May 13, 2004
"Red Sky at Morning": An important new book we highly recommend
Sooner or later we are going to revise our Booklist, and when we do, you can be this one will be on it. The author, Gus Speth, is the Dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. In this book, he calls things for what they are in the environmental movement. Unlike so many conservation groups who cannot afford to be honest about the failure of the environmental movement for fear of depressing and losing members (which is understandable), Speth lays out the bleak news very clearly.
As the book jacket says, "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 now and won't work in the future. He provides a stinging critique of the failure of U.S. leadership and offers intriguing insights into why we have been able to address domestic environmental threats with some success while largely failing at the international level."
He also provides his ideas on how to fix things, which are good, but what's most important is simply calling things as they are, which is what we have been aying. The entire U.S. public needs to see that the whole planet is inter-connected (especially when it comes to the oceans) and saving our little strip of the coast as the entire oceans go downhill isn't good enough.
It is an excellent book and strongly recommended by Dr. Jeremy Jackson.
