BOOK REVIEW
The Looming Disaster
Thomas Malone
Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global
Environment. James Gustave Speth. xvi + 299 pp. Yale University
Press, 2004. $24.
Drawing on his decades of experience as a distinguished leader of
the environmental movement, James Gustave ("Gus") Speth
has written a brilliantly insightful and extraordinarily useful
book, Red Sky at Morning. (Among Speth's accomplishments
are that he cofounded the Natural Resources Defense Council, chaired
the U.S. Council on Environmental Quality, advised presidents Carter
and Clinton on environmental issues, founded and headed the World
Resources Institute, led the United Nations Development Programme
and won Japan's prestigious Blue Planet Prize; he is currently dean
of the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale.) The
book's thesis is that there is an urgent need to mount an
"Environmental Revolution."
The immediate goals of that revolution would be fourfold: to link
local environmental issues with global ones; to embed environmental
considerations into mainstream public policy; to commit ourselves to
the notion that, as Maurice Strong (senior advisor to United Nations
Secretary–General Kofi Annan) observed in Where on Earth
Are We Going?, "our economic system should serve and
support our social goals and human values"; and to reestablish
the United States as an environmental leader.
The ultimate goal of the revolution would be the creation of a world
society that is environmentally sustainable, economically equitable
and peaceful. "The leadership of civil society and of the
private sector will be especially important," Speth explains,
noting that there must also be "a deeper change, a different
way of seeing ourselves in relation to the planet on which we
live." He also observes that we need "an international
movement of citizens and scientists, one capable of dramatically
advancing the political and personal actions needed."
Awareness of the need for such a revolution has been building for
half a century. Speth cites the wisdom of the legendary Aldo
Leopold, who wrote in The Sand County Almanac in 1949 that
"We have ethical duties to the communities of plants and
animals that evolved here with us. . . . A thing is right when it
tends to preserve the integrity, beauty, and stability of the biotic
community." In 1961 Rachel Carson remarked in the opening pages
of Silent Spring that "Only within the moment of time
represented by the present century has one
species—man—acquired significant power to alter the
nature of his world." Almost two decades later, the 1980 Report
of the Brandt Commission on International Development Issues warned
that "chaos—as a result of mass hunger, economic
disaster, environmental catastrophes, and terrorism" could be
as much of a threat to social stability as war. In 1987, the World
Commission on Environment and Development called for the creation of
a new charter that would set forth the principles of sustainable
development that were needed to maintain livelihoods and life on our
shared planet. And a decade ago the world's top scientists,
including a majority of Nobel laureates, stated that
we are fast approaching many of the earth's limits. Current
economic practices which damage the environment, in both developed
and underdeveloped nations, cannot be continued without the risk
that vital global systems will be damaged beyond repair.
The Preamble to the Earth Charter, a global mission
statement that was discussed during the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de
Janeiro and released in 2001, begins as follows:
We stand at a critical moment in Earth's history, a time
when humanity must choose its future . . . [which] at once holds
great peril and great promise. . . . Fundamental changes are needed
in our values, institutions, and ways of living. We must realize
that when basic needs have been met, human development is primarily
about being more, not having more.
Yet the world's governments have been slow to respond to global
environmental challenges. "We have been told what the future
may hold," Speth says, "but so far we seem unable to step
from the path to disaster." Two decades of international
environmental negotiations have resulted in framework conventions on
climate, desertification, biodiversity and the Law of the Sea, but
so far those treaties, agreements and protocols are not actually
preventing environmental deterioration. Speth characterizes them as
"weak medicine" for an ailing Mother Earth and asks why
the standard convention–protocol model, which worked well to
protect the ozone layer, has fared badly when applied to these
bigger problems. The failure is compounded of many elements—a
tendency to address symptoms rather than underlying causes; economic
opposition and protection of sovereignty as political factors; weak
multilateral institutions; the use of consensus–based
negotiating procedures; and lack of strong leadership from wealthy,
industrialized countries.
The supporting evidence for a threat to sustainability is
persuasive. Speth describes two "megatrends" of
environmental deterioration: increasing pollution and biological
impoverishment. These have been triggered by "prodigious
expansion in human populations and their production and
consumption." The global population increased fourfold during
the 20th century, and the average economic productivity of
individuals grew fivefold; the result was a 20–fold growth in
the global economy, which is expected by 2050 to quadruple in size
to $140 trillion. "Ecological footprints" left on the
finite natural system by the expanding human system indicate that in
the 1980s human demands began to exceed the regenerative capacity of
the world's air, water, land, sunlight, and plant and animal life.
