems to me. Unless you restrict things like mining and pollution and deforestation directly, I don't know how you prevent growth from being based more on quantity than quality, which a sustainable growth system would be.
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Biodiversivist Posted 5:08 am
11 Jun 2008
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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hapa Posted 5:43 am
11 Jun 2008
we got monsanto instead of food security, we got GM instead of sustainable transportation, we got aetna instead of dependable affordable health care, we got coca-cola machines everywhere instead of a decent maintenance schedule on our water systems, and on, and on and on on on on.
it doesn't even look like a hammer seeing a nail. it's like we were playing baseball, with the hammer, and now we need to switch to soccer and our sponsors are refusing to let us play without the hammer in our hand and the referee -- "gaia," one name, must be brazilian -- refuses to let us on the field while we're holding a weapon.
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Wolverine Posted 6:19 am
11 Jun 2008
The Siberian forest, one of the biggest on Earth, was intact until the capitalists took over Russia, and is now being destroyed. The one-child-family policy in China was undertaken when the government was still at least somewhat communist, and the now capitalist Chinese government, by its plans for growth, is causing far more environmental and ecological damage than all that put together by the previously actually communist one.
Moreover, your electric bike is NOT environmentally friendly, so who cares if you can't get its parts without capitalism? Just because an electric bike isn't as a car doesn't mean it's a good thing.
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caniscandida Posted 9:58 pm
11 Jun 2008
<<
Environmentalists are left with only 1 option: figuring out how to provide a high material quality of life without destroying the world's ecosystems for everybody. Very difficult task, but this is our job ...
>>
(The autisticoid Jason Scorse also referred to Biodiversivist as "biodiversity." You have both been writing in Gristmill for a number of years now, Jason; so what is your problem, that you cannot pay attention long enough, or care enough, to spell his name right? Aside from the rudeness issue, do you appreciate how that reduces your credibility?)
"High material quality of life" for everybody (both human, and sentient non-human too!) is indeed an ethically desirable goal. And I am glad and proud that so many in the Grist/Gristmill community are committed, more or less professionally, to discussing "material" issues.
Nevertheless, if Jason means to discount entirely the spiritual, aesthetic, and ethical dimensions of environmentalism, he is quite wrong.
Those dimensions do indeed exist, in spite of what Jason may be saying. And they appeal to many people who consider themselves environmentalists. And some of those are drawn to read Grist and Gristmill.
Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.
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caniscandida Posted 10:08 pm
11 Jun 2008
China, including Chinese society, the Chinese government, the Chinese Communist Party, and the Chinese economy, is a unique mixture of authoritarianism, regulation, and "capitalism" (whatever that means). We all await to see if it will turn out in the long run good for the Chinese people, good for the biodiversity and environment of China, and good for the world.
Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.
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JMG Posted 11:21 pm
11 Jun 2008
The 5% Project
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Biodiversivist Posted 1:06 am
12 Jun 2008
Ditto for communist China, which rightly implemented the one child policy rather than stand by and watch starvation do the job.
You left consumerless India out of the discussion. Was it also a poster child for ecological sustainability before its economy began to grow?
It isn't about the word capitalism, which is largley undefined. It is about material wealth and inversely poverty, which can both be used to preserve an environment or consume it. Poverty can preserve it because the people are too hungry and sick to cut it down, or it can destroy it because they are hungry and sick and need to cut it down, as is happening all across Africa today.
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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caniscandida Posted 2:11 am
12 Jun 2008
<<
It isn't about the word capitalism, which is largley undefined. It is about material wealth and inversely poverty, which can both be used to preserve an environment or consume it.
>>
Academic questions, not intended to put anybody on the spot:
What is "poor"? What is "poverty"?
What should we want the "poor" to have, which they do not have at present? What should we intend to give to the "poor," which they have not at present?
Is there an actual "something" which rich people possess, which can be transferred/given to poor people, such as to make the poor people not poor?
If that "something" is simply money, what are we waiting for?
Does the new "responsibility/right to protect" doctrine enter in? I.e., if parents cannot take care of their kids, do neighbors who are more capable have the right to break in and seize those kids?
Is there a "responsibility/right to preserve" an environment/ecosystem? May capable agencies always intrude, whether governmental or NGO?
N.B.: an excellent German movie, about a German Jewish family, fugitives (all of them very cute), trying to hang on in British East Africa during World War II: "Nowhere in Africa."
Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.
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Jason D Scorse Posted 2:54 pm
15 Jun 2008
As to the substantive point-that I have discounted the non-material aspects of life, no, I haven't; they are simply not my business- how you deal with your spirituality is up to you and the government should have no part in it- but the government does have a say in tax rates, clean water, and helping you and your children get good educations. Those are the things that should be part of the public policy realm.
I teach environmental economics and blog at http://www.voicesofreason.info.
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