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Page 6 ❧ THE ENVIRONMENTAL FORUM Copyright © 2009, Environmental Law Institute®, Washington, D.C. www.eli.org.
Reprinted by permission from The Environmental Forum®, March/April 2009
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Tulane Law Professor Oliver Houck
has made up his mind — capitalism
is a Very Bad ing. In his review of
Gus Speth’s e Bridge at the End of
the World: Capitalism, the Environ-
ment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sus-
tainabilty, he likens it to “an addic-
tion,” an “elaborate Ponzi scheme,”
a “beast,” and so on (“Sisyphus on a
Roll,” November/December 2008).
His jumping-off point is the claimed
correlation between “increased
growth and production,” on the one
hand, and “resource consumption
and pollution,” on the other. Profes-
sor Houck seems ready to condemn
our free-market economy without
considering the good things that are
also closely correlated with capital-
ism.
Take human freedom, for ex-
ample. e correlation between eco-
nomic freedom and personal freedom
is strong and consistent throughout
modern history. Nations with free-
market economies tend to have citi-
zens who enjoy the greatest political
and personal freedom. Conversely,
state-run economies are strongly
linked to oppression and subjuga-
tion. Skeptical? Try publishing a
newspaper of your own in North
Korea or Cuba. Or, if you happen to
be female, try driving a car in Saudi
Arabia.
A similar correlation exists in the
area of scientific research. e nations
that lead the world in basic and ap-
plied research tend to be those with
free markets. At the other end of the
spectrum, we find state-run econo-
mies where scientific knowledge lags
far behind the rest of the world. If
you’re looking for the latest advances
in science or medicine, don’t bother
looking in Libya or Zimbabwe.
All this is not to say that we live
in a perfect society. But as we ponder
how to improve it, we dare not focus
on environmental issues to the exclu-
sion of everything else.
M W. S
Bethesda, Maryland
Author Oliver Houck responds:
anks for your comments, with
whose thrust I largely agree. As I said
in the review, alternatives to capitalism
have not performed well economically
and environmentally. Recent events
have also demonstrated, however,
the extent to which capitalism based
on consumerism resembles a Ponzi
scheme, always requiring more in or-
der not to fall back, and when things
do crash, require socialist bail-outs (to
quote President Bush).
More to Speth’s point, capitalism has
done its own bad job on the environ-
ment, paliated, again, by such socialist
measures as regulation. at part of
the case seems to me unimpeachable.
Where I criticize Speth is not in his di-
agnosis of the problem but in his failure
to propose a remedy other than Less is
More. How we might get there remains
unsaid (although Western Europe may
be pointing a way). Wherever Speth’s
Bridge may lie or lead to, one does not
have to long to live in Zimbabwe to
understand both the fragility and the
destructiveness of present conditions.
One only needs to read the paper.
My guess is that if we were to spend
a couple of hours together on this (in
New Orleans), we’d end up closer than
you’d think.
We asked Michael Steinberg to continue
the dialogue:
I’d add that the issue is not simply
Speth’s book, but whether it’s sensible
for environmental policy gurus to pre-
scribe an overhaul of our economic
framework by looking through the sin-
gle-issue lens of environmental protec-
tion. As you can tell, I think the answer
to that long question is “heck, no!”
For example, Professor Houck’s
prediction that our current version of
capitalism is “both economically and
ethically doomed” strikes me as not
remotely grounded in either economic
theory or history. It resonates, yes, as a
reminder that life is about more than
just consumption and profit. Point
noted. But last time I checked, capital-
ism doesn’t force anyone to live a shal-
low life of conspicuous consumption.
us, inventing brave new economic
orders to force us all to live more sus-
tainably seems to me to be barking up
the wrong tree.
ere’s also the historical track re-
cord to keep in mind. e 20th cen-
tury did not lack for efforts to install
utopian economic programs that
would improve the lives of the work-
ing classes. ose efforts yielded up
millions of corpses and rivers of blood.
ese recent catastrophes should make
us skeptical of centralized governments
overturning the economic order and
starting fresh.
Finally, both Mr. Speth and Mr.
Houck suggest that we would do well
to emulate Western Europe. I respect-
fully disagree. As “green” as some
of those nations may be, they have
thrown out the baby with the bath-
water, and are now on a gentle glide-
path toward cultural disappearance.
e quasi-socialist economies of West-
ern Europe are in free-fall. eir abil-
ity to defend themselves militarily is a
thing of the past. eir birth rates are
not just low, but below replacement
level and still falling. eir churches
are increasingly empty. And so on. In-
deed, if there is any pressing question
facing Western Europe today, it might
be, “Will the last one left please turn
out the light?” At that point, does it
really matter whether the light was a
compact fluorescent bulb?
And a final word from Oliver Houck:
May take more than a few beers after
all. I’m reminded of a letter I received
back in l971 from an engineer who was
deeply offended by Barry Commoner’s
e Closing Circle. He summed up by
saying that, given the steady rise in
population around the world, he was
“glad that it was the environment that
is having the crises and not the people.”
I keep letters like this. To which there
is really nothing one can say.
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