Books & Music...

Chicken Little and his cohorts in mass hysteria earned the attention of other animals because they were the only ones predicting the sky was falling. There used to just be Al Gore and a couple of scientists telling anyone who would listen that the planet can't sustain our way of life. While not everyone has taken the message to heart, there's hardly a soul left to tell. In fact, the message is so roaring that after a while you don't even notice it that much. Doom and gloom voices turn me into an apathetic Foxy Loxy.

But James Gustave Speth's new book The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability brings hope amidst the dire warnings. Yes, we all need a good warning, but hopelessness breeds apathy--and Speth adroitly addresses the issues as he presents a viable solution. We need more books like his.

Check out this green nugget from Speth's book:

"Growth is traditionally measured as an increase in Gross Domestic Product, and GDP growth is what is meant by growth here. It has given much of the world remarkable material progress—progress in the things that economies can produce and money can buy—but this prosperity has been and is being purchased at a huge environmental cost. ...

"What the environment cares about, moreover, is not the rate of growth but the total loading. These loadings—for example, the amount of fish harvested—were already huge in 1980, so that even modest growth per decade produces large increases in environmental impacts—impacts that were already too large. By 2004, the world was consuming annually 369 million tons of paper products, 275 million tons of meat, and 9 trillion tons of fossil fuels (in oil equivalent). Freshwater for human use was being withdrawn from natural supplies of about a thousand cubic miles a year.

"Behind these numbers is the phenomenon of exponential expansion. A dominant feature of modern activity is its exponential growth. A thing grows linearly when it increases by the same quantity over a given time. If college tuition goes up three thousand dollars a year, the increase is linear. A thing grows exponentially when it increases in proportion to what is already there. If college tuition goes up 5 percent a year, the increase is exponential. The modern economy tends to grow exponentially because a portion of each year's output is invested to produce even more output. The amount invested is related to the amount of the economic activity. ... The economic system does not work when it comes to protecting environmental resources, and the political system does not work when it comes to correcting the economic system."