Speth , The Bridge at the edge of the world

1. EVSS 680: Case Studies ofEnvIssues CofC Fall 2010 Speth, The Bridge at the edge of the world

2. Agenda • Talk about Ecological Source Papers • Orientation Videos • Speth: Lecture/discussion • Speth Talk on his book: video

3. Population & Environment Video • Population and Environment Video (5m) • Downsides to Economic Growth (Bill McKibben) (6+m)

4. Quote from online blog • “The increased power that we humans have over the environment makes us safer, not more at risk. Our enormously increased productivity helps protect us from natural, including environmental, disasters. Any objective reckoning would conclude that far more deaths and suffering werecaused by environmental problems a century ago than are today. One reason that some of us are skeptical about environmental doomsaying (based not on actual current disasters, but just projected future ones) is that we have heard this all for a long time. When I was in college in the early 1970's, a huge group of such doomsayers was predicting that in the next ten to twenty years the world would see a lapse into chaos and mass die-offs due to exhaustion of resources, environmental poisoning, and overpopulation. I remember hearing about the drying up of the aquifers, the destruction of arable land through run-off and insecticide poisoning, the vast expansion of the Sahara Desert, etc. Twenty and thirty years later the world is plainly better, not worse. Food supplies seem to be adequate apart from their reaction to governmental decrees to use food as a gasoline additive. It's hard to believe in environmental catastrophe when the damage inflicted by environmental problems is diminishing rather than increasing.”

5. Key Concepts • America’s present system of political economy is failing across a broad front—economic, social, political, and environmental. • The prioritization of economic growth and economic values is at the root of the systemic failures and resulting crises America is now experiencing. • Most environmental deterioration is a result of systemic failures of capitalism • US must move to a post-growth society where working life, the natural environment, our communities, and the public sector are no longer sacrificed forGDP growth • For the new economy government policies must temper growth while simultaneously improving social and environmental well-being • “The best hope for a new political dynamic is a fusion of those concerned about environment, social justice, and political democracy into one progressive force. A unified agenda would embrace a profound commitment to social justice and environmental protection, a sustained challenge to consumerism and commercialism and the lifestyles they offer, a healthy skepticism of growth-mania and a new look at what society should be striving to grow, a challenge to corporate dominance and a redefinition of the corporation and its goals, and a commitment to an array of major pro-democracy reforms.”

6. Speth, A Bridge at the Edge of the World • Thesis: environmental movement has failed to prevent continuing ecological deterioration. World faces a global environmental crisis that requires remaking modern civilization. • It is a failure that reaches many spheres of national life—economic, social, political, and environmental. America can be said to be in crisis in each of these four areas. • Deep, systemic change is needed to transition to a new economy, one where the acknowledged priority is to sustain human and natural communities.

7. What Crises? • Economic: Great Recession brought on by Wall Street financial excesses has stripped tens of millions of middle class Americans of their jobs, homes, and retirement assets and plunged many into poverty and despair. • Social: extreme and growing inequality has been unraveling America’s social fabric for several decades. A tiny minority has experienced soaring incomes and accumulated grand fortunes, while wages for working people have stagnated despite rising productivity gains and poverty has risen to a near 30-year high. • Environmental: driven by excessive human consumption and waste and a spate of terrible technologies, is disrupting Earth’s climate, reducing Earth’s capacity to support life. • Political: reflected in governmental paralysis and a democracy that is weak, shallow, and corrupted—”the best democracy that money can buy”.

8. Changing Environment

9. Enviro Movement: Problem? • environ movement has adopted short term vision and agenda, largely as a “special interest.” • Death of Environmentalism? • The environmental movement is overly “pragmatic and incrementalist” and too willing to accept compromises, naïvely believing that “the system can be made to work for the environment.” • Mvmt believes that “problems can be solved at acceptable economic costs.”

10. Capitalism: Propositions • Proposition 1: today’s political economy--modern capitalism, is destructive of the environmentin ways that profoundly threaten the planet. People will therefore demand solutions, and current system will not be able to accommodate them, so the system will be forced to change, perhaps in the unfortunate context of some time of environmental crisis or breakdown. • Proposition 2: affluent societies have reached or soon will have reached the point where, as Keynes put it, the economic problem has been solved; the long era of ceaseless striving to overcome hardship and deprivation can soon be over; there is enough to go around. • Proposition 3: In more affluent societies, modern capitalism is no longer enhancing human well-being, either objective or subjective well-being, and is instead producing a stressed and ultimately unsatisfactory social reality; people are increasingly dissatisfied and looking for something more meaningful; this dissatisfaction will grow and force change.

11. Capitalism: Propositions • Proposition 4: international social movement for change – which refers to itself as “the irresistible rise of global anti-capitalism” – is stronger than many imagine and will grow stronger; there is a coalescing of forces: peace, social justice, community, ecology, feminism – a movement of movements; meanwhile, … weakened democracy and failed environmental politics [in America and elsewhere] are themselves ripe for transformation. • Proposition 5: people and groups are busily planting the seeds of change through a host of alternative arrangements, and still other attractive directions for upgrading to a new operating system have been identified; these innovations can transform the current system • Proposition 6: End of the Cold War and the West’s long struggle against communism opens the door – creates the political space – for the questioning of today’s capitalism.

12. Solutions • New Consciousness: [quoting Vaclav Havel]“we must develop a new understanding of the true purpose of our existence on this Earth … new models of behaviour and a new set of values for the planet.” • New Politics: “environmental politics cannot succeed with only a narrowly defined environmental constituency.” • Environmentalists must collaborate and connect with diverse communities and support their causes “not just to build the case for reciprocal support, and not just because the objectives are worthy, but also because environmental goals will not be realized unless these other causes succeed.” • These other causes are the causes of “union members, working families, minorities and people of color, religious organizations, the women’s movement and other communities of complementary interest and shared fate.” Causes through “domestic political reforms, the liberal social agenda, human rights, international peace, consumer issues, world health and population concerns, and world poverty and underdevelopment.”

13. Critiques • general leftist social agenda under cover of environmentalism? • Blames the wrong sector—not environmentalists fault, but the political and economic institutions? • Environmental problems are less severe today—than “in earlier days of contaminated water supplies, choking coal-dust laden fogs, deforestation, etc.” • Is Capitalism really the problem? How we use capitalism? Guns vs. people who use them?

14. Speth Video • Capitalism and Environmental Crisis • 12/08/09