The end is near

Heating System: Why the environmental movement cannot prevent catastrophe

The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing From Crisis to Sustainability
By James Gustave Speth
Yale Univ. 295 pp. $28

Reviewed by Ross Gelbspan
Washington Post

(Ross Gelbspan is author of "The Heat Is On" and "Boiling Point." He maintains the Web site www.heatisonline.org.)

Contemporary capitalism and a habitable planet cannot coexist. That is the core message of The Bridge at the Edge of the World, 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 environmental studies at Yale, a founder of two major environmental groups (the Natural Resources Defense Council and the World Resources Institute), former chairman of the President's Council on Environmental Quality (under Jimmy Carter) and a former head of the U.N. Development Program. So part of his thesis is expected: Climate change is only the leading edge of a potential cascade of ecological disasters.

"Half the world's tropical and temperate forests are gone," he writes. "About half the wetlands ... are gone. An estimated 90 percent of large predator fish are gone.... Twenty percent of the corals are gone.... Species are disappearing at rates about a thousand times faster than normal.... Persistent toxic chemicals can now be found by the dozens in ... every one of us."

One might assume, given this setup, that Speth would argue for a revitalization of the environmental movement. He does not. Environmentalism, in his view, is almost as compromised as the planet itself. Speth faults the movement for using market incentives to achieve environmental ends and for the deception that sufficient change can come from engaging the corporate sector and working "within the system" and not enlisting the support of other activist constituencies.

(Continued here.)