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Mainstream envrionmentalist Gus Speth: Change everything now (interview)
Jeff Goodell, Orion magazine
One of the nation’s most mainstream environmentalists says it’s time to get a lot more radical
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JAMES GUSTAVE “Gus” Speth’s office at Yale reeks of Old World charm, with a high ceiling and dark, wood-paneled walls adorned with souvenirs from his travels in Africa and Asia. Speth, sixty-six, the dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, is a tall, genial man who wears conservative striped ties and speaks in a quiet southern drawl. If America can be said to have a distinguished elder statesman of environmental policy, Speth is it. Before he arrived at Yale, he cofounded the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of the most powerful environmental groups in the U.S., then went on to serve as a top environmental policy advisor to President Jimmy Carter. In 1982, he founded the World Resources Institute, an environmental think tank, which he headed for a decade. He also served as a senior advisor to President-elect Bill Clinton’s transition team and spent seven years as the top administrator in the Development Programme at the United Nations.
It’s not surprising that Speth would end up in a wood-paneled office at Yale. What is surprising, however, is that he uses his bully pulpit in academia to push for a 1960s-style take-it-to-the-streets revolution. His new book, The Bridge at the Edge of the World (Yale University Press), is nothing less than a call for an uprising that would reinvent modern capitalism and replace it with, well, a postmodern capitalism that values sustainability over growth, and doing good over making a quick buck. Sound idealistic? It is-but that’s part of the book’s appeal. Speth goes beyond finger-wagging to indict consumer capitalism itself for the rape and pillage of the natural world. His proximate concern is global warming and the impact it will have on civilized life as we know it. But unlike, say, Al Gore, Speth is not concerned with details of climate science or policy prescriptions for the near-term. He is after bigger game-the Wal-Martization of America, our slavish devotion to an ever-expanding gross domestic product, the utter failure of what Speth disparagingly calls “modern capitalism” to create a sustainable world. What is needed, Speth believes, is not simply a tax on greenhouse gas emissions, but “a new operating system” for the modern world.
I spoke with Speth at Yale earlier this year.
… JG: Right. And you can say—as you do—that we consume too much, and that our economic system has become a slave to the idea of an ever-expanding GDP. But you could also just say, “Look, there’s too many people on the planet—”
GS: Well, I think a lot of people believe that. I actually have a law, Speth’s Law, and it is that the richer you are, the more you think that population is the world’s problem. But the scale of the impact is really derived from the phenomenal amount of economic growth in rich countries, not from the phenomenal population growth.
JG: In your view, what’s the alternative to pro-growth capitalism? Should we rethink communism?
GS: No, it’s not that at all. But I do believe we should be looking for a nonsocialist alternative to today’s capitalism. I think we do want to make changes that are sufficiently profound that when you look back on them, you will see that it’s no longer the capitalism of the early twenty-first century.
JG: What would a revised capitalist system look like?
(September/October 2008 issue)
There does seem to be a lot of truth in Speth’s Law (“the richer you are, the more you think that population is the world’s problem”).
Gus Speth seems to be arguing for democratic socialism, with an admixture of environmentalism and communitarianism. This is not particularly radical. During the 30s through the 70s, democratic socialism enjoyed wide support in non-communist countries worldwide, including Europe and the US )where it was known as the New Deal). -BA
The Unthinkable – Who Survives…
Amanda Kovattana, Flickr
Who Survives When Disaster Strikes and Why. A riveting page turner for those of us curious about how people behave when the shit hits the fan. Lots of stories from survivors of the Twin Towers, hotel fires, stampedes in Jerusalem, school shootings and plane crashes. Interviews with brain specialists, professionals and heroes even those who could do nothing, but offer a human face of compassion.
The message of the book is that people are cooperative and willing, they just need guidance and information. Authorities and professionals don’t trust regular people with enough instruction or tools to help themselves. Author notes suggestion by British House of Commons that airports should allow people a chance to use emergency equipment in a mock-up cabin where people wait at the gate instead of just having them sit there watching CNN. Aviation people wouldn’t even consider it.
