294 Book reviews
whether Kant would have preferred the anti-smoking
movement.
Reference
Ackerman, Frank, Heinzerling, Lisa, 2004. Priceless: On Knowing
the Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing. The New Press.
Frank Ackerman
Global Development and Environment Institute,
Tufts University, Medford, MA 02155, United States
E-mail address: Frank.Ackerman@tufts.edu.
24 February 2005
doi:10.1016/j.ecolecon.2005.03.039
Capitalism and Collapse: Contradictions of Jared
Diamond’s market meliorist strategy to save the
humans
The environmental movement finds itself at a
paradoxical conjuncture. On the one hand, global
environmental trends are truly frightening. I could
rehearse all these trends but they are familiar enough to
readers of this journal. On the other hand, global
environmental consciousness has never been higher.
Not so many years ago we environmentalists were
ridiculed as alarmists and extremists. Today, all the
world’s scientific organizations, the United Nations,
notable CEOs, Tony Blair, and even the U.S. Pentagon
are all pleading for something to be done to avert the
onrushing threat of global warming, among other
threats.1 Yet for all the gains in consciousness, the
1
National Academies of Science of Brazil, France, Italy, UK,
Canada, Germany, Japan, USA, China, India, and Russia, bJoint
science academies’ statement: Global response to climate changeQ
June 7, 2005 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/. United Nations Inter-
governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), bClimate Change
2001: Working Group I: The Scientific Basis (Summary for
Policymakers)Q, http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/005.htm
accessed 3/6/2005. Ray C. Anderson, Mid-Course Correction:
Toward a Sustainable Enterprise (Peregrinzilla Press: Atlanta,
1998). bBlair dshockedT by climate changeQ, BBCNewsOnline
September 14, 2004. U.S. Pentagon, bAn abrupt climate change
scenario and its implications for United States national securityQ,
October 2003. The report was leaked to the press in February 2004
and then posted on a government web site: http://www.ems.org/
climate/pentagon-climate-change.pdf.
practical efforts to stop global warming, deforestation,
pollution and other threats have run into a brick wall
of resistance. This paper is going to argue that the
easy gains have been won, and were won because
they were marginal and no threat to the system, but
the deeper problems are systemic, built into the nature
of the capitalist economic system, and cannot be
overcome short of systemic transformation. I am
going to make this argument through a critical review
of Jared Diamond’s new book Collapse: how societies
choose to fail or succeed.
Diamond, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of
Guns, Germs and Steel (1997) has given us a
provocative and fascinating history lesson in what
could happen, even to our technologically advanced
society, should we fail to learn–and apply–the lessons
of past failed societies. In bCollapse: How Societies
Choose or Fail to SucceedQ, Diamond takes us on a
sobering reality tour of six societies that committed
ecological suicide in the hopes that we can learn from
their failures in time to save ourselves.2 Diamond’s
thesis is that some societies like the Easter Islanders,
the Greenland Norse, the Anasazi of the American
southwest and others collapsed largely because they
overdrove their natural resource endowments. They
either failed to realize the need to change their
practices or, in some cases, inexplicably refused to
change and instead pursued bgrim trajectoriesQ toward
disintegration and collapse. Other societies facing
comparable circumstances, like the Tikopians and
Tongans of the south Pacific, the Highland tribes of
New Guineans, the Japanese under the Tokugawa
survived, Diamond says, because they reversed long-
term negative environmental trends and/or adapted to
difficult or changed environmental conditions.
So why did some societies change and survive
while others resisted change and fail? Diamond argues
that key to success was for societies to break with
outmoded, eco-suicidal bcore valuesQ and adopt more
environmentally benign economic practices. The
historical record, he says, reveals two bpaths to
successQ. Either, as with some small-scale tribal
societies, such turnabouts were made collectively
bfrom the bottom upQ more or less democratically.
Or, such decisions were made bfrom the top downQ by
fiat of benlightenedQ authoritarians: So Tokugawa
2
New York: Viking 2005.
 Book reviews
shoguns dictated forestry and agricultural reform, the
Dominican Republic’s Balaguer imposed forest pres-
ervation measures, the Chinese Communist Party
enforced family planning, and so on. Throughout,
Diamond places heavy emphasis on the free agency of
individuals, especially society’s political and econom-
ic leaders, to effect change. I am going to argue that
while the adoption of eco-rational bcore valuesQ is
necessary to adopt eco-rational economic policies, the
institution of such policies was and is constrained by
systemic factors: class structure and the requirements
of economic reproduction in specific class divided
societies. So I shall try to show that in Diamond’s own
case studies, neither the society as a whole nor even
its leaders were bfree to chooseQ beyond certain limits,
that ruling classes were and are very often compelled
to adopt environmentally self-destructive policies as
the means to preserving their own economic and
political dominance. With respect to our current crisis
and Diamond’s recommendations for how we mod-
erns might stave off collapse, I will argue that
Diamond’s analysis is handicapped by his reluctance
to break with his own outmoded bcore valuesQ,
specifically, his naı̈ve faith in the free market and
the potential for reforming the market system before it
destroys us. Let us look at some of his case studies.
1. History lessons
Easter Island was perhaps not only the most
bpurely ecologicalQ instance of collapse but also, for
Diamond, a model of bspaceship earthQ. From their
first settlements c. AD 900, the Polynesian colonists
of Easter Island proceeded to eat, chop and burn their
way through what was initially a bountiful flora and
fauna. The settlers found abundant forests, big trees to
build oceangoing canoes to hunt dolphins and deep
sea fish, plentiful wild birds to eat, ample inshore fish
and shellfish, sea turtles, and so on. So for a few
hundred years, Easter Islanders thrived and grew as
they consumed these extensive wild food sources and
supplemented these with farming. Their numbers
increased to between 5000 and 30,000. But defores-
tation soon exhausted the big trees that were crucial
not only for canoes but also for the Easter people’s
iconic stone statues, the famous carved stone moai.
From the 1400s all of Easter’s palms, its paper
295
mulberry (used for tapa cloth), its hardwood, fruit-
wood and other species used for construction,
firewood and other uses all disappeared as well.
Forest clearance and human population peaked
between the early 1400s and the 1600s: bThe overall
picture for Easter is the most extreme example of
forest destruction in the Pacific . . . the whole forest
gone, and all of its tree species extinctQ (p. 107).
Deforestation had a devastating impact on the human
population: losses of raw materials and wild-caught
foods, and decreased crop yields. After 1650, Easter’s
inhabitants were reduced to burning herbs and grasses
for fuel. Without seagoing canoes, fishing was limited
to small inshore species. Over-harvesting wiped out
all the land birds while the seabirds were reduced to
remnant populations on outer islets. Shellfish declined
in number and size. Wild fruit dropped from the diet.
