Earth Equity News

When the Environmental Movement is Part of the Problem. Review by Ross Gelbspan, WashPost, April 27, 2008. "Contemporary capitalism and a habitable planet cannot coexist. That is the core message of 'The Bridge at the Edge of the World [Yale University Press, 295 pp., $28.00] by J. Gus' Speth, a prominent environmentalist who, in this book, has turned sharply critical of the U.S. environmental movement. Speth is dean of the Yale School of Forrestry and Evironmental Studies, a founder of two major environmental groups (the Natural Resources Defence Council and the World Resources Institute), former chairman of the President's Council on Environmental Quality... and a former head of the U.N. Development Prgram... Environmentalism, in [Speth's] view, is almost as compromised as the planet itself... [It's] 'pragmatic and incrementalist,' he notes, 'awash in good proposals for sensible environmental action' -- and he does not mean [that] as a compliment. 'Working only within the system will... not succeed when what is needed is transformative change in the system itself'... which aims for perpetual economic growth and has brought us, simultaneously, to the threshold of abundance and the brink of ruination. He identifies the major driver of environmental destruction as the 60,000 multinational corporations that have emerged in the last few decades and that continually strive to increase their size and profitability while, at the same time, deflecting efforts to rein in their most destructive impacts... This book is an extremely probing and thoughtful diagnosis of the root causes of planetary distress. But short of a cataclysmic event -- like the Great Depression or some equally profound social breakdown -- Speth does not suggest how we might achieve the change in values and structural reform necessary for long-term sustainability." Ross Gelbspan is author of 'The Heat Is On' and 'Boiling Point.' He maintains the website www.heatisonline.org.