James Gustave Speth: The Bridge at the Edge of the World

James Gustave Speth: The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing From Crisis to Sustainability (2008, Yale University Press)

Speth was Chairman of the President's Council on Environmental Quality (the president was Carter), and founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council and the World Resources Institute -- unusually establishmentarian credentials for one who has come to see today's "pragmatic and incrementalist" environment movement as inadequate, who is willing to go so far as to cite capitalism itself as the problem that prevents us from moving towards any sort of sustainable economics. He could, of course, go further, but he is certainly on to something. We've seen that the class struggle between labor and capital can be mitigated by a more equitable political division of the pie. However, sustainability cuts far deeper into the essence of capitalism. A sustainable economy may retain aspects of private property and markets, but losing the prospect of endless growth certainly changes its nature.

(pp. xv-xvi):

Indeed, this book focuses heavily on the very rich United States. America is large and influential. The U.S. government and U.S. corporations are leading forces in international trade and the globalization of the world economy. The United States and other developed countries are setting the terms for much of the world, spreading cultural and other norms, and driving much of the economic growth occurring abroad as well as at home. The world needs America to be a leading part of the answer, but we Americans have a long way to go to claim that role. Moreover, for many of the topics reviewed here, the United States is an extreme case among the developed countries. In America's individualism, consumerism, acceptance of market forces, commitment to capitalism and globalization, lack of social and public services, and in many other ways, the country tends consistently toward one end of the spectrum of the well-to-do. If answers can be found here, perhaps they can be found anywhere.

(pp. 1-2):

For all the material blessings economic progress has provided, for all the disease and destitution avoided, for all the glories that shine in the best of our civilization, the costs to the natural world, the costs to the glories of nature, have been huge and must be counted in the balance as tragic loss.

Half the world's tropical and temperate forests are now gone. The rate of deforestation in the tropics continues at about an acre a second. About half the wetlands and a third of the mangroves are gone. An estimated 90 percent of the large predator fish are gone, and 75 percent of marine fisheries are now overfished or fished to capacity. Twenty percent of the corals are gone, and another 20 percent severely threatened. Species are disappearing at rates about a thousand times faster than normal. The planet has not seen such a spasm of extinction in sixty-five million years, since the dinosaurs disappeared. Over half the agricultural land in drier regions suffers from some degree of deterioration and desertification. Persistent toxic chemicals can now be found by the dozens in essentially each and every one of us.

Human impacts are now large relative to natural systems. The earth's stratospheric ozone layer was severely depleted before the change was discovered. Human activities have pushed atmospheric carbon dioxide up by more than a third and have started in earnest the dangerous process of warming the planet and disrupting climate. Everywhere earth's ice fields are melting. Industrial processes are fixing nitrogen, making it biologically active, at a rate equal to nature's; one result is the development of more than two hundred dead zones in the oceans due to overfertilization. Human actions already consumer or destroy each year about 40 percent of nature's photosynthetic output, leaving too little for other species. Freshwater withdrawals doubled globally between 1960 and 2000, and are now over half of accessible runoff. The following rivers no longer reach the oceans in the dry season: the Colorado, Yellow, Ganges, and Nile, among others.

(p. 34):

The negative impact that human societies are having on the health of marine fisheries and on the world's oceans and estuaries generally is difficult to exaggerate. In 1960, 5 percent of marine fisheries were fished to capacity or overfished. Today that number is 75 percent. The global catch of fish has gone down steadily since 1988 (taking the highly volatile Peruvian anchoveta catch, the chief supply of fishmeal, out of the calculation). In 2003, scientists reported that populations of large predator fish -- including such popularly consumed varieties as swordfish, marlin, and tuna -- are down 90 percent over original stocks; only 10 percent remain. And in 2006, fisheries scientists projected that essentially all ocean commercial fisheries would collapse by 2050 if current patterns persist. This projection is controversial, but it at least suggest the magnitude of the problem.

(p. 24):

A major area of ongoing climate change impact is in the North American West, where tens of millions of acres of forest are being devastated by bark beetles and other infestations. The pests -- which have attacked pine, fir, and spruce trees in the western United States, British Columbia, and Alaska -- are normally contained by severe winters. The milder winters in the region have increased their reproduction, abundance, and geographic range.

