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Elegies for two significant but flawed figures who cast a long shadow over the fields of late 20th century environmental and political thought. -KS
Where Do We Go From Here?
Nick Baumann, Mother Jones
Conceding the race for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1980, Edward Kennedy told the delegates at the Democratic National Convention:
We cannot have a fair prosperity in isolation from a fair society. So I will continue to stand for a national health insurance. We must—we must not surrender—we must not surrender to the relentless medical inflation that can bankrupt almost anyone and that may soon break the budgets of government at every level. Let us insist on real controls over what doctors and hospitals can charge, and let us resolve that the state of a family’s health shall never depend on the size of a family’s wealth.
The president, the vice-president, the members of Congress have a medical plan that meets their needs in full, and whenever senators and representatives catch a little cold, the Capitol physician will see them immediately, treat them promptly, fill a prescription on the spot. We do not get a bill even if we ask for it, and when do you think was the last time a member of Congress asked for a bill from the federal government? And I say again, as I have before, if health insurance is good enough for the president, the vice-president, the Congress of the United States, then it’s good enough for you and every family in America.
Nearly 30 years later, that dream—of health insurance for every American—is still unfulfilled, and now Kennedy won’t be around to lend his considerable political heft to the continuing debate. His seat in the senate will be empty for six months before Massachusetts can hold a special election to fill it. (Unless Massachusetts Dems change the law.) The Democrats will have 59 votes (if the ailing Robert Byrd is healthy enough) in the Senate, and the Republicans will be able to filibuster anything and everything they want. When the seat’s finally filled, it’ll be well into 2010, an election year. No one expects sweeping health care reform to be passed in an election year…
(26 August 2009)
Edward M. Kennedy, Senate Stalwart, Is Dead at 77
John M. Broder, New York Times
Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, a son of one of the most storied families in American politics, a man who knew acclaim and tragedy in near-equal measure and who will be remembered as one of the most effective lawmakers in the history of the Senate, died late Tuesday night. He was 77.
The death of Mr. Kennedy, who had been battling brain cancer, was announced Wednesday morning in a statement by the Kennedy family, which was already mourning the death of the senator’s sister Eunice Kennedy Shriver two weeks earlier.
“Edward M. Kennedy — the husband, father, grandfather, brother and uncle we loved so deeply — died late Tuesday night at home in Hyannis Port,” the statement said. “We’ve lost the irreplaceable center of our family and joyous light in our lives, but the inspiration of his faith, optimism and perseverance will live on in our hearts forever.”
Mr. Kennedy was the last surviving brother of a generation of Kennedys that dominated American politics in the 1960s and that came to embody glamour, political idealism and untimely death. The Kennedy mystique — some call it the Kennedy myth — has held the imagination of the world for decades, and it came to rest on the sometimes too-narrow shoulders of the brother known as Teddy…
(26 August 2009)
Edward Goldsmith (obituary)
Walter Schwartz, The Guardian
Edward Goldsmith, who has died aged 80, was an influential environmental scholar, polemicist and campaigner who founded and edited the Ecologist. A special issue in 1972, Blueprint for Survival, proposing the formation of a movement for sustainability, was published as a book, sold 750,000 copies in 17 languages and led to the foundation of the People party, later the Ecology party, which eventually became the Green party.
Blueprint for Survival was a call for a new world order founded not on economic growth but on stable populations of small, self-sufficient communities, similar to those that Goldsmith had seen in his early travels. “I began to see that the survival of primitive people and of the environment were inseparable,” he wrote at the time. “Primitive people were disappearing. So was wildlife. I realised that the root problem was economic development. So I decided to start a paper to explore these issues.”
However, Goldsmith’s extremist, conservative philosophy, opposed to economic development and globalisation in favour of local self-sufficiency, later marginalised him in the green movement, whose politics were moving leftwards. While greens welcomed the Channel tunnel as investment in public transport, he damned it as “designed to further increase our economic activity, exacerbating our rapidly deteriorating environment”…
(27 August 2009)
Discipline has given way to the silence of the graveyard
Jackie Ashley, Guardian comment
There can be few less likely heroes for the Guardian and progressive classes than Edward Goldsmith, who died last week at 80. He was ferociously rightwing, hostile to economic growth, wanted a much smaller population and hung around with a posh, high-living set. And furthermore, he left little obvious achievement behind him, except for founding The Ecologist magazine.
Yet Goldsmith merited a long, respectful obituary in this newspaper, and for anyone interested in the parlous state of the left, his legacy is worth analysing. He was an extremist: he pushed ideas to their logical end, then further – even supporting a racist group in France for a while. Like his younger brother, the maverick financier Jimmy Goldsmith, he frightened quite a lot of people.
Hardly surprisingly, he found relatively few allies. Today’s mainstream green agenda, which tries to reconcile material growth with action against global warming, often through technological fixes, was about as far from his primitive, low-growth, science-hostile politics as can be. He opposed the Channel tunnel as likely to increase our economic activity, while other greens welcomed it as an investment in public transport. So why did so many environmentalists, including George Monbiot, Jonathon Porritt and Goldsmith’s nephew Zac, praise him so fulsomely?
It was surely because, while they may not agree with all his philosophy, they understand the power of ideas and idealism. Goldsmith’s idealism certainly wasn’t mine. But by taking on such obvious truths as the virtue of free markets in agriculture, which he thought destroyed and starved, rather than sustained; and asking hard questions about the worship of technology, Goldsmith forced others to think harder. He was, in short, a stimulant – a shocker in good ways as well as bad…
(30 August 2009)
