@Corrie: Below, I’ve pasted some words from the first chapter of Natural Capitalism (there can be more than one form of capitalism; but I don’t really care what you call it). (The book is available free as a download; natcap.org)
I don’t have any idyllic or utopian views of a sustainable future. I just know that what I see now isn’t working and it would be foolish to not look for better ideas.
There’s nothing idyllic about choosing the right diameter pipe and then laying it out at angles, reducing distances, reducing friction, reducing pipe, reducing motor size, reducing $ spent on big pump motors, reducing $ spend on electricity, reducing pollution, reducing the need to mine and extract carbon fuels. All this reducing by simply using better ideas creates wealth for all. Nothing pie in the sky about it. Check out Negawatts if you want to see how wealth can be created by just using better ideas. Just one of the thousands of great ideas out there that aren’t being implemented widely.

CAPITALISM AS IF LIVING SYSTEMS MATTERED
Natural capitalism and the possibility of a new industrial system are based on a very different mind-set and set of values than conventional capitalism. Its fundamental assumptions include the following: The environment is not a minor factor of production but rather is “an envelope containing, provisioning, and sustaining the entire economy.”
. The limiting factor to future economic development is the availability and functionality of natural capital, in particular, life-supporting services that have no substitutes and currently have no market value.
. Misconceived or badly designed business systems, population growth, and wasteful patterns of consumption are the primary causes of the loss of natural capital, and all three must be addressed to achieve a sustainable economy.
. Future economic progress can best take place in democratic, market-based systems of production and distribution in which all forms of capital are fully valued, including human, manufactured, financial, and natural capital.
. One of the keys to the most beneficial employment of people, money, and the environment is radical increases in resource productivity.
. Human welfare is best served by improving the quality and flow of desired services delivered, rather than by merely increasing the total dollar flow.
. Economic and environmental sustainability depends on redressing global inequities of income and material well-being.
. The best long-term environment for commerce is provided by true democratic systems of governance that are based on the needs of people rather than business.

Wonder posting. Thank you.

couldnt agree more.

if postmodernism has taught us anything, it is that we cant think in the 3rd grade model of Binaries. This debate is not about capitalism versus sustainability. That is too simplified. We have to break out of our old Cold War epistemologies, our old binaries of thinking X versus Y.

This is the reality: capitalism and utopianism are both flawed models if they don’t consider that our economy needs to be first and foremost an environmental economy. Fossil fuels were a gift. But now that day is done. How are we going to live on this planet given that the way that we live is creating greenhouse gases that are getting trapped in our atmosphere and are heating up our world? I’m serious, what are we going to do about this? We can debate about whether global warming is planet-made or man-made, but we can’t argue about whether climate change is real. It is and there’s a slew of empirical evidence from the scientific community that supports this.

The sun is the creator of all life. It sounds silly to say it, but it’s true. The sun creates energy, and that energy fuels our atmosphere, plants, bodies, and cars. The problem is that we are burning way too much “stored-up” energy (coal, oil, natural gas) from the sun, and this releases extra gases in our atmosphere that hold heat…heat that normally bounces back into the space, but is now being held in our atmosphere…baking our planet (which paradoxically may bring about another Ice Age—Why? Because the melting of polar caps are disrupting the Gulf Stream).

We need to find a way to stop releasing so much greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Capitalism is at odds with that imperative since it is predicated on consumption and the now-flawed idea that “more is better.” This was true. Once. It no longer is. You don’t have to be a republican or democrat to be concerned with this idea: in the next 50-100 years, the earth will be hotter than it has been in the last 400 million years. On some very basic level, that is the only fact worth knowing about our earth.

I am not sure if this is the place to get into the politics of the global capitalistic system that seems to be infecting our planet like a parasitic virus. But my stubborn nature will not allow me not to comment on some points that you raised:

You refer to a subtle anti-capitalist diatribe. I would argue that this diatribe is also long overdue. I think he is simply saying that we need to change our shift and priorities on the values we teach kids. It is becoming painfully obvious that the American Dream and the promise of capitalism is proving to be false. Capitalism in the guise of 21st century globalization is simply not a sustainable option for future generations.

For all its faults, capitalism has been responsible for improving the standard of living for billions of people, providing jobs, new medical treatments, new methods of growing food, etc.

I think a simple look at the effects of unchecked capitalism and its ancestor colonialism will show a glaring different picture of the billions it has helped. Perhaps you are referring the billion people living on less than a dollar a day with no access to clean water, health care, or education. As for methods of growing food, are you referring to genetically modified foods by companies like Monsato, or the factory farms producing tons of beef that are destroying the planet in the name of profit?

Yes, the “have it all - have it now” consumer economy has its excesses, and many products are manufactured in awful factories. But many of those employees are far better off than their neighbors who don’t have jobs at all.

I am a not sure sweatshop workers being better off than the unemployed is the message we want to send our students. Why not teach them that there is a better way to do things? Why not teach them values that will enable more societies to work together for a more just world.

Many people seem to have a utopian view of a “sustainable” future. The picture painted always seems to be one of idyllic pastoral scenes and neighbor helping neighbor. It rarely confronts the harsh reality of the slums of Bankok, Mexico City, or Sao Paulo.

Those slums are a direct result of the very system you are saying is not that bad.

Marx and Lenin called for the same things, and we see how their experiment turned out.

The failure of socialism and communism is an old argument and one that I will not get into here, but let me say that a true socialist state has never existed on earth. No the USSR and Cuba were not what Marx had in mind.

But having said that it is important to remember that the failure of one system does not make its opposite correct. Maybe Marx was wrong, but Marxism is not the only solution to the failing of capitalism. We need to be teaching our kids to come up with their own solutions.

Most of the middle class - including the new and burgeoning middle class of China and India - has worked very hard and waited a long time to get to where they are.

They have been trained into believing that success and development is achieved only by their ability to consume. But I think that Bill’s video argues that we can look for other ways to look at success.

It might be a hard sell to ask them go back.

We have no choice. The planet will allow for all of us to live the way we are living.