Rating: 
Summary: Steady-staters unite!
Review: I started reading "Shovelling Fuel..." again as soon as I finished it to be sure I got every detail! This is a fun and easy read that puts any textbook on economics to shame; and it's 100 times more compelling! Ironically, I covered the last two chapters while sipping an eggnog latte at Starbucks in Seattle's uppity University Village. As a steady-stater I wanted to be amongst our country's finest amorphs and liquidators for Czech's inspirational closing call-to-arms for the environment and our grandchildren.
Rating:
Summary: Everyone should read this book!
Review: I think it may be the most important book I've ever read. It says in a thorough and well grounded way what has always been obvious to me by common sense: perpetual expansion is not possible in a finite universe. As a kid, I understood what most political and business leaders have never been able to acknowledge: that some day we will run out of oil and gas. Of course that is only the tip of the iceberg -- we'll run out of forests, water, mineral resources, and so forth. From the age of 10 until today I have never stopped worrying about the future that I, and now my children & grandchildren, will have to face. But now I have read a book that gives me hope -- hope that others DO understand these problems, can explain them in an entertaining and compelling way, and know what we can do about them. Czech deals with the daunting field of economics in a clear and entertaining way. He shows how American society is taught to consider economic growth as desirable, even necessary, but without considering the limits that are ultimately going to have to be reckoned with. He explains how a few scientists and ecological economists are starting to speak out about these problems, and he calls for a "steady state" revolution that is the best hope for the future comfort of people on Earth. Buy this book, enjoy it, believe it, and help change the world -- before it's too late!
Rating: 
Summary: Rampant overspending begins with buying this book
Review: I was drawn to this book after it was suggested as an alternative here at Amazon to a so-called "perpetual growth" tome (a book, by the way, that actually points to no such thing), but I've decided against buying Czech's book for fear of becoming an overspent American. Sorry, but I'm not contributing to the royalty check of Czech.
Rating:
Summary: An arresting book to stop that train
Review: I was initially attracted to this book by its title: that our growth economy has become a runaway train into which our economic efforts are merely shoveling fuel is a great metaphor. ... I expected the second part of the book, in which the author prescribes his recommendations, to be weak. Instead, I found his proposal and its supporting arguments arresting. And the book throughout is engaging and highly readable.I'm too lazy or rushed to try to provide a summary that will do justice to his proposal here. Suffice it to say that I think what he offers is workable and appropriate for our society. It is a way that can significantly help us to get there (to sustainability) from here, with the best of our system of government and cultural values intact. Let there be no mistaking it - Czech prescribes a nonviolent revolution! While I don't think his proposal is the last word on the matter or necessarily the main approach sustainability advocates should use, I do think it has influenced me significantly and in good ways that will foster effective action. Isn't that what you would want from a book like this? Having said that, I think Czech's approach would be well supplemented by an emphasis on the creative possibilities of sustainability. Other sustainability voices (e.g., Hawken, Lovins, McDonough, Braungart) seem to emphasize the building, restoring, redesigning, and creating. Czech emphasizes restraint. Given our fix, both are needed. And greater attention to virtue, as David Orr has argued, would help all around. Finally, I'll mention that ecological economics, which Czech espouses throughout the book, seems to be a real up-and-comer. I've just learned of a development called post-autistic economics, which started in France and is akin to ecological economics. Something is afoot here! We could be in for a paradigm shift, and this book could be instrumental in shaping and promoting it.
Rating: 
Summary: can't be beaten for lucidity
Review: I'm grateful to the author for providing me with a copy of this well-written book and for penning it in such a snappy and easily comprehended style. My few forays into economic topics have left me wandering in seas of abstraction....until now. If I could be made to understand anything at all in this field, you will be too--trust me on this. The author has quite a diverse background that uniquely qualifies him to write such a book: he is a conservation biologist with a wide knowledge of economic theory and hands-on training in several related fields. Another valuable aspect of this book is its courage in confronting a taboo topic: unlimited growth. Unlimited growth is good? Well, says who? And why? The author goes through a quick survey of past economic thought to illustrate how our growth obsession came to be. Part One of the book deals with the topic of "The Runaway Train": an economy dependent on eternal expansion--clearly an impossibility on a planet of limited (and rapidly diminishing) resources. Part Two is about stopping the train and deals with relations between three socioeconomic classes: the liquidators (the wealthy), the steady-staters (the unwealthy), and the amorphs (everyone else). The author mentions Maslow's need hierarchy. The liquidators tend to be obsessed with levels three and four: namely, belonging and esteem needs. Psychology has come a long way since Maslow, however, and we now see things more in terms of socially sanctioned conditioning forces and the perpetuation of narcissism. The hierarchy itself has taken a beating and should perhaps be replaced with a more current model of human motivation that does more justice to the impact of class and ethnicity. It could even be argued--and probably would by Maslow himself--that the insatiable urge to accumulate wealth has nothing to do with either belonging or esteem...but a lot to do with more antisocial propensities. For me the least helpful part of the book discussed women in terms of a "mothering instinct" and brought biological images into the discussion of gender relations and economic motives. When we start talking about wealth as an exhibit of plumage to attract the females, we are on extremely unsafe ground. The basic point--that unchecked consumption is harmful--can be made without reductionistic metaphors which postcolonial and feminist psychological thought and cross-cultural research have long since challenged as Western biases and grand narratives that obscure more than they reveal. I wish this book well in educating the majority about liquidating vs. steady-state styles of being. As I write this review the flag-waving majority in America seem capable of believing whatever the powers that be tell them via a mass media apparatus owned by--guess who?--the liquidating class, poised to liquidate more than assets. Perhaps in place of the need hierarchy and the biological metaphors could appear a discussion about how to grapple with the ongoing and aggressive colonization of consciousness so evident in the West...a colonization so powerful that even the prospects of environmental destruction and the mass extinction of life on Earth are insufficient to halt it.