Soon the only wild fauna left were rats. By the late
17th century, the Easter peoples had completely
denuded the island, consumed nearly all the wild
food sources and collapsed into civil war and revolt.
The chiefs and their symbols of authority the moai
were toppled and the remnant population of starving
humans were driven in hellish desperation to consume
each other. When Captain Cook arrived in 1774 he
found only a few bsmall, lean, timid, and miserableQ
survivors and wondered what could have befallen this
once developed island society.
At about the same time the Polynesians were
migrating across the eastern Pacific, the medieval
Norse Vikings set out to trade and raid northern
Europe, to venture westward into the north Atlantic
and settle the Shetland, Faeroe, Orkney and Faeroe
islands, Iceland, Greenland and even briefly founding
a colony, Vinland, in present-day Labrador. The story
of the Greenland Norse founding, flourishing and
eventual collapse is Diamond’s favorite example
because of the substantial evidence that those Norse
colonies of Greenland could have forged an alternative
history but for cultural, not environmental factors. For
nearly 500 years between AD 984 and the 1400s, the
two Greenland colonies supported Europe’s most
remote outpost with up to 5000 Scandinavians. Fifteen
hundred miles from Norway, they built a cathedral and
churches, established hundreds of farms, raised live-
stock, hunted caribou and seals, schooled themselves,
followed the latest European fashions in clothing—
and finally vanished. The Vikings’ unsustainable
296 Book reviews
environmental policies eventually undermined their
economy: Initially, they had the good luck to find in
their protected fjords a virgin landscape that had never
been logged or grazed. They arrived at a time of
relatively mild climate when hay production was
sufficient in most years to support their livestock,
when the sea lanes were free of ice, when there was
European demand for their exports of walrus ivory and
bear skins. But immediately they began to undermine
their future by burning their few woodlands for
pastures, then overgrazing their fragile pastures
causing soil erosion, and also destroying much
irreplaceable turf for building projects. Over time,
these practices left them short of lumber, fuel and other
resources, and reduced pastureland. By the 1300s, the
climate of southern Greenland began to cool before
plunging in the 1400s into the cold period climate
historians call the bLittle Ice Age.Q This shortened the
growing season for hay imperiling and eventually
dooming livestock raising. Ice began to clog shipping
lanes and reduced trade with Europe which eventually
stopped altogether, cutting Greenland off from access
to iron, wood and other necessities. Isolated, hungry
and freezing, the Greenland Norse society collapsed
and died out over the course of a century or so.
But for Diamond, the real mystery of the Norse
collapse is not why they starved and died, but why
they did not adapt and survive. After all, the Norse in
Iceland adapted and survived. And while the Green-
land Norse perished, their neighbors the Inuit survived
and carried on more or less unchanged right into the
19th century. Diamond sees this as a virtually self-
willed collective social suicide and the question is,
why? Mayan and Anasazi societies flourished,
peaked, then collapsed in the same familiar pattern:
growing population, limited productivity, overexploi-
tation of natural resources and steady deforestation
eventually drove these societies to collapse.
Against these case histories of collapses, Diamond
compares some success stories: the highland societies
of New Guinea, the Tikopians (a small Pacific island
society living on just 1.8 square miles but still
surviving after 3000 years), Tokugawa Japan and
others. These societies faced environmental difficul-
ties, many of their own doing, but changed course and
averted disaster: So the Tokugawa shogun in 1615
centralized political and military power. Peace opened
the way to increased agricultural productivity with
new crops, marsh reclamation, and increased produc-
tion of irrigated rice. Prosperity brought a population
boom, and extensive construction of castles, temples,
houses that consumed enormous quantities of wood.
Deforestation was also driven by the use of wood for
fuel, heating, and industry. By the mid-17th century,
deforestation reached crisis proportions. But instead
of an Easter Island-like catastrophe, over the next two
centuries Japan gradually achieved a stable popula-
tion and nearly sustainable resource consumption
rates. Successive shoguns broke with past environ-
mentally predatory policies and imposed strict forest
conservation measures, invented and developed plan-
tation forestry, promoted lighter technologies for
construction, and the use of coal instead of wood
for fuel. To relieve pressure on the land, the
population was encouraged to shift from a depen-
dence on farm-raised produce to increased reliance on
seafood. Fishing was promoted and developed and
fishmeal was developed for fertilizer relieving pres-
sure on the forests. In result of these programs,
initiated from the top down by the Tokugawa
shoguns, Diamond notes that while Japan is today
the second industrial power in the world, it remains
70% forested.
2. bFree to choose? Q
So why success here and failure there? In Chapter
14, Diamond proposes a five factor schema to explain
societal success or failure: environmental damage
(deforestation, etc.), climate change (cooling, drought,
etc.), opportunities or not for trade, hostile or friendly
neighbors, and most critically bsociety’s responses to
its environmental problemsQ (p. 11). Some or all of
these factors contributed to societal collapse. But what
Diamond finds most intriguing is the seeming perver-
sity of so many societal collapses, the apparent
bwoodenheadednessQ of individuals and societies in
the face of adversity, their reluctance to give up
established bcore valuesQ even at the cost of social
suicide. So as Diamond tells it, the Greenland Norse
thought of themselves as dairy farmers, Christians,
Europeans and specifically Norse. They scorned the
pagan Innuit, even though the Innuit were superior
colonizers of that harsh landscape. When the growing
season shortened and it became too cold for cattle, they
 Book reviews
could have adapted to Innuit ways: they could have
taken to hunting the ringed seals, fish, and whales that
the Innuit hunted. They could have adopted different,
Innuit, technologies, different consumption habits and
other changes in lifestyle. The medieval Greenland
Norse could have adapted but would not. Instead,
b[t]he Norse starved in the presence of abundant
unutilized food resourcesQ. bIn trying to carry on as
Christian farmers, the Greenland Norse in effect were
deciding that they were prepared to die as Christian
farmers rather than live as InnuitQ (p. 433).
