Speth's got the problem identified pretty well - it's the system stupid! Since market capitalism emerged it has had some pretty atrocious outcomes. We're not just talking about a Marxist critique, a great many early political economists had misgivings (Proudhon immediately comes to mind). Even J.S. Mill (a Liberal if ever there was one) was deeply disturbed by the tendency of capitalism to render problems in terms of individual choices, when the really big issues, the really important choices concerned society as a whole. Systemically capitalism has pretty much hit the limits of what it can do for us. In that sense Speth is spot on.

What Speth calls a dematerialized economy is an interesting idea. I'll have to read his book to get a better grasp on it. But he seems overly shy about what is needed, he doesn't want socialism. I can't blame him there - Soviet socialism was dirty both in terms of its ecological and human costs. But I think he's not seeing the nuances in his own thinking clearly enough. Dematerialization is only part of the solution to the conundrum it seems. The other part of it has to be the depersonalization of wealth. His reform of the corporate structure seems to indicate a move in this direction. But in what sense is his vision of a revised corporate America not "socialist". There is too much conflation between communism and socialism in the American academy. Communism is a very specific mode of organizing society, socialism is far more broad i think and merely suggests a system that puts the needs of society ahead of everything else. If putting social needs before that of profitability is not "socialist" in some sense I don't know what is.

New operating system is right. Post-growth is right.

What he is hinting at is an ethical issue. Modern capitalism is based on the Western concept of an ever-expanding frontier, that arises from the discovery of the "new world" and its seemingly endless possibility for exploitation and renewal. This was the mindset that drove the growth of America, as the westward expansion dominated our thinking. When your city grew dirty and polluted and crowded, you pulled up stakes and headed west. When your soil became depleted and your forests empty, you pulled up stakes and headed west.
What eventually happened is that we reached the edge of that new world. With the closing of the West in the 1890's America had to face a new reality, one of their being no new frontier. This is hard to swallow. People, tribal animals that we are, cling to traditional ethics. You see people clinging to the tattered remnants of the frontier mentality in the exurban "ranch" developments paving over the west, in the construction of boom towns where there is no water to support them, in the mindset of faux-libertarian "independence" that grips the psyche of political leaders across the west (despite the fact that places like Alaska and Utah are the most government subsidized and controlled places in America). Of course, these new places, these fake frontiers are a dream. Of course Sarah Palin wants to keep polar bears off the endangered species list. Like many Alaskans, she believes that she is still trying to "tame" the wilderness.
This is the mindset that must change. There is no new frontier (except in the space program). We have filled in the bubble of our little planet, and we can no longer pick up and move west. We must change our ethics to encompass this shift in our physical reality. The resistance to this new, more cramped and delicate world was perfectly summed up in the chanting mob at the Republican Convention, repeating "drill, baby, drill" over and over. Until we break the idea that exploitation of non-renewable resources is ethically neutral, we will be stuck in gear heading down a curving road. To simplify it, we need to make pollution and waste the new sins, the new taboos of our tribe. Until we do so, until we shift the ethics, as the professor points out, we will be pissing into the wind.
Sustainability means treating the planet with the holiness we now reserve for money, growth, and acquisition. Sustainability means creating new gods.

In the long run, yes, I agree completely. Available resources, even in the whole observable universe, are finite, and so economic and population growth must ultimately cease, regardless of our level of technology and how efficiently we use what we have. There is a finite amount of free energy in the universe, so in some sense all life is unsustainable. To define sustainability, we must ask, on what timescale?

First, for energy supply and environmental impact.
To live another century, we can rely on fossil fuels.
To live another thousand years, we can rely on uranium and thorium.
Ten thousand, geothermal power. A million, fusion. A billion, wind and solar.
It will take strong political will and economic incentives to get us toward using the cleaner and longer-lasting, more abundant energy supplies.

For material resources, the supply doesn't change with time; by throwing things out, we simply make it harder for matter to be reused. Here we must use every political and economic weapon we have to ensure that at the end of a product's life cycle, it is dismantled or disposed of in such a way that the matter that composes it remains useful.

The obsession with economic growth can come from many places. For those who are truly poor, economic growth can mean tremendous gains in quality and length of life, vast improvements in health, increases in educational and occupational opportunity, the power to interact with the rest of the world, and the ability to enact many other positive changes. I tend to think that at some point a law of diminishing returns kicks in, where increasing resource consumption has only a tiny impact on life. I don't claim to know where that point is, and it is probably different for everyone, but until it is reached, people will continue to push for growth as a major goal.

I don't think growth is a problem as long as it is sustainable growth - ie renewable energy, nonpolluting industries, A maintenance or growth of wilderness areas etc.
I do agree that growth has diminishing returns and becomes more and more wasteful as people become more wealthy. For every unit of happiness you end up spending a lot more money. A holiday in Samoa may be nicer than a family trip to the local swimming pool but it's also a darn sight more dollar-expensive and resource-expensive.
We had a discussion about this at work one day and a comparatively well-off colleague said that if she was honest then there's not really a limit to how much she'd like to own. I believe that most humans are like that. Have a look at what rich people do - they buy more and more and more until they own multimillion dollar mansions which are far too big for them but there seems to be no end to it. Sure, there are exceptions (Bill Gates & Warren Buffet giving most of their fortune to the B&M Gates Foundation are extreme examples) but I suspect that there is really no limit to human desire to own things (this could be called greed). That has pretty serious concequences. To me it means we cannot stop growth but we could direct and shape it towards sustainable growth. It means that environmental laws & regulations need to become strong and strict.

As for transforming the corporation, it's a nice idea and I agree that corporations should work for the good of everyone, I can't see how this would work.

For an example of how this might work, have a read of the Mars trilogy science fiction novels by Kim Stanley Robinson. Besides being great books, they discuss at length the development of a new economic system on the new society on terraforming Mars that has a lot of these ideas (worker-owned cooperatives, common good etc).

Benjamin

I've never posted before, but commenting on this article seems the most likely place to pose my question & hopefully get some positive answers. My question is this: How does one keep "fighting the good fight" when faced with other knowledgable forces who say that Greenies are just kidding themselves, and that the problems with our ecosystems, the failure of our current capitalist economy/consumer-based society, and our so-called democratic form of government are too far gone for our feeble efforts to make any difference. To put it bluntly -- that any efforts at this point to green our world are just not going to be enough to forestall the inevitable. I'm thinking particularly of James Kunstler, author of "The Long Emergency," (and his blog, entitled "Clusterfuck Nation') who claims he's been warning for years about the pending world-wide crisis which will likely bring to an end the world as we know it -- particularly in the U.S. He has many advocates and followers who agree with him, and yet I find it difficult to absorb his theories without becoming completely paralyzed with the enormity of it. It becomes increasingly difficult to not just throw up one's hands and say, "I surrender; we're too far gone." Are we (those of us still trying to save the planet) just keeping ourselves busy with our eco-efforts in order to remain in denial? I'd be curious to hear from others how they keep their morale up; more importantly, I'd appreciate some fact-checking or knowledgable feedback to counter Kuntsler's claims regarding the post-peak-oil America Kunstler predicts -- a dark scenario which he posits will make the Great Depression seem like a day in the park by comparison (think Blade Runner). Many thanks to all who can shed some optomistic light on this subject or recommend resources (books, posts, other websites) which deal with this dark-night-of-the-Earth's-soul dilemma..or keeping the faith.
-Suzanne in Portland, Oregon