Red Sky at Morning_ America and the Crisis of the Global Environment - James Gustave Speth (2005).pdf

This book will change the way we understand the future of our planet. It is both alarming and hopeful. James Gustave Speth, renowned as a visionary environmentalist leader, warns that in spite of all the international negotiations and agreements of the past two decades, efforts to protect Earth’s environment are not succeeding. Still, he says, the challenges are not insurmountable. He offers comprehensive, viable new strategies for dealing with environmental threats around the world.

The author explains why current approaches to critical global environmental problems—climate change, biodiversity loss, deterioration of marine environments, deforestation, water shortages, and others—don’t work. He offers intriguing insights into why we have been able to address domestic environmental threats with some success while largely failing at the international level. Setting forth eight specific steps to a sustainable future, Speth convincingly argues that dramatically different government and citizen action are now urgent. If ever a book could be described as “essential,” this is it.

From Publishers Weekly
In this timely book, Speth, dean of the Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, sounds the alarm on the seriousness of the global environmental crisis. Although he contends that it is not too late to avert disaster, he stresses that we are running out of time and that we can't afford to let current trends continue. He acknowledges that there have been a few hopeful developments, such as the ban on ozone-depleting chemicals around the world, but overall, he argues that little has been accomplished by a plethora of international conferences, negotiations, action plans and treaties. The failure, for which he says the U.S. must take much of the blame, stems from a focus on the symptoms rather than on the underlying causes of environmental degradation, such as population size, affluence and technology. He underscores the necessity of achieving sustainability-living off nature's income rather than consuming its capital-and lists eight transitions that are necessary to redefine and redirect growth on a global level. Speth, co-founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council, founder of the World Resources Institute and an adviser on environmental issues for presidents Carter and Clinton, is well qualified to present a wake-up call on the environment in this thorough and reasoned book. Unfortunately, his somewhat dry recital of the facts may put off some potential readers-that is, today's youth. In a final and particularly useful chapter, he lists organizations and Web-based resources.
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From Booklist
*Starred Review* To be effective, call-to-action books about environmental issues must strive for balance. They must sound the alarm, Silent Spring-style, loudly enough to get readers motivated (i.e., frightened); but, on the other hand, they must remain optimistic enough to prevent feelings of futility from morphing into lethargy, no easy task when the environmental damage is immense and its scale global. It also helps to include specific suggestions for action. This book meets all of those challenges beautifully. Although the environmental movement, since the 1960s, has raised much consciousness and cleaned up much pollution, its methods fail against gigantic problems we cannot see until it is too late, like global warming. Nor, says Speth, will our current hodgepodge of treaties and international protocols even come close to preventing some truly horrible things in the near future, like the complete disappearance of maple trees from the Northeast.With concise statistics, bulleted lists, and the calm professionalism of an oncologist, the author is sympathetic to our civilization's economic needs but firm in prescribing some pretty serious lifestyle changes. Brendan Driscoll