For Diamond, the main determinant of success or
failure comes down to the conscious decisions of
society’s members: bSociety’s fate lies in its own
hands and depends substantially on its own choicesQ
(p. 341). Critical in this regard, Diamond argues, is the
willingness of society to examine its bcore valuesQ, to
choose which to discard and which to hold onto. In
particular, b[r]eligious values tend to be especially
deeply held and hence frequent causes of disastrous
behaviorQ (p. 432). Yet Diamond’s thesis that bsocietyQ
exercises free will to make bits own choicesQ is, I
would argue, contradicted by the evidence of his own
narrative presentations. For Diamond shows that in
most cases, bsocietyQ was in no position to exercise
any such free choice bto fail or succeedQ. In analyzing
societal responses to environmental crises, Diamond
often brings in a neo-Marxist class conflict model to
partially account for collapse (though he never uses the
term class). So he says that Easter Island society did
not collapse because of human failures of judgment or
lack of foresight. Easter’s systematic deforestation was
to a very great extent driven by inter-ruling class
bcompetition between clans and chiefs driving the
erection of bigger statues requiring more wood, rope,
and foodQ (p. 119). bEaster Island chiefs . . . acted so as
to accelerate deforestation rather than to prevent it:
their status depended upon their putting up bigger
statues and monuments than their rivals. They were
trapped in a competitive spiral such that any chief . . .
who put up smaller statues or monuments to spare the
forests would have been scorned and lost his jobQ (p.
431, my italics). For all we know, Easter Islanders
understood well enough the suicidal logic of their
systematic deforestation of the island. But Easter
Island bsocietyQ–ordinary Easter Islanders–were in no
position to change policies dictated by their ruling
chiefs.
297
Similarly, the Mayans also faced various environ-
mental difficulties though none that were insurmount-
able. bTheir [the kings and nobles’] attention was
evidently focused on their short-term concerns of
enriching themselves, waging wars, erecting monu-
ments, competing with each other, and extracting
enough food from the peasants to support all those
activities. Like most leaders throughout human
history, the Maya kings and nobles did not heed
long-term problems, insofar as they perceived themQ
(p. 177). Here too, given the brutal class divisions of
Mayan society, it seems safe to assume that Mayan
peasant society had little or no say in ruling class
decisions about the future of the forest.
Even Greenland Norse society, which was hardly
so class divided as the Mayans, still collapsed through
much the same class conflict-driven overdriving of
the environment: b[P]ower in Norse Greenland was
concentrated at the top, in the hands of the chiefs and
clergy. They owned most of the land (including all the
best farms), owned the boats, and controlled the trade
with Europe. They chose to devote much of that trade
to importing goods that brought prestige to them:
luxury goods for the wealthiest households, vestments
and jewelry for the clergy . . . stained glass for the
churches. Among the uses to which they allocated
their few boats were the Nordrseta hunt, in order to
acquire the luxury exports (such as ivory and polar
bear hides) with which to pay for those imports.
Chiefs had two motives for running large sheep herds
that could damage the land by overgrazing: wool was
Greenland’s other principal export with which to pay
for imports; and the independent farmers on over-
grazed land were more likely to be forced into
tenancy, and thereby to become the chiefs followers
in his competition with other chiefsQ (pp. 275–276).
Diamond says bkey decisions of Viking society were
made by the chiefs, who were motivated to increase
their own prestige, even in cases where that might
conflict with the good of the current society as a
whole and of the next generationQ (pp. 190, 239).
bThere were many inventionsQ, Diamond suggests,
bthat might have improved the material conditions of
the Norse, such as importing more iron and fewer
luxuries, allocating more boat time to Markland
journeys for obtaining iron and timber, and copying
(from the Innuit) or inventing different boats and
different hunting techniquesQ. But those innovations,
298 Book reviews
Diamond argues, bcould have threatened the power,
prestige, and narrow interests of the chiefs. In the
tightly controlled, interdependent society of Norse
Greenland, the chiefs were in a position to prevent
others from trying out such inventionsQ (pp. 242,
276).
In sum, on Diamond’s own telling of these histories,
society’s fate was not really bin society’s handsQ.
Typically, it was in the hands of a small elite of
kings, chiefs and priests—the ruling classes of those
societies. They shut the rest of society out of decision-
making, and they systematically made the bwrongQ
bshortsightedQ decisions that eventually doomed their
societies. Furthermore, Diamond’s narratives reveal
that very often even society’s rulers were not free to
choose. That is because these ruling classes were
themselves, as Diamond says, very often blocked in a
competitive spiralQ which was beyond their control.
This competitive dynamic bound them to make
decisions about the economy, resources and their
environment that were advantageous, rational, and
necessary from the standpoint of the short-term needs
of ruling class survival and reproduction but irrational
and even disastrous from the standpoint of society’s
long-term survival.
In drawing attention to the important role of social
(class) structure and elite–mass (class) conflict,
Diamond has opened a fruitful approach to under-
standing the dynamics of eco-social collapse. Indeed,
I think this is the most important history lesson in his
book. Yet Diamond diminishes the importance of his
inadvertent neo-Marxist class analysis by burying it
within his multi-factoral schema instead of highlight-
ing the major role and weight that class conflict
actually plays in his own narratives from which I have
quoted extensively above, and which has been used to
such impressive effect in studies of comparative
history elsewhere, notably in the seminal and im-
mensely influential work of his UCLA colleague
Robert Brenner, and of Mike Davis in his brilliant
synthetic social-environmental history Late Victorian
Holocausts.3
3
The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic
Development in Pre-Industrial Europe ed. T.H. Aston and C.H.E.
Philpin (Cambridge: CUP 1985); Michael Davis, Late Victorian
Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World
(London: Verso, 2001).
3. Capitalist constraints on free choice
Toward the end of the book, Diamond turns to
our current crisis and lists a dozen critical environ-
mental problems that he says will doom our own
society unless we solve them. We all know what
these problems are: global warming, fossil fuel
consumption, natural habitat destruction, species
extinction, fresh water consumption, industrial pol-
lution, etc. (the full list in Chapter 16). And we also
know what we must do to solve these problems: We
need to cut fossil fuel use, halt deforestation, find
alternative energy sources, stop over-fishing and
hunting species to extinction, stop dumping toxics
in the environment, and so on. Indeed, the solutions
seemed so obvious to Diamond’s undergraduate
students when he taught the draft of this book as a
course, that they wondered how we as a society
could be so bblindQ to the obvious and fail to
bsucceedQ (pp. 420–421). Well, if we all know what
needs to be done, and have the advantage of
hindsight, why are we not choosing to succeed?
3.1. Democracy and environmental rationality
The short answer is that in the capitalist system
the choices we need to make are not up to bsocietyQ.
