We use the term "Watermelon" to refer to those who are green on the outside and red on the inside. (We at Maggie's are ardent Conservationists and nature-lovers and studiers, but have never bought into the "Green" thing.)
Jonathan Adler (himself a global cooling denier) takes a look at Gus Speth and his new book. Speth is as green as they come, and Dean of the Yale School of Forestry. The piece in The New Atlantis, Green Bridge to Nowhere, is quite revealing. I'll just offer one quote:
Speth’s agenda is not confined to economics and the environment, however. He believes his sustainability agenda is intertwined with broader social concerns. “Sustaining people, sustaining nature—it is one cause, inseparable.” Thus he wants to replace the traditional focus on economic growth, as measured by GDP, with “good growth,” which he defines as “growth with equity, employment, environment, and empowerment.” While ostensibly focused on our environmental crisis, and calling for a “post-growth” society, the bridge he seeks to build is to a far broader and more ambitious progressive agenda:
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].
This agenda, Speth claims, is not only the key to sustainability, but also to greater human “well-being.” So too are limits on consumerism and consumption. 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.
Read the whole piece for full insight into this totalitarian movement.
Power grabs used to be "for the children," then they were "for the greater good," and now they are "for the planet." I guess any excuse will do for those who imagine that they know better than us regular benighted people. And as far as my "well-being" goes - if I want advice, I will ask for it.
