Global Disaster or Sustainability?: The Need for Deep Political Reform to Save the World

Will we take up the challenge, personal and political, of building the movement for fundamental political and policy change that is needed to address the crisis that faces us all? James Speth argues on the basis of current science that if we continue along our current path of political and economic decision-making, we will have made the world unlivable by the end of this century. While so much of the discussion of global climate change misses the forest for the trees by focusing on such a narrow range of elements that we never get to see the big picture that results from this science, Speth brings the big picture into focus, and challenges us to ACT NOW, or face the fact that we and our children will be witnessing the decline of the world into global disaster over the coming decades.

According to James Speth, we need to build a "mighty political force" for fundamental political and economic change, and this is now our most basic task and challenge. The environmental movement has been far too timid politically, and unless all environmentalists team up with the environmental justice movement and begin to work for more fundamental forms of political and policy change, we will have little chance of saving our world for even this century.

Summary of book from Yale Press: How serious are the threats to our environment? Here is one measure of the problem: if we continue to do exactly what we are doing, with no growth in the human population or the world economy, the world in the latter part of this century will be unfit to live in. Of course human activities are not holding at current levels—they are accelerating, dramatically—and so, too, is the pace of climate disruption, biotic impoverishment, and toxification. In this book Gus Speth, author of Red Sky at Morning and a widely respected environmentalist, begins with the observation that the environmental community has grown in strength and sophistication, but the environment has continued to decline, to the point that we are now at the edge of catastrophe.

Speth contends that this situation is a severe indictment of the economic and political system we call modern capitalism. Our vital task is now to change the operating instructions for today’s destructive world economy before it is too late. The book is about how to do that.

James Gustave Speth, a distinguished leader and founder of environmental institutions over the past four decades, is dean of the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University. He was awarded Japan’s Blue Planet Prize for “a lifetime of creative and visionary leadership in the search for science-based solutions to global environmental problems.”

Today NPR's Diane Rehm Show hosted Speth for a discussion of his book and his vision of what we need to do--Check out this program for an introduction to the major themes of Speth's book.