In Chapter 9, Diamond discusses the successes of
some Pacific island societies where economic and
environmental decisions were indeed up to
bsocietyQ—because unlike Easter Island or Mayan
society these were small tribal village democracies
where there were no distinctions of rank or class and
no elite/mass conflict. His favorite example is the
highland society of New Guinea. Over thousands of
years they built a mini-Switzerland of interrelated
villages, terraced farms and tree plantations. The
society was, and still is today, chiefless. Within each
village, there are just individuals and so-called bbig-
menQ with no special privileges, who by force of
personality, intelligence and experience are often
more influential than other individuals but still live
in a hut like everyone else’s and till a garden like
everyone else’s.
bDecisions were (and often still are today) reached by
means of everybody in the village sitting down
together and talking, and talking, and talking. The
 Book reviews 299

big-men couldn’t give orders, and they might or might conserve materials, recycle their waste, use cleaner
not succeed in persuading others to adopt their fuels and so on and thus to adopt policies that are
proposals. . . To outsiders today (including not just congruent with society’s interests as well as those of
me but often New Guinea government officials their stockholders. But these reforms are marginal
themselves), that bottom-up approach to decision- reforms that do not threaten corporate profitability or
making can be frustrating, because you can’t get a prerogatives. Society’s problem is that the potential
quick answer to your request; you have to have the environmental catastrophes we face cannot be solved
patience to endure talk–talk–talk for hours or days short of drastically retrenching some lines of
with every villager who has some opinion to offerQ production, closing down factories, lumber opera-
(pp. 278, 284–85). tions, fishing operations, chemical production, refin-
eries, even whole industries and sectors. And this
But it works. By getting everyone’s input and
threatens not just profitability but even the existence
approval, New Guinea societies successfully ensured
of many corporations. Even more alarmingly, this
consensus, rationally managed their economy, society,
threatens the bdivine rightQ of private capital to shape
and environment and survived primitively but sus-
our collective social economy as it pleases. What
tainably for more than 40,000 years.
CEO could bring such a proposal to his board?
3.2. Corporate maximands vs. environmental
rationality
4. The limits of market meliorism
But we do not live in such a bbottom-upQ
Thus, it is curious that when Diamond turns to
democratic society. We live in a capitalist society
address our contemporary environmental crisis, he
in which ownership and control of the economy is
inexplicably bforgetsQ his own lesson about socio-
largely in the hands of private corporations who do
economic conflict as a motor of eco-collapse and
not answer to society.4 In this system, democracy is
presents no comparable exploration of the systemic
limited to the political sphere. Society does not get to
problems, the contradictory (class) interests and (class)
bsit down and talk–talk–talkQ and then vote on the
conflict in modern capitalist society. It seems that
economy. And that is the problem. It is a problem
Diamond’s pro-market bcore valuesQ prevent him
because no decision about whether society should
applying the same critical analysis to our own society
permit deforestation or over-fishing, about whether
that he so effectively deploys to analyze ancient
we should conserve fossil fuel or just find more to
societies. So Diamond does point out that since
pump out of the ground, about whether we should
corporations bexist to make profits for their stock-
introduce GM foods, or any other significant
holdersQ, corporate CEOs are often obliged to maxi-
environmental issue can possibly be socially respon-
mize profits at the expense of the environment and
sible, environmentally and scientifically rational—
society (p. 442 and Chap. 15 passim). But instead of
unless that decision takes into account the input and
analyzing the implications of these contradictory
needs of all those affected. But under capitalism,
material interests for the environment and for efforts
economic power is effectively monopolized by
to brake the slide toward collapse, as he does in his
corporate boards whose day-to-day requirements for
study of the Greenland Norse, Diamond assumes that
reproduction compel their officers to systematically
reforms-within-the-system can overcome such inher-
make bwrongQ decisions, to favor the particular
ently contradictory (class) interests and imperatives,
interests of shareholders against the general interests
and so falls back on the standard tried-and-failed
of society. Of course, corporations can and do
strategy of lobbying, consumer boycotts, eco-labeling,
sometimes find it convenient and even profitable to
pressuring corporations to adopt the most environmen-
tally benign bbest practicesQ, bbuying greenQ, and so on
4
A good primer on corporate power and domination is Joel
(pp. 467–468 and 484–485)—the stock in trade of the
Bakan’s book and film The Corporation (New York: The Free Press environmental lobbying industry. Having stressed
2004). throughout the necessity and urgency of radical
300 Book reviews
change in production and consumption to avert
collapse, Diamond then concludes that bthe publicQ
can beither directly or through its politicians . . . make
destructive environmental policies unprofitable and
illegalQ by bsuing businessesQ, by bpreferring to buy
sustainably harvested productsQ, by bmaking employ-
ees of companies with poor track records feel ashamed
of their company,Q and bwriting your congressmanQ
(484–485). Given the sorry track record of the
lobbying/market reform strategy to date, it is hard to
take this seriously. It is a bit like Donald Rumsfeld
telling us bwe’re not losing the warQ, just bkeep the
pressure onQ.5 The worst thing about this perspective
is that reliance on such anodyne market reforms as a
strategy to save the environment promotes the illusion
that such feel good bwin–winQ corporate reforms can
really save us when the truth is that such reforms are
entirely marginal, are only acceptable to the corpora-
tions so long as they do not threaten their profits and
growth, and sometimes even hasten the slide toward
collapse. We will see why below.
Now to say this is not in the least to demean
reforms. Many problems can be and have been
significantly ameliorated and even solved within our
economic system. In the U.S. since the 1970s,
environmental activism, government intervention,
industrial reform and cleanup have saved some
species and forests, cleaned up some lakes and
streams, dramatically improved urban air quality,
taken lead, mercury and some carcinogens (mostly)
out of, the food chain and workplace, promoted
healthier and organic foods, and so on. We are all
vastly better off for these efforts, they deserve our
support, and we should all recycle, conserve
resources, and bbuy greenQ. But this is no strategy
to save the humans because despite these marginal
reforms, the big problems like global warming,
5
As a couple of young critics recently observed in a widely read
essay: bOver the last 15 years environmental foundations and
organizations have invested hundreds of millions of dollars into
combating global warming. We have strikingly little to show for it.
From the battles over higher fuel efficiency for cars and trucks to the
attempts to reduce carbon emissions through international treaties,
environmental groups repeatedly have tried and failed to win
national legislation that would reduce the threat of global warming.
As a result, people in the environmental movement today find
themselves politically less powerful than we were one and a half
decades agoQ (Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, bThe death
of environmentalism,Q Gristmagazine.org, January 13, 2005).
deforestation, over-fishing, pollution, resource ex-
haustion, species extinction, environmentally caused
human health problems, are not getting better. They
are getting worse. All the government legislation and
market reforms enacted thus far have done precious
little to brake our slide toward collapse.6 The crisis is
getting worse precisely because the requirements of
capitalist reproduction trump all else and ensure that
meaningful reforms must always and everywhere be
subordinated to profit and growth.
