« Impeachment Ornament Nixed by White House | Main | Felons Receive Compensation for Being Forced to Quit Heroin »
December 4, 2008
Gus Speth Calls for Totalitarian Moonbattery
Posted by Dave Blount at December 4, 2008 9:35 AM
If the Green agenda were really primarily about concern for the environment, even most conservatives would be sympathetic. But packaging needs to be deceptive if you're trying to sell sheer totalitarian moonbattery. Jonathan Adler offers a glimpse of what lies behind the feel-good froth in a review of The Bridge at the Edge of the World by influential envirowacko James Gustave Speth.
Like many left-wing ecoweenies, Speth rants that "the planet cannot sustain capitalism as we know it." But his agenda goes well beyond snuffing out economic freedom. From the book:
Perhaps the most important prescriptions challenging unbridled growth come from outside the environmental sector … they include measures such as more leisure, including a shorter workweek and longer vacations; greater labor protections, job security and benefits, including retirement and health benefits; restrictions on advertising; new ground rules for corporations; strong social and environmental provisions in trade agreements; rigorous consumer protection; greater income and social equality, including genuinely progressive taxation for the rich and greater income support for the poor; major spending on public sector services and environmental amenities; a huge investment in education, skills, and new technology to promote both ecological modernization and sharply rising labor productivity to offset smaller workforces and shorter hours. People deserve more free time, more security, and more opportunity for companionship and continuing education. They deserve to be free of the growth-at-all-costs paradigm and the ruthless economy [of capitalist societies].
What, nothing about gay marriage?
Here's why our entire civilization needs to be radically transformed:
Today's dominant worldview is simply too biased toward anthropocentrism, materialism, egocentrism, contempocentrism, reductionism, rationalism, and nationalism to sustain the changes needed.
When they start complaining about anthropocentrism and rationalism, it's time to call in the men in white coats with the butterfly nets. Adler comments:
The measures he outlines are the "hallmarks of a caring community and a good society" and must be imposed by government diktat. The role civil society and non-governmental civic institutions might play in this regard receives not a single mention. Capitalism and its attendant freedoms are not only bad for the environment, in his view, they are bad for people as well, and must therefore be controlled, if not eliminated. … this revolution bears a striking resemblance to revolutionary calls we've heard before.
In short, Speth wants a deranged, communistic concept of utopia imposed by force, à la Pol Pot. Why does it matter what this kook thinks?
For over thirty years he has played a key role in the development of environmentalist organizations and agendas. He was present at the founding of the Natural Resources Defense Council in 1970 and later launched the World Resources Institute, a $27 million enterprise that may be the most influential environmental think tank in the world. He served on, and eventually chaired, President Carter's Council on Environmental Quality, where he oversaw production of the apocalyptic Global 2000 report. During the 1990s he worked on President Clinton's transition team and headed up the United Nations Development Program, and he is now dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.
No doubt Speth or people like him will have a major role in the Obamination Administration.
Nuts like Speth aren't a major problem when they stand on street corners yelling at hallucinations. But they've been accumulating in the system for decades. The global warming hoax is their way of deliberately steering it toward catastrophe.
Hat tip: Maggie's Farm.
