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Will shifting from a GDP-driven society help solve the United States' environmental problems? In his new book, "The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability," James Gustave Speth, dean of the Yale School on environment and forestry, argues that U.S.-style consumer capitalism needs to change in order for any progress on the environment to occur. During today's OnPoint, Speth, a former chair of the Council on Environmental Quality and founder of both the Natural Resources Defense Council and the World Resources Institute, explains why he is unhappy with the current state of environmentalism. He also gauges the changing level of interest in environmental issues on college campuses throughout the country.
Monica Trauzzi: Welcome to OnPoint. I'm Monica Trauzzi. Joining me today is Gus Speth, dean of the Yale School on environment and forestry. Dean Speth is a former chair of the Council on Environmental Quality and founder of both the NRDC and the World Resources Institute. He is also author of the new book "The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability." Quite the resume. Thanks for coming on the show.
Gus Speth: Thank you, Monica. I'm glad top be here. All of my groups have done better after I left.
Monica Trauzzi: Oh, is that right?
Gus Speth: Yes.
Monica Trauzzi: Your new book is very with reflective of the work that you've done over the last several decades in environmentalism. And you say you're nearing the end of your career and after decades of being a leading environmentalist you're not happy with the results. Why did you decide to write this book?
Gus Speth: Well, you have some time to reflect in the academic world, where I am now, and I realize that it's been almost four decades since a group of us first had the idea of starting the Natural Resources Defense Council, 40 years. And during that time, our environmental movement if you will, the number of groups, the amount of money, we've grown larger and more sophisticated, but if you look at the results, well, after all that effort we're on the verge of ruining the planet. And that's a very serious situation. So, what we're doing today, in terms of the types of approaches we're taking to the environment, in the end, I don't think are going to succeed at the level we need success. So, I wrote the book to try to explore different ways of approaching some of our environmental issues.
Monica Trauzzi: Why haven't environmentalists been more successful? There's been a lot of money put into this, a lot of time, a lot of effort. Why hasn't there been more success?
Gus Speth: Well, I think there have been a lot of successes and I shudder to think what the world would be like today or what our country would be like without them, without all of that effort. But still, if you look at the trends, the global trends and even the trends on the more domestic issues here in the U.S., they're not reassuring. The climate issue is clearly on the cusp of getting beyond our ability to deal successfully with it. We're losing tropical forests at a rate of an acre a second and have been for decades and have not been able to do anything about that. The toxic chemicals buildup continues in our society and I could go down that long list of very disturbing trends and data points. We're losing 6000 acres a day of open space in the United States, now. So, why hasn't it work? Well I think what's basically happened is that we are up against a mighty force which is pushing enormous amounts of economic growth forward at a very rapid rate with increasingly complicated technologies. And we just haven't been able to cope. And the gains that we've made have tended to be overrun by the expansion of economic activity. So, you know, the world economy, during that 40 years, has almost quadrupled in size. And the doubling time of the world economy now is less than two decades, less than 20 years. So in just 15 to 20 years, we'll have twice as much economic activity on the planet. It took all of history to grow the $7 trillion world economy of 1950. We now add $7 trillion every decade. So, this brings with it, drags into our lives, an enormous potential for environmental destruction.
Monica Trauzzi: And in the book you do say that American-style consumer capitalism must change and some would respond, "Good luck, to that."
Gus Speth: Yeah, well, dream on, right?
Monica Trauzzi: Yeah.
Gus Speth: Dream on.
Monica Trauzzi: And how do you change something like this? I mean we've been born and bred to live this way. How do you start to change that?
Gus Speth: Well, I think it's gotten worse. I also think this, that those who think, if you want to hear something really radical, the really radical proposition is that we can make it just continuing to do what we do today. That's a really radical proposition, that business as usual will suffice, because if we just keep doing what we're doing today, releasing the same amounts of greenhouse gases, the same impoverishment of ecosystems, the same toxification, you know, well in the latter part of this century the planet won't be fit to live on. So, we have to - the pragmatic necessity is deep change.
Monica Trauzzi: Because business as usual won't help us reduce emissions. We'll still be emitting.
Gus Speth: More. So…well, I think the ideas in the book are not the next steps. The next steps are to get this cap-and-trade legislation, for example, through the Congress and signed by a president. But the next, next steps are to begin to question our obsessive concern with economic growth so that it trumps everything and everything, every proposal has to be trimmed down and trimmed down and cut down and compromised to the point that it's often quite weak, in order to not have any adverse effects on the economy. We have to question our own pathetic capitulation to consumerism. We've had our home size in the U.S. go up 50 percent in the last few decades. The average lot size has gone up by more than that, and yet we still don't have enough space for all of our stuff. So, we've had to create this self storage industry in the United States. And the square footage of the self storage industry would now cover the entire island of Manhattan and the entire city of San Francisco, so much stuff do we have. And it's all illusory because in terms of real human happiness and real well being, because all the studies say that what we really get fulfillment from and a sense of satisfaction from, are relationships with other people. And buying more and more stuff doesn't work.
Monica Trauzzi: This is a psychological argument too.
Gus Speth: This is a very psychological argument, but a very real one. And the basic point is that materialism is toxic to happiness, so I think we are going to have to start talking about these issues. In this very wonkish --
Monica Trauzzi: Why should the U.S. change though?
Gus Speth: In this very wonkish town, where everything is a policy proposal or an argument against it, you know, we need to start talking about some deeper issues, yeah.
Monica Trauzzi: But why should the U.S. change of other countries, like China and India, are also trying to grow their GDP --
Gus Speth: Right.