Rating:
Summary: This is one for us all
Review: If you have the least interest in the direction that the USA is headed ecologically and economically, this book is a must read. Czech has taken a politically charged, difficult subject and turned it into an adventure in creative solutions. With skill and wit that make entertaining and delightful reading, he takes on a serious problem and hands it not to the politicians, economists, or powerful of the world - but to us, the everyday folk who have to live with their decisions. If I were a teacher, I would make this required reading for every student, and as a parent I've passed it on to my kids. Oh - and if you have NO interest in the direction that we are headed - then I suggest you buy two copies. One for yourself, and one for your grandkids.
Rating:
Summary: Problem identified; solution in doubt
Review: It is a curiosity of modern economic thought that some people--Brian Czech identifies them as "neoclassical" economists, led in part by the late Julian Simon--think there is no end to economic growth. When I first became aware of this idea some years ago I dismissed it out of hand along with what I saw as a couple of similar delusions, that of perpetual population growth and an ever-increasing agricultural yield. But maybe the seemingly impossible is possible after all! To get right to the heart of the matter--which Czech does after noting that economic growth is a national goal; that is, a political and (one might say) an emotional goal somewhat in the manner of "manifest destiny" from the nineteenth century--we need to ask why Simon (and other respected economists) think that such a fantastic thing as perpetual economic growth is possible. First they start with "substitutability," the idea that when we run short of some resource another will be developed or otherwise come along to take the place of the now scare resource. Thus plastic replaces wood; coal will replace oil, wind power and mirrors in space will replace coal, and farmed fish will take the place of the wild variety. Second, there is the notion that the efficiency of engines and other technological developments will increase endlessly. And third, there is the relatively new idea of "human capital," a kind of fuzzy--one is tempted to say mystical--belief that human intelligence, education and knowledge will just keep right on growing and growing and growing, getting more and more from less and less. Perhaps these guys never heard of entropy or diminishing returns--or they think that such things are so far in the future that they needn't be mentioned. I suppose somewhere along the way the neoclassicists do recognize that in the very long run even the universe will grow cold, and economic growth will become but a faint and very distant cosmic whisper. What Czech observes, as he convincingly destroys Simon's perpetual growth arguments as Simon articulated them in The Ultimate Resources 2 (1996), is that "Eventually they will recharge their arguments...by resorting to the topic of space travel" (p. 44)--meaning that if we run out of resources on earth, we'll just go to the moon, to Mars, to Alpha Centauri! So what Julian L. Simon and the others are really saying is not clear. What is clear is that they want no limits on economic growth, and they especially do not like to hear sob stories about what we are doing to the environment in pursuit of an ever expanding economy. But what Brian Czech does in this sprightly tome is throw a kind of Niagra Falls flood of water on America's love affair with what he calls "liquidation"--that is, the liquidation of natural capital for present consumption to the impoverishment of future generations. As others have pointed out he does a good job of demolishing what he dubs "the Ptolemaic theory of perpetual economic growth" (p. 51) in favor of "a more Copernican economics...in which economic growth is limited." (p. 49) He calls this new paradigm, "steady state economics" or "ecological economics," in which the natural resources of the planet are not wantonly wasted and destroyed by greedy "liquidators" bent only on self-gratification and status display, but instead maintained by more frugal steady-staters seeking self-actualization as their primary goal in life. This recall of psychiatrist Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs fits right in with Czech's hope for a sustainable economy since self-actualization need not require more fuel than the planet has. What Czech does not do well is convince this reader that his steady state plan has a snowball's chance in the boiler room of his runaway train of becoming the accepted paradigm before we use up most of the world's non-renewable resources. What with the acquisitive nature of the human animal (which Czech delineates very well in his portrait of the "Liquidating Class") and the need of corporations and government leaders to go from "ups to upper ups" economically-speaking (to recall Lucy's words in the Peanuts comic strip), there is little prospect that conservation-minded individuals will have enough influence to stop the train before it crashes. What is terrible about this--and this is what Czech is warning us about--is that it will be our grandchildren who will pay the price as the rain forests turn to burgers and the ocean's fisheries to a whopping fish story in the memory of the last fisherman. What kind of world will it be? I don't think that the Bush administration and the present political leaders of most of the world really care. They see it as somebody else's problem downstream. Czech's optimism that the train can be stopped seems like so much whistling Dixie in the dark. I think the deeper issue here is that of the capitalist/corporate economic system itself. Capitalism defeated communism, and we can say hurrah for that. But can a planet with finite resources survive an economic system that seems to function well only when it is spiraling upward? Since capitalism is the current paradigm, to suggest that it needs replacing amounts to something like blasphemy. Consequently Czech does not target capitalism per se. After all he has a career and a reputation to consider. However, I have neither to worry about, and I can say it: capitalism as an economic system is becoming a cancer on the planet. Perhaps the system that will replace it (still awaiting its genius) will build on Czech's steady state ideas.