(p. 27):

In short, there is little doubt that the process of human-induced global warming has begun in earnest, that the consequences are already serious, and that they could be devastating if the buildup of greenhouse gases is not halted. Yet the process of halting their buildup has hardly started. Global carbon dioxide emissions climbed by 22 percent between 1980 and 2000. Since 2000, the growth rate of emissions has tripled over the average for 1990-1999. The International Energy Agency projects that if societies continue on a business-as-usual path between 2004 and 2030, the result will be a rise in carbon dioxide emissions of 55 percent globally. Even in its most optimistic scenario, where environmental actions are taken, global emissions climb by 31 percent. Congress is finally waking up, but it is terribly late.

(p. 48):

In a remarkable passage of his environmental history of the twentieth century, Something New under the Sun, historian J. R. McNeil writes that the "growth fetish" solidified its hold on imaginations and institutions in the twentieth century: "Communism aspired to become the universal creed of the twentieth century, but a more flexible and seductive religion succeeded where communism failed: the quest for economic growth. Capitalists, nationalists -- indeed almost everyone, growth disguised a multitude of sins. Indonesians and Japanese tolerated endless corruption as long as economic growth lasted. Russians and eastern Europeans put up with clumsy surveillance states. Americans and Brazilians accepted vast social inequalities. Social, moral, and ecological ills were sustained in the interest of economic growth; indeed, adherents to the faith proposed that only more growth could resolve such ills. Economic growth became the indispensible ideology of the state nearly everywhere.

(pp. 52-53):

Economist Wallace Oates has provided a clear description of "market failure," one reason the market does not work for the environment: "Markets generate and make use of a set of prices that serve as signals to indicate the value (or cost) of resources to potential users. Any activity that imposes a cost on society by using up some of its scarce resources must come with a price, where that price equals the social cost. For most goods and services ('private goods' as economists call them), the market forces of supply and demand generate a market price that directs the use of resources into their most highly valued employment.

"There are, however, circumstances where a market price may not emerge to guide individual decisions. This is often the case for various forms of environmentally damaging activities. . . . The basic idea is straightforward and compelling: the absence of an appropriate price for certain scarce resources (such as clean air and water) leads to their excessive use and results in what is called 'market failure.'

"The source of this failure is what economists term an externality. A good example is the classic case of the producer whose factory spreads smoke over an adjacent neighborhood. The producer imposes a real cost in the forms of dirty air, but this cost is 'external' to the firm. The producer does not bear the cost of the pollution it creates as it does for the labor, capital, and raw materials that it employs. The price of labor and such materials induces the firm to economize on their use, but there is no such incentive to control smoke emissions and thereby conserve clean air. The point is simply that whenever a scarce resource comes free of charge (as is typically the case with our limited stocks of clean air and water), it is virtually certain to be used to excess.

"Many of our environmental resources are unprotected by the appropriate prices that would constrain their use. From this perspective, it is hardly surprising to find that the environment is overused and abused. A market system simply doesn't allocate the use of these resources properly."

(pp. 53-54):

Governments not only tend to shy away from correcting market failure but exacerbate the problem by creating subsidies and other practices that make a bad situation worse. In Perverse Subsidies, Norman Myers and Jennifer Kent estimate that governments worldwide have established environmentally damaging subsidies that amount to about $850 billion annually. They conclude that the impact of these subsidies on the environment is "widespread and profound." They note: "Subsidies for agriculture can foster overloading of croplands, leading to erosion and compaction of topsoil, pollution from synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, denitrification of soils, and release of greenhouse gases, among other adverse effects. Subsidies for fossil fuels aggravate pollution effects such as acid rain, urban smog, and global warming, while subsidies for nuclear energy generate exceptionally toxic waste with an exceptionally long half-life. Subsidies for road transportation lead to overloading of road networks, a problem that further subsidies promote overuse of cars; the sector also generates severe pollution of several sorts. Subsidies for water encourage misuse and overuse of water supplies that are increasingly scarce. Subsidies for fisheries foster overharvesting of already depleted fish stocks. Subsidies for forestry encourage overexploitation at a time when many forests have been reduced by excessive logging, acid rain, and agricultural encroachment.

