Review of the Book:
Creating a Sustainable World:
Past Experiences, Future Struggles
by Trent Schroyer and Thomas Golodik
H. William Batt
[This book is published by Apex Press, 2006. This review is
reprinted from
GroundSwell, September-October 2006]
Half a century ago the burgeoning field of political and economic
development took most of its cues from experiences from post-war
Europe's Marshall Plan. Based largely on the success of America's
capital investment in nations devastated by the war and perceived to
be vulnerable to communist allure from the east, President Truman
inaugurated a program in 1949 known as "Point Four." It
was intended to achieve the same success in third-world nations as
transpired in Europe. The program made substantial initial
investment in Israel and the Middle East, but it declined again
under the Eisenhower Administration and was formally abolished in
May, 1953.
Nonetheless there arose greatly expanded interest in third world
development during the fifties and sixties, as the sale of American
grain to India for rupees then paid for American scholars' research
there. Similar programs of a more modest nature were established for
Latin America and Africa with even less financial commitment. The
first generation of Peace Corps Volunteers, I being one, cut their
teeth on the literature that grew from the overseas studies from
this period.
It was a heady time, even though there were no agreed-upon
strategies to bring about the promised development. In retrospect
many of the debates were quite simplistic -- whether political and
economic development needed to be concurrent, or whether one sector
should precede the other, and whether large-scale public
infrastructure investments were necessary for other dimensions to
ensue. Almost all third world economies were dependent upon
extractive or agricultural enterprises to the extent that they were
monetized at all. And these industries formed the basis of trade
with the so-called "developed" world in what was, by
today's standards, a very rudimentary globalized trading system. We
bandied about growth models and used terms like "take-off"
as if we really had solutions to making them like us!
That optimism, parochialism, and ethnocentrism has all but
disappeared, and has been replaced moreover by a school of political
/ economic thought that, in my view and in the view of these
assembled essayists, is far less sanguine but just as arrogant. Its
practices are opportunistic and even cynically exploitive, have
limited time perspective, are politically unjust, and ultimately
unstable. The assessment of all the authors in this volume is that
today's neo-liberal politics and neoclassical economics have been
subjugated to corporate power, and that this power is being used to
abuse both natural and human resources in ways that are palpably
unsustainable.
But here is where the book's consensus ends. Not that there is
much disagreement among the several views expressed; rather it's
that each contributor then goes his or her own way toward
explicating an interpretation of what is happening, speculating
about the consequences, and opining about what needs to happen to
ensure that the world becomes sustainable. Fortunately, effective
introductions to each section of the book integrate the material
well. And the selections, most of which were written just for this
volume, are most impressive. Some of the authors have worldwide
reputations: Vandana Shiva, Indian scientist, author and activist;
Wolfgang Sachs, researcher, author and activist; Peter Montague,
environmental activist and editor of the online blog Rachel; Robert
Engler, who has achieved recent prominence from his book, The
Politics of Oil; and Ward Morehouse, author of numerous books, elder
statesman of many NGOs, and cofounder of POCLAD (Programs on
Corporations, Law and Democracy). Other names will be readily
recognizable to those versant with the literature and networks on
sustainable development. It should also be noted that Alanna
Hartzok, of the Earthrights Institute and past president of the
Council of Georgist Organizations, has also contributed.
What else can one say about a collection of articles that ranges
from the local to the worldly, from politics and economics, to hard
science and to ideology and epistemology? I myself found some of the
articles on the latter end of the spectrum much too prolix in their
style, and heavily laden with references to feminist theory and
post-modernist language. But the four sections of the book do make
sense: discussions of sustainable development itself, the impact and
dimensions of corporate power, knowledge systems and the premises
requisite to sustainable lifestyles, and social system designs that
point to achieving them. Only three of the essays in the third
section did I find beyond my capacity to integrate.
Particularly apparent in this collection is how much certain
dimensions of our lives have been captured by institutions likely to
be impervious to challenge and change. The globalized economy may
soon be stressed to exhaustion of resources strategic to industrial
economies: fossil fuels, precious metals, and ecosystems requisite
to regeneration of other life resources. One might hope for a
reversion and rebirth of more localized systems. But one can only
wonder how such shifts can ever be gradual or smooth. Nor is the
reversal of legal precedents likely to materialize in ways that
support the decentralization and less global interdependency. And
what of the prospects of environmental degradation and climate
shifts that are essentially irreversible? How will these affect not
only food-streams but the very fauna and flora that give quality of
much of our lives? Talking about designs for change and reversal of
patterns that have grown for so long displays an optimism that many
regard as naive and unrealistic.
What other courses of action are there but to offer such
alternative ideas? It is both optimism and hard-nosed realism and
perseverance to hold out such thinking for review. This is the
essence of what Creating a Sustainable World does: it offers hope to
a readership, likely to be comprised largely of students, who need
such encouragement and direction. There is plenty of news to be
alarmed about, and enough denial of looming truth to make the coming
generation both despairing and resentful of the heritage it has been
passed.
If answers are to be had, it is books such as this one that need
to be accessible. Editors Trent Schroyer and Thomas Golodik have
pulled together enough thoughtful material to mark the way for many
subsequent explorations. The answers offered here address the need
to limit corporate power, the need to return to local economies and
polities, the importance of reasserting the commons, rebuilding
sustainable agriculture, and strengthening local democratic
institutions. Nothing particularly radical or unusual about most of
them except that they involve the reversal of trends that have
prevailed for three centuries. All this against formidable odds.