Speth - The Bridge at the Edge of the World

More Praise for The Bridge at the Edge of the World:

Gus Speths critique of unbridled capitalism is riveting and haunting, and his solutions are poetic and inspiring.

Devra Davis, author of The Secret History of the War on Cancer and When Smoke Ran Like Water

In The Bridge at the Edge of the World, James Gustave Speth gives us new lenses with which to see what we have done to our environment and, more important, to see what we can do to restore it. He challenges us all to act not for ourselves but for our children and grandchildren. In particular, he takes on the most powerful guardians of the status quoour mindsets. The bridge he hopes to construct has its bridgehead firmly based in today, because Speth asks us to think about it and then to use our creativity, imagination, and the power of common purpose to act to restore the environment and create a healthier world.

Honourable Gordon Campbell, premier, Province of British Columbia

Gus Speth is one of the leaders in trying to steer humanity on a course to sustainability, and this is his most important book to date. Read it, and then take some action.

Paul R. Ehrlich, author with Anne Ehrlich of The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment

An extremely important book both for what it says and for who is saying it. The steady transformation of a solid, pragmatic, progressive negotiator into a radical and unrealistic oracle concerned with the fundamental nature of modern economies is an important event.

Richard Norgaard, University of California, Berkeley

What a delight to read Gus Speths new book, which no one else could write but all will admire, stunned by his remarkable talents. The book opens vast new opportunities for thought and discussion in science and public affairs and will undoubtedly long stand as the classic that it is. George M. Woodwell, founder, director emeritus, and senior scientist, Woods Hole Research Center

One can scarcely choose a more important or timely subject than this one. Speth writes about it with passion and conviction, and a touch of humor.

J. R. McNeill, Georgetown University

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

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW HAVEN AND LONDON

A Caravan book. For more information, visit www.caravanbooks.org

Copyright 2008 by James Gustave Speth.

All rights reserved.

This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

Set in Monotype Fournier type by Duke & Company, Devon, Pennsylvania. Printed in the United States of America.

Manifesto is reprinted from Selected Poems of Wendell Berry by Wendell Berry. Copyright 1999 by Wendell Berry. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. First published in The Country of Marriage, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1973.

Illustrations on pages xxxxi are redrawn with kind permission of Springer Science and Business Media from W. Steffen et al., Global Change and the Earth System (2005)

is redrawn from Marque-Luisa Miringoff and Sandra Opdycke, Americas Social Health: Putting Social Issues Back on the Public Agenda (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 2008), p. 71. Copyright 2008 by M. E. Sharpe, Inc. Reprinted with Permission.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Speth, James Gustave.

The bridge at the edge of the world : capitalism, the environment, and crossing from crisis to sustainability / James Gustave Speth.
p. cm.

A Caravan bookT.p. verso.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-300-13611-1 (clothbound : alk. paper) 1. Environmental economics. 2. CapitalismEnvironmental aspects. 3. Environmental policy. I. Title.

HC 79.E5S6652 2008

333.7dc22 2007043584

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This book was printed with vegetable-based ink on acid-free recycled paper that contains postconsumer fiber. The case was manufactured using acid-free recycled paper that contains postconsumer pulps and colors that are lignin-and carbon-free.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Cece
and her grandchildren

The Edisto River glides gracefully through the South Carolina low country, its dark, tannin-stained waters spreading over both banks into beautiful hardwood bottomlandsa swamp of tall cypress, tupelo, and sweet gum draped with Spanish moss and populated by sunfish, heron, and the occasional alligator and water moccasin.

I grew up in a small town on the Edisto in the 1940s and 1950s. Our house was about a mile from a swimming area the town had established down from a high bluff along the river. We swam there every summer. The area from the bluffs top down to the water had been terraced, and the girls put blankets on the grass and worked on their (one-piece) tans. At the bottom, along the riverbank, benches ran between the large cypresses where the mothers sat watching their children play in the shallow water near the edge. A pavilion atop the bluff served RCs and hot dogs. We racked up points on the pinball machines there and listened to the jukebox play Sixty Minute Man, a song to fuel a boys fantasy if ever there was one.

Childhood memories like this tumble out of deep storage as I get older. Thoughts of swimming in the Edisto occurred to me particularly often as I wrote this book. For many years I could not buck the rivers current, but as I grew older and stronger, I was able to make good headway against it. In my environmental work for close to four decades, Ive always assumed Americas environmental community would do the sameget stronger and prevail against the current pushing in the opposite direction. But in the past few years I have been forced to think hard about whether this assumption is correct. I have concluded it is not. The environmental community has grown in strength and sophistication, but the environment has continued to deteriorate. This book seeks to explain why the current is too swift and what must be done instead of always swimming against it.

The need for a new approach on the environment would not be so urgent if environmental conditions were not so urgent. America is a comfortable place for many of us, myself included. But our comforts deceive us. The mounting threats recounted in the chapters that follow point to an emerging environmental tragedy of unprecedented proportions. I wrote this book because I am very worried. We should all be.

How serious is the threat to the environment? Here is one measure of the problem: all we have to do to destroy the planets climate and biota and leave a ruined world to our children and grandchildren is to keep doing exactly what we are doing today, with no growth in the human population or the world economy. Just continue to release greenhouse gases at current rates, just continue to impoverish ecosystems and release toxic chemicals at current rates, and the world in the latter part of this century wont be fit to live in. But, of course, human activities are not holding at current levelsthey are accelerating, dramatically. It took all of history to build the seven-trillion-dollar world economy of 1950; today economic activity grows by that amount every decade. At current rates of growth, the world economy will double in size in a mere fourteen years. We are thus facing the possibility of an enormous increase in environmental deterioration, just when we need to move strongly in the opposite direction.