(pp. 65-66):

Whenever I think of the place of far-reaching ideas in American history, I am reminded of what Richard Hofstadter wrote in his wonderful book, The American Political Tradition. "Although it has been said repeatedly that we need a new conception of the world to replace the ideology of self-help, free enterprise, competition, and beneficent cupidity upon which Americans have been nourished since the foundation of the Republic, no new conceptions of comparable strength have taken root and no statesman with a great mass following has arisen to propound them. . . .

"Almost the entire span of American history under the present Constitution has coincided with the rise and spread of modern industrial capitalism. In material power and productivity the United States has been a flourishing success. Societies that are in such good working order have a kind of mute organic consistency. They do not foster ideas that are hostile to their fundamental working arrangements. Such ideas may appear, but they are slowly and persistently insulated, as an oyster deposits nacre around an irritant. They are confined to small groups of dissenters and alienated intellectuals, and except in revolutionary times they do not circulate among practical politicians."

(pp. 68-69):

In 1989, almost two decades ago, we at the World Resources Institute greeted the incoming administration of George H. W. Bush and the new Congress with a report setting out an agenda to address climate change, energy security, acid rain, and biodiversity loss. We urged the president and Congress to declare protection of the global atmosphere a priority national objective, and we called for a new national energy policy "that gives balanced attention to adequate and affordable energy supply, national security, and environmental protection, including the need to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases." We called for a carbon tax, and we called on the administration to launch an international process leading to a climate treaty. Then in 1991, we called for international negotiation of a global partnership to save tropical forests. Two years later, in 1993, when the Clinton administration arrived, we presented it with a ten point agenda of initiatives, including a call for the transformation of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) into something akin to a world environment agency. And most impressively, in 1996, WRI led the President's Council on Sustainable Development, a group that included many top business executives and senior administration officials as well as environmental leaders, in generating an agreed set of major recommendations for government and private sector action that brought innovative environment and social thinking together.

These stories do more than just underscore that the landscape is littered with worthy but badly neglected proposals for government action on the environment. They also point out that when today's environmentalism recognizes problems, it believes they can be solved within the system, typically with new policies and, more recently, by engaging the corporate sector. It believes in the efficacy of government action, the usefulness of legislation and regulation, the effectiveness of environmental groups and of environmental advocacy within the system. It believes that good-faith compliance with the law will be the norm and that corporations can be made to behave and are increasingly weaving environmental objectives into business strategy. Today's environmentalism is forever hopeful on all this. And it is persistent, dogged, and determined.

The second notable feature of today's environmentalism is that it tends to be pragmatic and incrementalist. Its actions are aimed at solving problems, often one at a time. It is more comfortable proposing innovative policy solutions than framing inspirational messages. These characteristics are closely allied to a third: the tendency to deal with effects rather than underlying causes. Most of our major environmental laws and treaties, for example, address the resulting environmental ills much more than what causes them. In the end, environmentalism accepts compromises. It takes what it can get.

(p. 81):

Frederick Buell in his valuable and undernoticed book, From Apocalypse to Way of Life, has chronicled what happened: "Something happened to strip the environmental [cause] of what seemed in the 1970s to be its self-evident inevitability. Something happened to allow environmentalism's antagonists to stigmatize its erstwhile stewards as unstable alarmists and bad-faith prophets -- and to call their warnings at best hysterical, at worst crafted lies. Indeed, something happened to allow some even to question (without appearing ridiculous) the apparently commonsensical assumption that environmentalists were the environment's best stewards.["]

(pp. 90-91):

Wallace Oates and other environmental economists contend that environmental economics makes three major contributions. First, it makes a compelling, persuasive case for public intervention in the free market in order to correct market failure.

Second, it provides guidance on how far this government intervention should go in prescribing environmental goals and standards. Typically, as one moves from lax to tough controls, the first steps are the cheapest, and the costs of compliance rise as the proposed controls get tighter. Meanwhile, the extra social benefits of tougher intervention will decline, for example, as pollution is reduced to more tolerable levels. Environmental economics teaches that government should mandate investment in environmental protection up to the point that the (rising) cost of compliance equals the (declining) social benefits. To invest more would be wasteful because the marginal costs would exceed the marginal benefits.