4.1. Corporate bbest practicesQ fuel global warming
Diamond’s own examples illustrate as well as
anything the limits of corporate reform. Diamond’s
favorite example of corporate bbest practicesQ and
one he holds up for emulation as the sort of
bsolutionQ we need is Chevron’s Kutubu oil field in
the Kitori River watershed of New Guinea. Dia-
mond was sent there in 1993 as a consultant for the
World Wildlife Fund to evaluate Chevron’s prac-
tices. What Diamond (birdwatcher since he was 7)
found was that unlike so many other oil operations
that typically despoiled environments all over the
world,
bI discovered to my astonishment that [New Gui-
nea’s indigenous bird] species are much more
6
In his review of the history of efforts since the 1970s to manage
the global environment through the adoption and enforcement of
international treaties, James Gustave Speth, Yale professor of
environmental studies, founder of the World Resources Institute
and co-founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council, writes
that with the exception of the singularly successful Montreal
Protocol banning production of CFCs, and one or two other efforts,
b[t]he results of two decades of international environmental
negotiations is disappointing. It is not that what has been agreed
upon, for example, in the framework conventions on climate,
desertification, biodiversity, or in the Law of the Sea is wrong or
useless. Those conventions have raised awareness among govern-
ments, provided frameworks for action, stimulated some useful
national planning exercises, and generally had some beneficial
effects. . . But the bottom line is that these treaties and their
associated agreements and protocols do not drive the changes that
are needed. Thus far, the climate convention is not protecting the
climate, the biodiversity convention is not protecting biodiversity,
the desertification convention is not preventing desertification, and
even the older and stronger Convention on the Law of the Sea is not
protecting fisheriesQ (Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis of
The Global Environment (New Haven: Yale U.P. 2004): 95–96).
 Book reviews
numerous inside the Chevron area than anywhere
else that I have visited on the island of New Guinea
except for a few remote uninhabited areas. . . That’s
because there is an absolute prohibition against
Chevron employees and contractors hunting any
animal or fishing by any means in the project area,
and because the forest is intact. The birds and
animals sense that and become tame. In effect, the
Kutubu oil field functions as by far the largest and
most rigorously controlled national park in Papua
New GuineaQ (pp. 445–46).
Great. But the larger truth of this example of
corporate bbest practicesQ is an illustration of the limits
of corporate reform. For the whole point of Chevron’s
bclean practicesQ demonstration in New Guinea, as
Diamond himself says, was to deflect criticism and
better position itself to win new markets to drill and
pump more oil: bclean environmental practices help
them make money and gain long-term access to new
oil and gas fieldsQ and bgive it a competitive
advantage in obtaining contractsQ. The tactic won
Chevron access to Norway’s North Sea fields and
helped it secure leases to drill in the Alaskan National
Wildlife Refuge, should ANWR ever be opened by
Congress (p. 449). In all probability, by opening doors
to new sources in the North Sea and elsewhere,
Chevron’s bclean practicesQ in New Guinea actually
helped to accelerate global oil production and with it
the pollution that is killing the birds and us.
4.2. bWithout disturbing the essence of our way of lifeQ
Global environmental trends put the lie to the bwin–
winQ propaganda of the market reformers: while the
Kyoto Treaty required that industrialized countries
reduce (fossil fuel combustion generated) CO2 emis-
sions 5% below 1990 levels by 2010, emissions of EU
countries are on course to climb 10% above 1990 levels
by 2010. US emissions are already at least 30% above
1990 levels. And China’s emissions are soaring off the
charts. World oil production is at an all-time high and
growing. The US, Britain and China all plead that they
will be happy to do anything to reduce emissions so
long as these cuts do not that bharm the economyQ,
bundermine our American way of lifeQ (G.W. Bush) or
slow growth. So Tony Blair told Parliament in
September 2004 that bthe world’s richest nations
301
have a responsibility to lead the wayQ in the fight
against bour greatest environmental challenge—global
warmingQ. bThere is no doubt that the time to act is
nowQ. bIt is now that timely action can avert disaster. It
is now that with foresight and will such action can be
taken without disturbing the essence of our way of life,
by adjusting behaviour, not altering it entirelyQ7.
Well what is bthe essence of our way of life?Q In
modern capitalism, the essence of the bAmerican
way of lifeQ is not democracy or free speech (which
we are finding we can do without) but rather, the
unbridled pursuit of ever-more consumption, ever
higher bstandards of livingQ as defined by ever
more possessions and services–new electronic toys,
bigger SUVs, larger and more luxurious homes,
etc.–a trend that has reached epidemic proportions.8
Half a century ago, retailing analyst Victor Lebow
penned the credo–the bcore valueQ–of the then
ascendant American baffluent consumer societyQ:
Lebow wrote:
Our enormously productive economy . . . demands
that we make consumption our way of life, that we
convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that
we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction,
in consumption . . . We need things consumed, burned
up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever
increasing rate9.
And that is exactly what we are doing. Globally,
human consumption of forests, fresh water, minerals,
fish, arable land, of virtually every significant natural
resource on the planet is growing bat an ever
increasing rateQ. In March 2005, the UN Millennium
Ecosystem Assessment compiled by 1360 scientists
from 95 countries concluded that humanity is now
7
bPrime Minister gives dire warning on climate changeQ,
BBCNewsOnline, September 14, 2004 6:52GMT (my italics). But
Blair has also been criticized for his hypocrisy by members of his
own government because he is proposing to bdowngrade the
environment as a priority behind growth and jobsQ. Marie Wolf,
bBlair hypocritical on green prioritiesQ (The Independent, June 22,
2005).
8
John de Graaf et al. Affluenza: the All-Consuming Epidemic
(San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc. 2001).
9
Lebow in Journal of Retailing, quoted in Vance Packard, The
Wastemakers (New York: David McKay, 1960) and reproduced in
Alan Durning, How Much is Enough?: the consumer society and
the future of the earth (New York: Worldwatch Institute/W.W.
Norton, 1992, pp. 21–22).
302 Book reviews
consuming and degrading almost two-thirds of the
natural resources that support life on earth. The
authors call this ba stark warningQ for the entire
world. The wetlands, forests, savannahs, estuaries,
coastal fisheries and other habitats that recycle air,
water and nutrients for all living creatures are being
irretrievably damaged. bIn effect, one species is now
a hazard to the other 10 million or so on the planet,
and to itself. . . Human activity is putting such a
strain on the natural functions of Earth that the
ability of the planet’s ecosystems to sustain future
generations can no longer be taken for grantedQ10.
