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December 4, 2008
Gus Speth Calls for Totalitarian Moonbattery
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.
Posted by Van Helsing at December 4, 2008 9:35 AM
Comments
Is anyone else as sick of the overusage of the word "social" as I am?
Posted by: Jaeson at December 4, 2008 9:52 AM
Im sick of the word PROGRESSIVE. To a "progressive", a Cuban like system is the goal. Thats not what I call progress. Of course most of the nuts like this guy expect to be one of those priviledged "inner party" members who get all the perks while the proles live in poverty and are powerless to do anything about it because without the government they would die.
Posted by: Anonymous at December 4, 2008 9:59 AM
What a stuck-up liberal moonbat snob when will they be crowning him the KING OF MOONBAT PUSSIE-PANTS FOOSIE FADS
Posted by: Spurwing Plover at December 4, 2008 12:30 PM
Just think, with the money this moonbat makes from the dirty, capitalist machine that produced and is selling his book he can put said money where his mouth is.
Posted by: Mike at December 4, 2008 4:15 PM
Today's dominant worldview is simply too biased toward anthropocentrism, materialism, egocentrism, contempocentrism, reductionism, rationalism, and nationalism to sustain the changes needed.
Man, that's a lot of -isms.
I think the poor fellow is suffering from ismism.
Posted by: GeronimoRumplestiltskin at December 4, 2008 4:20 PM
So let me get this straight...
Speth is railing about capitalism and the destruction of the environment, in a book made from dead trees that he hopes will sell well and bring in profits?
Give him another year and he'll make a movie and win the Nobel Peace Prize like fellow hate-capitalism-now-buy-my-stuff hypocrite Al Gore
Posted by: BURNING HOT at December 4, 2008 8:32 PM
Is anyone else as sick of the overusage of the word "social" as I am?
Posted by: Jaeson at December 4, 2008 9:52 AM
Especially when used together with the word "justice" to describe what is increasingly a mainstream concept which no-one really actually understands.
See also: inequities/inequality, diversity, outreach, community organizer, etc. etc.
The left is nothing if not repetitive. Oh and the only things they talk about are social issues (or what they perceive as such) because they lack the intelligence (or refuse to use it) to fixate on anything more complicated than a sort-of-semi-intellectual-but-really-just-vacant understanding of some of the ways humans interact with each other.
Posted by: mandible claw at December 4, 2008 9:33 PM
The SICKLY of the herd have gained control of it instead of being pushed to the outside!
Posted by: TED at December 5, 2008 5:19 AM
In other words the COMPASSION of the right has, for too long, ALLOWED the psychotic left have their way! It's time for some TOUGH LOVE, a spanking is in order all around!!
Posted by: TED at December 5, 2008 5:24 AM
Capitalism is the unequal distribution of wealth while
Socialism is the equal distribution of poverty.
Posted by: TED at December 5, 2008 5:25 AM
"The inherit vice of capitalism is the equal sharing of blessings; the inherit virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries"
Sir Winston Churchill
Posted by: lvb-rocks at December 5, 2008 12:54 PM
GUS SPETH such a pussietard why dont he go take a long walk off a short peir he is getting to annoy this irrate ol shorebird
Posted by: Spurwing Plover at December 7, 2008 3:13 PM