Monica Trauzzi: -- and increasing emissions as a result?
Gus Speth: Well, I think first, you know, I worked in the U.N. on international development for a long time and I'm very sympathetic to lots of places in the world that do need high rates of growth. We can come back to the Chinese greenhouse gas emissions issues and other things, but, you know, the poor parts of the world do need to grow. But for those of us in the already rich, affluent countries, I think we can slow up a bit on the growth issue and concentrate on other things. We're, you know, rich enough, frankly, if we spent our money wisely on each other and on things that really matter.
Monica Trauzzi: In the introduction of your book you say, "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 would you assess American knowledge and the level of concerns that Americans have about the climate change issue?
Gus Speth: Well, it's mixed. My own sense is that we've passed through a sort of tipping point or a threshold where the issue is not going to go away now. It went away for a long time. We put out three reports on the climate issue calling for sharp decreases in greenhouse gas emissions when I was in the Carter administration, in the late 1970s. So, it's been 30 years that we knew enough to take this problem seriously and we didn't and now we're up against an emergency situation and we've got to act very, very sharply on it. My impression of the public opinion on it is that people acknowledge there's a problem, but the depth and seriousness of the problem is not fully appreciated at this stage, despite all the good work that Al Gore and others are doing. And I hope that this public service ad campaign that Vice President Gore is launching now can build up a force for real change. But we truly need a grassroots movement in the country that can support the political action that's necessary. There's real risk that the types of initiatives that are being talked about on the campaign trail today, when they come to Washington, will find themselves in the same meat grinder that so many other good proposals encounter there.
Monica Trauzzi: All right, let's talk about the campaign for a second.
Gus Speth: Yeah.
Monica Trauzzi: Is there a particular candidate that you think is going to have more success at addressing these issues domestically and internationally?
Gus Speth: Well ...
Monica Trauzzi: All three would sign on to a cap and trade.
Gus Speth: All three are supportive of cap and trade. The Democratic candidate's proposal, right now, is stronger than Senator McCain's. I'm a lifelong Democrat myself and I'm supporting Senator Obama because I think he can mobilize action here and mobilize us better internationally, represent us better internationally. I'm just… I'm ready for change.
Monica Trauzzi: You're ready for change and things are starting to move domestically and internationally.
Gus Speth: Yes.
Monica Trauzzi: in terms of the domestic talks happening on Capitol Hill right now, Lieberman-Warner is set to be taken up in June.
Gus Speth: Yes.
Monica Trauzzi: Is this a hopeful step for you?
Gus Speth: Yes!
Monica Trauzzi: In terms of what you're saying in the book?
Gus Speth: No, it's very hopeful. It doesn't relate that much to what's in the book, but it's very hopeful. I think we are seeing action, both political action and action in the private sector of a type that we haven't seen before. And for those of us who have waited around and pushed for this for a long time, it's very gratifying. Is the type of environmentalism that leads to that action and that has gotten us to where we are today going to be sufficient in the future? I don't think so and I don't think we can simply sit back and think that what we see of corporate greening and green consumerism will get us there are either, because I'm rather skeptical.
Monica Trauzzi: You talk about young people a lot in the book.
Gus Speth: Yes.
Monica Trauzzi: Did you write this book for them? Why are young people so important to you in terms of getting this message out?
Gus Speth: Well, I think things really began to look bleak in their lifetimes if we don't respond. And I have grandchildren now and I worry greatly about them and about the world that they are going to inherit. Amartya Sen said that development was freedom, that development was a process of giving people more and more options and more choices. And he's really an extraordinary person. But, if you look at what the climate issue could do, it could just lead us just in the opposite direction, curtailing our options, forcing more and more resources into dealing with this problem unless we respond now.
Monica Trauzzi: Well, a big problem with young people today is that they're even more materialistic than the generation before, so getting that message of less is more is difficult.
Gus Speth: There are folks who do a survey every year of entering freshmen in the college and universities and the surge in materialism among those students is, I haven't seen the last few years, but if you look at it over a period of a couple of decades, there has been a huge surge. You're absolutely right about that. But I see something more hopeful going on on the colleges and universities today. I see a lot of young people who are mobilizing to take these issues on and are organizing groups like One Sky and Step It Up and Green for All and Power Shift and all these initiatives that are coming out of young people today to build this grassroots movement in our country. And once it's built around the climate issue, I think it will grow to embrace other issues and it's bringing together people that are concerned about social justice and people that are concerned about environment. And we need to bring into this also people who are concerned about political reform, because right now the politics in this town are not going to deliver enough in terms of either social justice or environmental protection. And so, we need to be thinking about, for example, getting the money out of our elections.
Monica Trauzzi: Let's end with a question about Yale.
Gus Speth: Yes.
Monica Trauzzi: Have you seen a surge in interest in the school that you're dean of, in environment issues in general, among applicants, among students at your school?
Gus Speth: Yes. It's changing, perhaps not as fast as some would like or as I would like, but we have seen an increase in applications. We have seen students wanting to get more and more engaged. We've seen more and more students want to go into business than certainly in my day. My school itself is probably not a very good gauge of that because almost everybody who comes there is very interested in the environment, but overall I see it on the campuses. I've done a lot of speaking now and I think we've seen the beginnings of a student mobilization around environmental issues, and climate in particular, in our country.
Monica Trauzzi: OK. We're going to end it right there on that note. Thanks for coming on the show.
Gus Speth: Thank you very much.
Monica Trauzzi: This is OnPoint. I'm Monica Trauzzi. Thanks for watching.
[End of Audio]
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