And Americans lead the way in hogging this one-time
blowout sale of the world’s natural resources. With
just 4% of the world’s population and 2% of the
world’s oil, we consume 25% of the world’s oil and
produce more than 25% of all CO2 emissions. We use
50 million tons of paper annually—consuming 850
million trees (just for paper). The average American
produces 864 kg of municipal waste per year, nearly
three times the average produced by an Italian. And
on and on.11
Given these trends, I for one would like to ask Tony
Blair how humanity can survive unless we very quickly
and very drastically bdisturb the essence of our way of
lifeQ—by massively cutting our consumption of forests,
fossil fuels, water, minerals, etc.? It is not enough just to
slow down the growth of our consumption. Globally,
we have to consume less—or die. We need to cut down
fewer trees and give the forests a break. We need to stop
reclamation and revive wetlands. We need to catch
fewer fish, give the oceans, the fish, and the whales a
break to regenerate. We need to drastically reduce our
consumption and burning of fossil fuels. We need to
halt the production of thousands of toxic chemicals,
petrochemicals, pesticides, etc. that are poisoning us,
stop the production of unnecessary plastics, redundant
packaging, and unnecessary products. We need to stop
treating the world’s oceans as if they were toilets. We
need to retrench the drug industry, the arms industry,
the fast food industry. And if we do this, society is
going to have to find new employment for redundant
workers, among other concerns. Further, if we are to
10
United Nations, Millenium Assessment Findings (draft) March
30, 2005. http://www.milleniumassessment.org.
11
bGlobal warming: the US contribution in figuresQ n.a. (The
Independent, June 13, 2005). Also, Durning, op cit.
survive we will also have to restructure production and
consumption dramatically—to close down some in-
dustries, expand others, cut waste, and conserve
resources instead of squandering them. This means
that we are most definitely going to have to challenge
and re-conceive our bway of lifeQ which is bound up
with endless consumption of goods and services. We
will have to find life’s meaning in other ways and to ask
entirely new questions: Do city dwellers need private
property in cars? Could we not share them—and many
such consumer durables? Do we need industries
producing an endless stream of new, and nearly all
unneeded gizmos that we soon tire of, simply to seduce
us into spending to maximize profits? Do we need
dozens and hundreds of duplicate manufacturers all
churning out virtually identical cars or TVs? Do we
need designed-in obsolescence or annual model chang-
es with all the waste that entails? Do we really need
everything to be bconsumed, burned, worn out
replaced, and discarded at an ever increasing rate?Q In
short, if we want to survive, we are going to have to
slow down the global economy, reduce production
overall, make less stuff, and re-engineer manufacturing
to produce products to be durable and last, make what
we make differently, with different goals—for social
need, not for profit. Unless we make such drastic
changes, we are indeed heading for collapse.
4.3. Systemic barriers to limiting growth
But the problem is, how can we slow down the
economy under capitalism? From its inception, the
school of becological economicsQ has maintained that
unlimited economic growth and consumption are
unsustainable on a planet with finite natural
resources.12 This once radical idea is now widely
accepted as a truism. But leading eco-economic
theorists also argued that capitalism could be slowed
down, that the drive to ceaseless growth could be
quelled and capitalist development reduced to a
bsteady stateQ. In the words of Herman Daly, the
architect of the notion of a steady state economy, once
a level of resource use is determined that is both
12
United Nations’ World Commission on Environment and
Development, Our Common Future [aka The Bruntland Report]
(New York: United Nations 1987). Donella H. Meadows et al., The
Limits to Growth (New York: Potomac Associates 1972).
 Book reviews
sufficient for a decent life for both the industrialized
and developing nations and within the carrying
capacity of the global environment, then bproduction
and reproduction should be for replacement only.
Physical growth should cease, while qualitative
improvement continuesQ13. This seems to me the
only sensible objective of a rational and humane
global economy. I just do not see how this is possible
given capitalist property relations and capitalist
requirements for reproduction.
The problem, to start with, is that the logic of
insatiable growth is built into the nature of the system,
built into the requirements of capitalist reproduction.
For under capitalism, everyone finds it in his/her
interest to maximize growth: Investor-owned corpora-
tions have to produce for market, to compete against
other corporations producing for the same market. So
they have no choice but to constantly seek ways to
drive down costs, to innovate, to expand their
markets, to find or invent new markets. They are
obliged, in the capitalist maxim, to bgrow or dieQ—
increase profits or see their stock values fall as
investors sell off their stock for higher returns
elsewhere. Just look at GM: unable to grow in a
glutted market, GM’s bonds have been reduced to
junk status and its stock has plummeted as investors
flee. Workers, facing the threat of competition and
unemployment likewise can only be in favor of
growth, the faster the better. Those with pension
funds invested in the market have even more reason to
support growth. Governments are similarly compelled
to maximize growth: States need economic growth to
enlarge the tax base for growing populations and
demands and to provide the employment that is key to
maintaining social stability. But capitalist govern-
ments do not own the economy, even if some own a
sizable state sector. So globally, governments fall over
themselves in competition to bribe the corporations
with tax and other incentives, to drive down the wages
of their own workers, to gut whatever environmental
protection they might have and so on, in a disastrous
planetary brace to the bottom.Q So capitalists, workers,
governments–taken together, we are all—just like
those Easter Islanders–btrapped in a competitive
13
Herman E. Daly, Beyond Growth (Boston: Beacon Press 1994),
p. 3. Also: Herman E. Daly, Steady-State Economics (Washington,
DC: Island Press 2nd ed. 1991).
303
spiralQ of growth without end that is beyond our
control. No corporate board of directors and no
government on the planet aims to slow down growth
and none have tried to do so. Even the most self-
styled leftist, pro-labor, pro-environmental national
president in the world, Brazil’s Lula Ignacio de Silva,
is fiercely pushing growth and accelerating the
plunder of the Amazon at the expense of the
environment14. And this is why the entire patchwork
of government regulation, of pollution bcostingQ, and
btradingQ schemes in America and Europe have been
designed by business and governments as bwin–winQ
responses to emerging environmental crises, designed
to reduce emissions of particular sources but above all
to keep the global economy growing.
Given these everyday built-in requirements of
capitalist reproduction, can we expect the lumber and
paper industries to reinvent their business plans,
explain to their stockholders that, bsorry but due to
the threat of global warming, we need to save the
forests, cut down fewer trees, decrease output, and
therefore profitQ? How long would such an environ-
mentally responsible lumber company stay in busi-
ness? Or, given the immediate threat of fossil fuel
combustion driven global warming, what the world
needs now is not just cleaner cars but fewer cars. Surely
Ford or Toyota can make smaller and even more fuel-
efficient hybrid cars. But can we really expect Ford or
Toyota to strive to produce and sell fewer cars? They
are in business to make and sell as many cars as
possible. So to ask the question is to answer it.