And third, Oates and others point out that once one sets a goal or standard, by whatever means, environmental economics can guide us to the least-cost, most efficient way of achieving that goal.

(pp. 100-101):

In their 2001 book Perverse Subsidies, Norman Myers and Jennifer Kent analyzed the hundreds of studies that quantify subsidies in agriculture, energy, transportation, water, fisheries, and forestry. They classified as "perverse" those subsidies that had demonstrable negative effects both economically and environmentally. Their conclusion was that, at the behest of powerful interests, the world's governments have intervened in the marketplace to create perverse subsidies that now total about $850 billion annually. Admittedly a rough estimate, these subsidies come to about 2.5 percent of the global economy, creating a huge economic incentive for environmental destruction. The Congressional Research Service estimates that U.S. energy subsidies alone were between thirty-seven billion and sixty-four billion dollars in 2003 and were increased by two to three billion dollars annually by the provisions of the Energy Policy Act of 2005.

(pp. 104-105):

A related trend is privatization. The shift of once-public responsibilities and functions into private hands for market-based management is far advanced. In 2007, Business Week reported that investors are clamoring to take over America's highways, bridges, and airports: "With state and local leaders scrambling for cash to solve short-term fiscal problems, the conditions are ripe for an unprecedented burst of buying and selling. All told, some $100 billion worth of public property could change hands in the next two years, up from less than $7 billion over the past two years."

(p. 107):

Economic growth is modern capitalism's principal and most prized product. The idea that there are or should be limits to growth is typically met with derision. Yet not all economists have been dismissive. John Maynard Keynes writing eighty years ago looked forward to the day when the "economic problem" would be a thing of the past. His writing is itself priceless: "Suppose that a hundred years hence we are eight times better off than today. Assuming no important wars and no important increase in population, the economic problem may be solved. This means that the economic problem is not -- if we look into the future -- the permanent problem of the human race.["]

(p. 117):

Much of the latest thinking has been brought together creatively by Australian policy intellectual Clive Hamilton in his 2003 book Growth Fetish. Here is Hamilton rising to his subject: "In the face of the fabulous promises of economic growth, at the beginning of the 21st century we are confronted by an awful fact. Despite high and sustained levels of economic growth in the West over a period of 50 years -- growth that has seen average real incomes increase several times over -- the mass of people are no more satisfied with their lives now than they were then. If growth is intended to give us better lives, and there can be no other purpose, it has failed. . . . The more we examine the role of growth in modern society, the more our obsession with growth appears to be a fetish -- that is, an inanimate object worshipped for its apparent magical powers.

(pp. 120-121):

Ecological economists tend to insist that the quantitative limits be set so that the environment -- and human health -- are fully protected. Put otherwise, ecological economists want to see natural capital fully protected and, indeed, regenerated. They thus take a position that is called "strong sustainability." In strong sustainability, the environment is sustained. Natural capital is sustained. In "weak sustainability," it is the prospect for long-term economic growth that is sustained. In weak sustainability, natural capital can be consumed provided there are substitutes for it, like man-made capital. Many traditional economists, including many environmental economists, favor the weak sustainability approach. The strong and weak approaches are very different, but they both march under the banner of sustainability, and therein lies the source of much confusion. Everyone prefers sustainability, but they define it differently.

Perhaps the most important prescriptions challenging unbridled growth come from outside the environmental sector. Explored in more detail in the chapters that follow, they include measures such as more leisure, including a shorter workweek and longer vacations; greater labor protections, job security, and benefits, including retirement and health benefits; restrictions on advertising; new ground rules for corporations; strong social and environmental provisions in trade equality, including genuinely progressive taxation for the rich and services and environmental amenities; a huge investment in education, skills, and new technology to promote both ecological modernization and sharply rising labor productivity to offset smaller workforces and shorter hours. People deserve more free time, more security, and more opportunity for companionship and continuing education. They deserve to be free of the growth-at-all-costs paradigm and the ruthless economy described by Samuelson and Nordhaus.

