Capitalism As If the World Matters
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Capitalism As If the World Matters

Jonathon Porritt
Earthscan, 2006
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Editorial Rating

7

Qualities

  • Overview
  • Visionary

Recommendation

Activist Jonathon Porritt offers the startling proposal that capitalism may provide the best solution to poverty and global environmental degradation, though his solution requires reshaping capitalism. Porritt is aware that conventional environmental activists, greens and political academics favor socialism more than capitalism. However, he takes them to task for ignoring the power and potential of such capitalist mechanisms as markets and property rights and for their naïveté in expecting voters or political leaders to embrace their dismal vision of environmental responsibility as asceticism. getAbstract finds his book more suggestive than programmatic. It meanders like a river and is sometimes directionless. The author makes his passions apparent, including anti-Americanism and scathing criticism of certain forms of Christianity. Though Porritt does not offer a detailed description of his vision or the practical steps needed to realize it, he does suggest a path toward a utopian ideal; for that hope, he deserves appropriate attention.

Summary

Coming to Grips with Capitalism

The December 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean killed hundreds of thousands of people and left millions without homes, but it also elicited an outpouring of generosity from the developed world. This kind of charity frustrates campaigners in the cause of ending poverty, because they know that poverty itself annually causes more death and destruction than dozens of tsunamis, yet the same compassion does not pour forth to end poverty. Environmental destruction and poverty reinforce each other. The dilemma is that those who fight poverty and protect the environment oppose the only economic system that can help achieve their goals: capitalism.

No alternative to capitalism exists in today's world. The markets are a fact of life in every economy and market thinking has penetrated noneconomic dimensions. The key question in changing the world is how to use the power of capitalism, not how to destroy that power. A thousand children die every hour from poverty-related diseases, and the present model of capitalism makes the poor poorer, while it makes the rich richer. The present model of capitalism is also responsible for destroying the wetlands...

About the Author

Jonathon Porritt, CBE, is co-founder and Programme Director of Forum for the Future, the United Kingdom's leading sustainable development charity.

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