4.4. Systemic barriers to restructuring
Secondly, maintaining a habitable planet will also
require massive global industrial restructuring to
redirect investment from some industries like fossil
fuels and into others, especially into renewable energy
sources. Yet again it is all but impossible to imagine
how such large scale phase-outs and investment
reallocations could be made when these sectors of the
economy are in the hands of privately owned corpora-
14
For example, Steve Kingstone, bAmazon destruction acceler-
atingQ (BBCNews Online, May 15, 2005). And deforestation is
wiping out peoples as well as plants and animals as well. See
bAmazon tribe faces dannihilationTQ n.a. (BBCNewsOnline, May 17,
2005).
304 Book reviews
tions. Diamond argues that the costs of environmental
cleanup ought to be socialized, passed onto consumers
(pp. 484–485). Fair enough. But the scope of the
problem we face is far beyond the capacity of any
single corporation or even whole industries. We do not
have a national, much less global bEnergy CompanyQ
that could make the decision to phase out investments
in fossil fuels and aggressively increase investments in
renewable energies, and socialize those huge but
necessary costs over the whole society. What we have
instead are many individual privately owned energy
corporations, responsible to their shareholders, with
sunk capital in existing technology they cannot afford
to just scrap, with human capital in trained staff with
expertise in fossil fuels, with a global infrastructure
dedicated to the distribution of fossil fuels, and so on.
So Ford Motor’s president planted a lawn on the roof of
his new truck assembly plant; but what they are
building inside that plant–gas hog SUVs (the bigger
the better)–are Ford’s biggest profit maker. So British
Petroleum has set up a boutique solar power outfit,
painted all its service stations up with big sunflowers
and re-christened itself bBeyond PetroleumQ for benefit
of its ads in National Geographic. But nearly all of its
sunk capital is in oil production. Petrochemicals still
constitute 99% of BPs business and output and sales of
these products grow every year. Can we really expect
BP to just junk all this and phase out all its investments
in fossil fuels? How could BP afford to do this without
massive state subsidies? How could it do so while
maintaining its competitive position against Exxon/
Mobil or Shell?15 How could any individual corpora-
tion, no matter how large, sacrifice all that and stay in
business? What would their stockholders say to such a
proposal? Would TIAA-CREF hold onto that stock
just because many of its members are enlightened,
environmentally concerned professors? What would
the workers say? And yet if we do not drastically
reduce fossil fuel consumption and rapidly shift
investment into alternative energy sources, then CO2
levels will continue to climb at present rates, if not
faster, in which case they will likely reach 500 parts
per million, nearly double their pre-industrial level, by
2050 or so forcing average global temperatures up by
somewhere between 4.98 and 7.78 at which point the
15
Heather Timmons, Shell’s chief reaffirms goal of 30% more
output by 2015 (New York Times, June 23, 2005).
global melting will accelerate and rising sea levels
will begin to inundate New York, Miami, London,
Shanghai and the rest of the coastal cities of the world
where most of the world’s population lives.16
In the 18th century world of Adam Smith, individual
producers–farmers, sheep husbandmen, weavers, arti-
sans and small industrialists–producing and trading
with one another could not really have much negative
impact on the natural world. They did not have the scale
of production and technological capacity to do much
harm. But today, when a single self-interested producer
like Pacific Lumber has the technical capacity to wipe
out the last remaining stands of 4000-year-old redwood
forests in a few weeks, when self-interested fleets of
giant satellite-guided industrial fishing trawlers strip-
mine the world’s oceans till fish specie after specie is
driven to the brink of extinction, when a few self-
interested chemical giants pump and dump so many
billions of tons of toxic chemicals into the world’s
waters that every major fresh water source on the planet
is at risk, and even human mothers’ breast milk in many
countries would if packaged for sale have to be labeled
as hazardous waste17, when a few self-interested auto-
petroleum giants have the collective power to melt the
polar ice-caps and dramatically alter the climate of the
planet—it is time to check your theory.
The problem is the inherent logic of the system:
Each corporation, acting rationally from the standpoint
of its owners and employees, seeking to maximize their
own self-interest, makes individually rational capitalist
16
IPCC op cit. For a readable lay person’s summary of the most
recent scientific evidence and concerns, see Elizabeth Kolbert, bThe
Climate of Man,Q part II (The New Yorker, May 2, 2005).
17
bIf, as Cicero said, your face tells the story of your mind, your
breast milk tells the decades-old story of your diet, your
neighborhood and, increasingly, your household decor. Your old
shag-carpet padding? It’s there. That cool blue paint in your pantry?
There. The chemical cloud your landlord used to kill cockroaches?
There. Ditto, the mercury in last week’s sushi, the benzene from
your gas station, the preservative parabens from your face cream,
the chromium from your neighborhood smokestack. One property
of breast milk is that its high-fat and -protein content attracts heavy
metals and other contaminants. Most of these chemicals are found in
microscopic amounts, but if human milk were sold at the local
Piggly Wiggly, some stock would exceed federal food-safety levels
for DDT residues and PCB’s.Q Florence Williams, bToxic Breast
Milk?Q (New York Times Magazine January 9, 2005). Also:
Environmental Working Group, bStudy finds record high levels of
toxic fire retardants in breast milk from American mothersQ, http://
www.ewg.org/reports/mothersmilk/es.php accessed June 1, 2005.
 Book reviews
decisions. But the result is that in the aggregate, these
individually rational decisions are massively irrational,
indeed ultimately catastrophic and they are driving us
down the road to collective social suicide.
5. We are all in this together
If capitalism cannot be reformed to subordinate
profit to human survival, what alternative is there but to
move to some sort of nationally and globally planned
economy? Problems like climate change require the
bvisible handQ of direct planning. We need a globally
enforced freeze on CO2 and other emissions, enforced
reductions in energy usage, an enforced halt to forest
destruction, enforced limits on auto production, chem-
ical production, etc. Problems like climate change do
not end at the factory smokestack or national borders so
they cannot be solved by individual corporations or by
individual nations. These problems are by their nature
interconnected and international and require concerted,
united international action—in a word, international
economic planning, international governance by a
global citizenry. If a habitable climate is to be
preserved, global humanity will need to create institu-
tions that can impose the sorts or required restraints—
regardless of considerations of profit. Call it socialism,
economic democracy or whatever.18 But we need to be
having a national conversation, indeed a global
bbottom-upQ conversation about rationing resources,
about limiting production and consumption, about
what gets produced and what not produced, and about
who gets to consume what and how much, about
rationing and about rationing by democracy and not
by the market. As the US approached the November
2004 elections, some critics argued that bthe whole
world ought to vote on George BushQ since what he
does has so much impact on the whole world. That is
even more true with respect to the economy and the
environment. We need a national and planetary vote
18
Of course one could imagine an entirely different outcome—
namely, that eco-collapse could just as likely result in a statist or
even globalized fascist Orwellian capitalist dystopia whose rulers
could bmanageQ capitalist competition, direct production, distribute
profits a la the Nazis. Not the outcome readers of this journal would
like to see, but we cannot doubt that there are powerful forces out
there, and not only bizarre Christian fascists, who are hoping if not
planning for just such a denouement.