A post-growth society thus should not be a stagnant society. It should include dynamic initiatives that recognize the real sources of human well-being. Clive Hamilton has put the matter well: "A post-growth society will consciously promote the social structures and activities that actually improve individual and community well-being. It will aim to provide a social environment in which people can pursue true aim to provide a social environment in which people can pursue true aim to provide a social environment in which people can pursue true individuality, rather than the pseudo-individuality that is now obtained through spending on brand names and manufactured lifestyles.

(pp. 122-123):

If challenging growth seems difficult, one should remember Milton Friedman's observation: "Only a crisis -- actual or perceived -- produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable. That is one philosophy -- be ready for the coming crisis. Another, taken from Mahatma Gandhi, is more active: "First they laugh at you," he said, "then they ignore you, then they fight you, they you win."

(pp. 126-127):

Darrin McMahon, in his wonderful book Happiness: A History, traces these questions down through the centuries. McMahon finds the origins of the "right to happiness" in the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment, he writes, sought "to create space of happiness on earth. To dance, to sing, to enjoy our food, to revel in our bodies and the company of others -- in short, to delight in a world of our own making -- was not to defy God's will but to live as nature had intended. This was our earthly purpose. . . . 'Does not everyone have a right to happiness?' asked . . . the entry on that subject in the French encyclopedia edited by Denis Diderot. Judged by the standards of the preceding millennium and a half, the question was extraordinary: a right to happiness? And yet it was posed rhetorically, in full confidence of the nodding assent of enlightened minds."

The wellsprings of consumerism, summarized by Tim Jackson in the Journal of Industrial Ecology (p. 157):

First, there are those who see consumer culture as a form of social pathology. Prominent names in this school include Thorsten Veblen, Eric Fromm, Ivan Illich, Tibor Scitovsky, Herbert Marcuse, and Ernest Becker. Jackson notes: "Fromm (1976) was alarmed at the alienation and passivity that pervaded modern life, and placed the blame squarely on an economic system predicated on increasing levels of consumption. Ivan Illich (1977) attacked the ideology that equates progress with affluence and needs with commodities. In attempting to discover why 'unprecedented and fast-moving prosperity had left its beneficiaries unsatisfied,' Scitovsky (1976) highlighted the addictive nature of consumer behavior and its failure to mirror the complexity of human motivation and experience." Such views have found empirical support in the growing number of studies showing the failure of reported levels of well-being to match the growth in incomes.

(p. 169):

As a result, corporations are not merely the dominant economic actors, they are the dominant political actors as well. William Domhoff is now into the fifth edition of his well-known and provocative book Who Rules America? His answer to his title's question: the corporate community. His analysis shows how "the owners and top-level managers in large companies work together to maintain themselves as the core of the dominant power group. . . . [Despite] highly visible policy conflicts among rival corporate leaders . . . the corporate community is cohesive on the policy issues that affect its general welfare, which is often at stake when political challenges are made by organized workers, liberals, or strong environmentalists."

(p. 212):

Homer-Dixon argues that foreshocks and breakdowns can lead to positive change if the ground is prepared. "We need to prepare to turn breakdown to our advantage when it happens -- because it will." he says. Homer-Dixon's point is critically important. Breakdowns, of course, do not necessarily lead to positive outcomes; authoritarian ones and Fortress World are also possibilities. Turning a breakdown to advantage will require both inspired leadership and a new story that articulates a positive vision grounded in what is best in the society's values and history.

(pp. 236-237):

Beyond the fork, down either path, is the end of the world as we have known it. One path beyond the fork continues us on our current trajectory. Presidential science adviser John Gibbons used to say with a wry smile that if we don't change direction, we'll end up where we're headed. And right now, we're headed toward a ruined planet. That is one way the world as we know it could end, down that path and into the abyss.

But there is the other path, and it leads to a bridge across the abyss. We have been examining this bridge at the edge of the world and what is required to cross it. Of course, where the path forks will be the site of another struggle, a struggle that must be won even though we cannot see clearly what lies beyond the bridge. Yet in that struggle and in the crossing that will follow, we are carried forward by hope, a radical hope, that a better world is possible and that we can build it. "Another world is not only possible. She is on her way," says Arundhati Roy. "On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing."

posted 2008-07-11