Authorities fear that people will panic at the very idea of an emergency, not to mention how it would impact business. In Katrina the mayor held off on the announcement to evacuate because his lawyers feared lawsuits from businesses. By now they have figured out that the law-that government is immune to that kind of lawsuit. Thai officials had same fear of backlash before tsunami.
Humans are motivated by both human psychology and cultural memory. Thus training would go a long way to helping a culture get it. And it helps if people are told why they should do things, ie: we all know we should put on the oxygen mask on ourselves before assisting a child, but I never knew why. It’s because you would black out in 5 to 10 seconds without oxygen and then where would your kid be?
A note to activists and apocalypse mongers. There is a fine line between getting people’s attention about a possible emergency situation and loosing them to a sense of futility. Thus give a scenario that is manageable, but not overwhelming recommends one professional.
(September 2008)
Shame on you, Generation Excess
Garry Egger, Sydney Morning Herald
Baby boomers practised scorched earth gluttony, and now the rest must pay the price, writes Garry Egger.
We Australian baby boomers are among the most privileged human beings to have walked on planet earth. It’s not just that we are the second longest living people in the world, after Japan. Or that we are exceptionally healthy, because obesity levels suggest we’re not. Or wealthy, although we do pretty well by all relative standards.
No. It’s because we’ve lived in that tiny slice of human history and phase of economic development where everything has been right. And let’s face it, even for the least privileged of us, life has been relatively easy. Most of us have never had to face the hell of a civil war, or depression, and have been blessed by geography – the most powerful influence in anyone’s life – by being born and raised in a “lucky country”.
But is it all coming to an end? Are petrol prices and global warming just the tip of a melting iceberg primed to set humanity back on its heels, such that our kids won’t enjoy anything like the fruits of life that we have? More worryingly, am I, and my generation partly to blame as the generation that tried to warn against all this in the ’60s and ’70s, but then said “wait for me” as the world took off again in the 1980s?
(6 September 2008)
The Elephant Under the Rug: Denial and Failed Energy Projects
Thomas R. Blakeslee, Clearlight Foundation via Renewable Energy World
At the World Renewable Energy Conference in Glasgow I recently witnessed the strange phenomenon of group denial first hand. After a paper about hydrogen-fueled cars, some embarrassing questions were asked about the practicalities of storing and delivering hydrogen to the cars. The questions were dismissed and the questioners meekly backed down. I wanted to jump in and set them straight but keenly felt the group pressure to not ruin the party. I couldn’t do it!
Groupthink is a strange phenomenon resulting from our deep genetic programming as herd animals: If our peer group is ignoring the giant lump in the living room rug, we will naturally imitate their behavior and walk around the elephant hidden there. We tend to be drawn into a sort of mass hallucination where everyone conforms to an unspoken agreement to ignore the inconvenient but obvious truth. We walk around the lump without consciously seeing it.
… U.S. energy policy has developed several similar delusions where people are still getting rich pursuing failed projects that should have been abandoned years ago. Mare than half of our US $4 billion DOE science budget is being spent to keep alive failed programs. Saving face and saving contracts has made denial the order of the day. Billions in subsidy money finance a war chest for lobbying that keeps these programs alive.
Let’s look closer at the denial of fatal flaws in three major DOE programs where money is being spent recklessly and entire industries, government agencies and journalists are in group denial:
The Hydrogen Initiative: US $246 million 2009 budget
… Nuclear Power: US $1.4 Billion 2009 budget, $44 billion spent so far
… Clean Coal Technology: US $754 million 2009 budget
… Our energy policymaking has been hijacked by the coal and nuclear industries. They have sabotaged appropriations that have real potential for solving our energy problems and directed vast billions instead to keeping their dying industries alive. Technology could solve our energy and pollution problems if we could just free ourselves from the political stranglehold of these heavily subsidized industries.
Thomas R. Blakeslee is president of The Clearlight Foundation, a non-profit organization that invests in renewable energy and other socially useful companies and issues cash grants to individuals who are working effectively for change.
(2 September 2008)
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