305
on whether the lumber companies can mow down the
forests, on whether the fishing industry can fish the
seas to extinction, on whether the auto-oil industrial
complex can burn the world’s fossil fuel until the
icecaps melt, among other pressing issues. We in the
advanced countries need to be talking about imposing
limits on individual consumption, about bhow much is
enoughQ given how much we already over-consume.
People in rapidly developing countries like China
need to be asking themselves whether it is such a great
idea to emulate American consumerism by, among
other things, scrapping bicycles and adopting auto-
mobiles as mass transit.19 bGetting rich is gloriousQ
but it would not be much use when Shanghai is under
water. So instead of striving after mindless consum-
erism, the Chinese would do well to avoid going
through all the stages of stupidity that we in the
advanced capitalist countries have gone through. And
as for the underdeveloped countries, we all need to be
thinking of ways to help those peoples develop their
economies in such a way that present generations can
achieve a life of sufficient material satisfaction
without undermining the future for their children.
Such profound transformations in the organization of
production, distribution, and conservation of
resources cannot be realized in an anarchic unplanned
market economy, they can only be realized in a
democratically planned, or at least mostly planned
economy.
I can already hear the objections about the perils
of central planning, bstateQ this and bbureaucraticQ
that, and the threat to our freedom—especially the
freedom to exploit, privatize and profit, and to
insatiably consume. The global community is going
to have to sit down and talk and struggle collectively
and vote on these issues and every other decision
important to our collective survival. It would be far
beyond the scope of this article to attempt to sketch
out what a model of national and global democratic
economic planning might look like. But there are
plenty of pre-figurative examples in the spontaneous
bfrom belowQ anti-privatization, anti-globalization
19
For example, Jonathan Watts, bToxic smog shrouds Beijing,Q
http://www.guardian.co.uk October 11, 2004. On China’s capitalist
catastrophe-in-the-making, see Richard Smith, bNew problems for
old: the institution of capitalist economic and environmental
irrationality in ChinaQ (Democracy and Nature, Vol. 5, No. 2,
1999: 249–274).
306
democratic struggles that have burst out around the
world from Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela and Brazil to
South Africa, India and beyond, and in the huge
meetings of the World Social Forum which try to
confront just such issues though of course, unlike the
(un-elected) WTO, the World Social Forum lacks any
power whatsoever to enforce any policies.20 The
unifying slogan of these movements–banother world
is possibleQ–is still fairly inchoate but the instinctive
drive of these struggles–toward democratization from
below–is unmistakable, and hopeful. Such a bbottom-
up environmental managementQ (to borrow Dia-
mond’s phrase) will take time, produce frustration
and will be binefficientQ by some measures. But given
that, like the Viking, Mayan, and Easter Island chiefs
of old, our modern corporate chiefs just cannot help
themselves, have no choice but to systematically
make wrong, irrational and ultimately, given the
technology they command, suicidal decisions about
the economy and the environment, what other choice
do we have? If capitalist market economists have a
better plan to save the humans, where is it?
Richard Smith
E-mail address: richardsmith212@yahoo.com.
2 July 2005
doi:10.1016/j.ecolecon.2005.07.012
20
There is also a large and growing literature on the subject of
popular and global democratic governance: e.g. George Mondiot,
The Age of Consent: a Manifesto for a New World Order (London:
Flamingo 2003); William Fisher and Thomas Ponniah, Another
World is Possible (London: Zed Books 2003); Greg Palast et al.,
Democracy and Regulation: How the Public Can Govern Essential
Services (London: Pluto 2003), Adolf G. Gundersen, The Environ-
mental Promise of Democratic Deliberation (Madison: U. Wiscon-
sin Press 1995), Thomas C. Beierle and J. Cayford, Democracy in
Practice: Public Participation in Environmental Decisions
(Washington DC: Resources for the Future 2002), A. Anton, M.
Fisk, and N. Holmstrom eds. Not For Sale: In Defense of Public
Goods (Boulder Colo.: Westview 2000), Al Gedicks, Resource
Rebels: Native Challenges to Mining and Oil Corporations
(Cambridge: South End Press 2001); and Raymond L Goldstein
and John K. Schorr, Demanding Democracy After Three Mile Island
(Gainesville: Univ. of Florida Press 1991).
Book reviews
Sandra Postel, Brian Richter, Rivers for Life: Ma-
naging Water for People and Nature, Island Press
Washington, D.C., 2003, ISBN: 1559634448 253 pp.
Rivers for Life centers on the sustainable use and
governance of rivers. The book blends insights from
the science of river restoration and examples of
specific public policies to develop a vision of what
is possible in the short term to protect and recover
rivers and what is necessary in the longer term to
realize sustainable use. It is well written and readily
accessible to a wide audience.
The central theme of the book, and for the authors
the sustainability approach that they advocate, is what
they call an ecosystem support allocation—ba desig-
nation of the quantity, quality, and timing of flows
needed to safeguard the health and functioning of
river systems themselves.Q (pp. 37–38). An ecosystem
support allocation implies limits on the uses that
humans can make of rivers and the extent to which
natural river flows may be altered. The authors
designate such limits as sustainability boundaries.
Sustainability boundaries and ecosystem support
allocations are closely related, but very distinct
concepts. Sustainability boundaries designate the
level of health and functioning of a river system.
Ecosystem support allocations translate sustainability
boundaries into practice by designating flow regimes
that support a specified level of river system function.
Curiously, the authors never clarify the precise
relations between these two concepts. Do sustainabil-
ity boundaries come first with ecosystem support
allocations then defined to realize the sustainability
boundary? Or, are ecosystem support allocations first
defined with sustainability boundaries implicitly
derived from them? The former implies that citizens
define environmental values and science is used to
realize those values. The latter implies that science is
used to define and realize environmental values with
little room for citizen participation. Perhaps the
authors are purposely vague so as to avoid the highly
contentious issue of the proper role of science in
public policy decision making.
By far, the best chapters of the book are those that
immediately relate to ecosystem support allocations
and sustainability boundaries and not to public policies.
The first chapter lays the foundation for ecosystem
support allocations. The authors present a convincing