THOM HARTMANN'S "INDEPENDENT THINKER" REVIEW OF THE MONTH
July 2008 -- Thom's First Father/Son Review
"The Bridge at the Edge of the World" [0]
By James Gustave Speth
Reviewed by Thom and Justin Hartmann
The world’s population, CO2 emissions, and pollution rates are in an almost vertical climb. Half of the world’s tropical and temperate forests are gone. Eighty percent of the world’s fisheries have been decimated. Since the Industrial Revolution over 20,000 species have gone extinct at rates not seen in 65 million years (since the dinosaurs disappeared). Half the wetlands and a third of the world’s mangroves are gone. Twenty percent of the corals are gone and another 20 percent are severely threatened. And the list goes on... These are the current trends and figures concerning our global environmental health. If our culture leaves our environmental policies and practices at the current rate and status, there will be no habitable planet for our grandchildren… period.
The Dean of the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, James Gustave Speth, wrote the book The Bridge at the Edge of the World [0] because he’s worried about our future and he’s right. We should all be very worried. He writes:
"Our home planet is now dangerously near a ‘tipping point.’ Human-made greenhouse gases are near a level such that important climate changes may proceed mostly under the climate systems own momentum. Impacts would include extermination of a large fraction of species on the planet, shifting of climate zones due to an intensified hydrologic cycle with effects on freshwater availability and human health, and repeated worldwide coastal tragedies associated with storms and a continuously rising sea level."
Speth shows us that the primary factor in today’s environmental decline is our economic system. Our particular breed of capitalism, integrated and linked in to the world markets, is unprecedented in its ability to produce goods. Therefore, as we tap into the earth’s finite resources at accelerated rates we also produce waste byproducts at the same increased rates. Moreover, economic assessments of growth and the American gross domestic product (GDP) do not include many of the costs of all this manufacturing and waste. Sustaining people and sustaining nature have taken a back seat unfettered economic growth, which is ever increasing. For example, it took all of history to get to the 7 trillion-dollar world economy of 1950; now we grow by that amount every decade.
Speth also shows that political oversight, currently, has failed or is non-existent with respect to the environment. This is evidenced by neglect of "non-market environmental costs," and the use of subsides that remove market signals and lack correcting mechanisms.
Thus, Speth suggests, today’s neoclassical market logic needs to be dismantled. In conjunction, he advocates restraining "market imperialism" and the commodification of our natural and cultural resources. Speth states that the concept of "endless growth" needs to be challenged especially when it exceeds environmental sustainability and that "ecological economic" principals need to be adopted. Speth’s "Post-growth" societies supply an alternative to today’s consumptive world where neoclassical economic practices are not increasing human happiness or improving people’s satisfaction with life. This "post-growth" society will foster economic security of the average person, environmentally honest prices, replacing consumerism with sustainability, and pulling the corporate interests out of politics.
Speth is also critical of today’s environmental movement. He states that the environmental movement, as it stands today, has proven ineffective at dealing with the current and future "larger challenges" in our global environmental crisis. Environmental policies need to expand beyond its current "incrementalist polices" that rely on consumer based solutions within the movement and do not offer viable solutions to such massive problems. Future environmental policy should focus on a more holistic view stressing the inclusion of resource depletion and pollution into economic forecasting and assessments.
Given this bridge between the economy and pollution, if we connect GDP to environmental destruction it is easy to show that the momentum of the current worldwide capitalist economic system (fifty-five trillion dollars in 2004) will be very difficult to "transform into something environmentally benign and restorative."
Given this challenge, he suggests two drivers for potential change, new consciousness and new politics.
With respect to the new consciousness he stresses developing non-materialistic lives and "a profound change in social values, culture, and worldview."
He also outlines a new style of democratic politics, one which addresses the long term goal of a strong democracy along side the immediate needs of "new environmental politics."
In the end, Speth believes that a new set of democratic policies and politics may be adopted to address the inexorably linked issues of politics, environmentalism, and social change. And, in fact, may even come about as the result of the crisis capitalism has brought us to.
This book [0] – both for it’s brilliant articulation of the world’s current system and, as Speth calls it, the "crisis of capitalism," is an important addition to your bookshelf. And it’s sufficiently easy to read and accessible that it’s a great gift for just about anybody!
Thom Hartmann is a New York Times bestselling Project Censored Award winning author and host of a daily talk show on Air America Radio. Justin Hartmann is an environmental scientist, who recently traveled with Thom to the Darfur region of Southern Sudan and is an activist for environmental and humanitarian causes. You can learn more about Thom Hartmann at http://www.thomhartmann.com [1] and find out what stations broadcast his program.
THOM HARTMANN'S "INDEPENDENT THINKER" REVIEW OF THE MONTH
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