Speth describes in some detail the cause of those megatrends. In the
largest sense, he observes, it's our economic activity: We're
"consuming nature and pouring out products and pollution."
In addition, some of us are consuming more than our share. In 2002,
G. W. Yohe and I (in an article in the Journal of Knowledge
Management) pointed out that 900 million individuals in 23
affluent industrialized nations today produce and consume more than
20 times the quantity of goods and services used by the 700 million
individuals in the 40 least–developed countries (after taking
into account differences in purchasing power). Annual gains in
economic productivity (powered by energy from fossil fuels) are 50
percent higher in those affluent countries than in the
least–developed ones. Moreover, this higher rate of growth
builds from a level of economic production and per capita
consumption that is more than 20 times greater in affluent than in
developing nations. By 2050 the level of production and consumption
will be more than 40 times greater in affluent than in
"least–developed" nations if present demographic and
productivity trends continue.
Serious inequities also exist within countries. The U.N.
Development Programme's 2003 Human Development Report noted
that in about a third of the countries surveyed (including Japan,
the Nordic countries, and Eastern European countries), the richest
10 percent of the population enjoys 5 to 10 times as much income and
consumption as the poorest 10 percent. In another third (including
the United States, Italy, Germany and the United Kingdom), the
richest 10 percent have 10 to 20 times as much as the poorest, and
in nearly another third (including many African and Latin American
countries), they have more than 20 times as much.
The annual rate of population increase is nearly six times greater
in the least–developed countries than in the affluent ones.
Most of the growth in world population will take place among the
five billion people in the developing world, where, as Speth notes,
three billion individuals "live on less than two dollars a
day" and have little capacity to cope with deterioration in
life–supporting ecosystems. Massive population growth in
developing countries and massive production and consumption in
industrialized countries are fueling economic inequity, threatening
environmental sustainability, and jeopardizing social stability and
peace in a world blessed with new technologies for sharing
knowledge—and cursed with terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.
Speth spells out eight transitions that will be required to
transform society: progress toward a stable or smaller world
population, freedom from mass poverty, environmentally benign
technologies, environmentally honest prices, sustainable
consumption, an emphasis on knowledge and learning, good governance,
and—above all—a culture and consciousness that respects
nature, human rights and economic justice, and treasures peace.
These transitions are central to four overarching imperatives:
reduction of population growth in developing countries; restraint on
economic production and conspicuous consumption in the
industrialized world; development of environmentally benign sources
of energy to power economic development globally; and a revolution
in education that will equip individuals to become co–creators
of the human future.
Innovative partnerships among disciplines and institutions
(academia, business and industry, government, and civil
organizations) will be required to advance these goals. The book has
two appendices that can help empower its readers: a comprehensive
"Bookshelf" of recommendations for further reading and a
set of "Resources for Citizens" that includes lists of Web
sites pertinent to each of the eight transitions. Voters, investors,
consumers, family members, association members, workers, advocates
of government policies and funding, conservationists, activists and
educators should all find information of use to them. The
"Resources for Citizens" appendix is available for free
downloading at www.redskyatmorning.com.
Success in these endeavors will produce a civilization like that
envisioned by Paul Raskin and colleagues in Great Transition:
The Promise and Lure of the Times Ahead
(2002)—"a civilization of unprecedented freedom,
tolerance and decency." In this brave new world,
"Conspicuous consumption and glitter are viewed as vulgar
throwbacks to an earlier era. The pursuit of the well–lived
life turns to the quality of existence—creativity, ideas,
culture, human relationships and a harmonious relationship with nature."
In summary, Red Sky at Morning is a clarion call for
changes in the behavior of individuals and institutions that will
lead to an environmentally sustainable, economically equitable and
socially peaceful world society, in which all of the basic human
needs and an equitable share of human "wants" can be met
for every individual in present and future generations while
maintaining a healthy, physically attractive and biologically
productive environment. This vision is now within reach.
Read a review of the
Afterword to the new paperback edition of Red Sky at Morning