For your information: Europe was shocked yesterday when Jacques Chirac - the notoriously blue neoliberal capitalist - inaugurated the launch of the 'Chirac Foundation', which focuses on preserving biodiversity and cultural diversity.

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? :-)

"Happiness," "well-being," "flourishing," and other synonyms should not be allowed to float about in a conversation unsecured.  It is ethically perilous to allow a speaker, or reader, to get away with thinking that "happiness" is interchangeable with "affluence," or "the enjoyment of wealth."

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.

In its modern, most destructive mode, national corporate feudalism, where government/industry merges, either government taking over corporate power (as in china)or corporate power taking over government (bushwacked USA), is not really capitalism.

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

markets, markets, markets!

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.

Thanks for saying it. I completely agree. It's obvious that this whole compromise with capitalism thing did not work. And it's not going to work.
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.

...let me count the ways...  But let me also count the ways you have vastly improved my life, so as not to be hypocritical.  For one thing, I don't have to spend most of my time cleaning.  Can you imagine spending 16 hours a day cleaning and cooking?  No wonder women had such short life expectancies.  Not to mention all the babies they were supposed to produce.

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.

We live in a REPUBLIC, with democratic representative institutions to, ostensibly, carry out the will of the people. In addition, I respectfully disagree with your characterisation of our republics' founding as one which established a capitalist nation. There are very few words in our Constitution which deal with commerce. The vast majority of the document deals with establishing the various powers--and the seperation thereof--of the three branches of our national government. Oh, and of course, last but not least, our Bill of Rights. I'm with Patrick Henry on this one: "Give me Liberty, or give me death". We have all benefitted from the the excesses of capitalism, no doubt, but the time has come to question the nature of capitalism and its effects on our lives as humans and citizens.

The mellotron is your friend.

... to read your history then.  Start with A People's History of the United States, and go from there.  That Tea Party people make such a fuss over?  Caused by taxes which uhrt primarily well-off people and business people.  Our first president?  The richest man in the country at the time.  The rest of those people?  Also rich power players.

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. ;^)

Exactly what do you mean when you say "free market"?

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.

were the three "isms" that Martin Luther King identified as humanity's biggest problems.

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?

I think what GS is saying is to point to your forehead and say that's where the "radicalism" has to start. Forget all these grand notions like free markets, which are not free, and global trade that isn't global. Like the days of the Black Panthers, the SDS, and the hippies, it started with a fundamental "paradigm shift" in how we viewed anything.

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

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.

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.

lawsuits.

lawsuits and regulation.

our civil court system: older than capitalism, and way more fair.

Jon writes: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?
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?

not the environment, particularly.  A friend of his was working on cellulosic ethanol through the 1980s, to little success.

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.

but why don't we get to ask whether the multinational corporation is the right tool for that job? sclerosis, right? not until the heart attack can you change. growth is defined by what grew. instead of what needed to grow.

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.

"Most of the environmental destruction in Russia and China was done when they were clearly 'not' capitalist economies."  FALSE!!!  Come on Biod, I know you're rather conservative, but let's at least avoid propagandistic lies.

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.

Jason Scorse wrote ambiguously:

<<
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.

Interestingly, Wolverine, according to the MainStream Media, resentment by parents of children who died in the recent horrible earthquake in central China (Sichuan) may lead to a significant political movement.  Their resentment (we are told) is founded not only in the disgracefully shoddy construction (thanks to corruption at several levels) of schools, where the children died; but also on the fact that so many of those children were ONLY children.  I.e., the parents obediently followed the Party's instruction, and had one and only one child -- who is now dead.

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.

BioD wrote:

<<
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.