If you have glanced over that the "I'm Reading" list on this blog you will have seen the topic for today's entry: Break Through - From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility.
The co-authors, Nordhaus and Shellenberger are excellent writers with impeccable credentials in the envoronmental community. They have shown themselves willing to question many if not most of the current approaches to managing climate change.
For me, they put their fingers on problems that I never understood and they expose flaws in my own reasoning that I didn't want to admit. In short, these guys will make you think.
"Environmentalism offered something profoundly important to America and the world. It inspired an appreciation for, and an awe of the beauty and majesty of, the nonhuman world. If focused our attention on future generations and our responsibility toward them. and it called upon people to take valiant risks, from saving rain forests and whales to inventing wondrous new technologies that will help us overcome the ecological crises we face.But environmentalism has also saddled us with the albatross we call the politics of limits, which seeks to constrain human ambition, aspiration and power rather than unleash and direct them. In focusing attention so exclusively on the nonhuman worlds that have been lost rather than also on the astonishing human world that has been created, environmentalists have felt more resentment than gratitude for the efforts of those who came before us. And the "rational" environmentalist focus on just fixing what's wrong with the present narrows our vision at a time when we desperately need to expand it."
I was particularly taken by the arguments made about the ineffectiveness of "buying up" the Brazilian rain forest to protect it. In places like the rain forest or for much of the rest of Brazil, there is a serious poverty problem. The people aren't cutting down trees to have a better view. They are cutting down trees to float them to a market that will pay them and allow them to feed their families. The fact that some North American ecological foundation has come in and bought "their land" isn't going to make the economic incentive go away. In fact, it makes those charged with preventing such poaching all the less likely to put in much of a police effort. If a tree falls in the rain forest but there is no environmentalist to hear it, does it still make a sound?
The authors' premise is that until there are better economic opportunities for rain forest workers than poaching trees and clear land, they will continue to poach trees and clear land. The Brazilian economy has shown potential but is currently burdened with over $500 billion in sovereign debt, much of which was run up by a military dictator in the 1960s. They propose that the only way to fix the ecological problems in the Amazon is to fix the economy of Brazil and that won't happen without canceling all or most of this dictatorship debt.
But those are freely traded securities in the public markets. How would you do that?
I don't know and as a finance-type the whole idea steps on my toes, but I have to say that I see their point.
As I said, these guys will make you think. Happy reading.