Rating:
Summary: A display of scientific and political savvy
Review: Shoveling Fuel for a Runaway Train opens with a clear and compelling exposition of the limitations of classical economics. In the chapters composing Part I, Brian Czech delivers a powerful critique of the idea of limitless growth, while offering a concise examination of the psychological and marketing forces behind our consumer culture. In Part II, Czech moves beyond the parameters of a traditional academic treatise and sets out a plan, based in the science of conservation biology, that transforms the contentious, relatively new field of ecological economics into a coherent plan for political action and cultural change. One of the catchwords in contemporary academia is "mutidisciplinarity." In this remarkable work, Czech's intellectual range and his passion for the environment combine to make the dream of multidisciplinary analysis into a reality with real power. Shoveling Fuel's combination of sound substantive analysis and polemics make it a perfect resource for undergraduate classes in economics, marketing, political science, environmental science, conservation biology/ecology, and science studies. It deserves a wide and attentive audience.
Rating:
Summary: Important, Smart, Practical
Review: Shoveling Fuel for a Runaway Train will educate, enlighten, and even entertain you --- an accomplishment for any book, but an especially notable achievement when you consider that this is a book about economics. This is a book that will forever change your perspective of the world in which we live. It works kind of like "Find the Hidden Picture" in the children's magazine, Highlights: at first you don't see the shoe, the spoon and the puppy, but once you discover them, there is no way to stop seeing them. In the tradition of New World, New Mind by Robert Ornstein and Paul Ehrlich, Shoveling Fuel takes us past the point of no return on the road of increased awareness. Specifically Brian Czech teaches us the fallacy of neoclassical economics, explaining that our pursuit of the illogical and predictably elusive goal of constant and infinite economic growth will result in devastating consequences to be paid by generations to come. Czech makes this a little more personal by referring to the generations who will pay the piper for our foolishness as "the grandkids." Czech outlines a new economics, what he calls "steady state economics," and he explains himself so clearly that even a guy who can't balance a checkbook (like me) can understand. As a psychotherapist and writer of social/political commentary I love what Czech has to say about how the necessary changes must come as a result of social, rather than political, revolution --- his term is "a revolution of public opinion." Translation: the politicians who are supposed to represent us will not change until we do. I am inspired by what Czech has to say on this subject because I believe that his thinking is applicable to issues even broader than the economy. The lesson essentially is that if we don't invest the time and effort into thinking through the big issues of the day, those found under the umbrella of globalization, we might as well start preparing to hand over a complete mess --- our train wreck --- to "the grandkids." Read this book. You won' be sorry. You will be smarter --- no, you will be more enlightened. - Thom Rutledge, author of Embracing Fear (HarperSanFrancisco)
Rating:
Summary: How to stop the "runaway train" of too much growth
Review: Shoveling Fuel For A Runaway Train: Errant Economists, Shameful Spenders, And A Plant To Stop Them All by Brian Czech (Adjunct Professor at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University) is a scathing indictment of rampant overspending and the lasting harm it can do (and is doing) to America's economy. After persuasively describing in considerable detail what the problems are, Brian Czech offers practical and articulate ideas on how to stop the "runaway train" of chasing after too much growth without stagnating the economy, or causing painful recessions. It is the cautionary words of Shoveling Fuel For A Runaway Train that make this treatise stand out and demand to be read by governmental policy makers and the entire taxpaying population.
| 
