James Gustave Speth

Speth's summary of how the best parts of the South have been overrun and the worst parts exported to the rest of the country I found the most compelling.

He founded the NRDC with something like a $300,000 grant from the Ford Foundation (and MacArthur?). Today their annual budget is over $100 million. "An oak tree is just a nut that held its ground."

Speth makes the point that environmentalism has not kept up with its opponents. In 1970 when NRDC started the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the National Environmental Protection Act were all brand new. Corporate pollutes were caught flat footed. Enforcing the laws was like shooting fish in a barrel. Now they have more than caught up led by wealthy and powerful forces like the Koch brothers. The bad guys now control the narrative positioning conservation as anti people and anti jobs. They even routinely succeed at information campaigns based on falsehood, bigotry and greed.

There is much work to be done.… (mais)

What an absolutely miserable book. It starts with Speth bragging that he and his wife had been arrested for protesting the Keystone XL pipeline. It doesn't get any better.

Evil corporations are destroying the world. Global warming is killing the planet. All the usual left-wing things that we read.

Nothing in this book convinced me that he is right. It might reinforce the wayward beliefs on a person who already believes this.

I can not recommend this book as good reading for any time. NO stars.… (mais)

This book, from a leading US environmentalist, argues that the environmental situation is critical, not just in terms of global warming, but also in terms of the extent of species extinction taking place, and the destruction of many major ecosystems. It claims that capitalism as it currently works is the major cause of this, as growth is the prime purpose of companies and governments, but this necessarily comes at the expense of natural resources and the environment. It claims that our obsession with growth is misplaced anyway, since beyond a relatively modest salary, happiness doesn't increase. Instead, happiness is primarliy supported by social and communal ties, which modern capitalist habits erode. The book then goes on to suggest potential solutions, by changes on a personal, corporation and government level.

I think that Speth makes a convincing case for how dire the environmental crisis is, and for how destructive and misguided capitalism can be. However, the book is very largely about the US, which frustrated me enormously, firstly because many of the problems are (hopefully) specific to the Bush administration, and secondly as this is a world crisis and many different countries are facing these problems in different ways. When it comes to the solutions, Speth comes across as a teenage idealist in many ways: naive and vague. There is no detailed economic discussion of what kind of system could replace capitalism and yet stabilise wealth, no detailed blueprint for how government can stabilise carbon emissions, or what role the individual can play. Although at times Speth recognises the complexities of the situation, he makes no attempt to provide pragmatic analyses of these complexities, in order to provide some guidance. This over-general approach to providing a "bridge" over the abyss ended up making me feel more pessimistic rather than less, and I found the book keenly frustrating overall, particularly since the style is rather repetitive and wildly overburdened by quotations. I'd say worth reading for the first half, and aggressively skimming for the second.

((I read this book on the recommendation of a series of articles in the New Scientist (see Opinion Section from 16 October 2008), and actually found those articles considerably better and more succinct.))… (mais)