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Gates Community Center
"If you take an honest look at today's destructive environmental trends, it is impossible not to include that
 they profoundly threaten human prospects and life as we know it on the planet," says James Gustave Speth, Dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.
So begins Speth's most recent book, The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability. He will delve deeper into his concerns-and his hopes-in a talk at College of the Atlantic's Gates Center at 7 p.m. Monday, Sept. 15. The talk, "The Coming Transformation: Capitalism and the Environment," inaugurates the college's Beth and Don Straus Cutting Edge in Human Ecology Lecture and Award.
Rather than advocate for a renewed environmental movement, with market-driven incentives, Speth believes we must alter our personal and collective values: "People have conversion experiences and epiphanies," he says. "Can an entire society have a conversion experience?"
A widely respected environmentalist, Speth is also the author of Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment. He notes that while the environmental community has grown in strength and sophistication, the environment has declined to the point of catastrophe. "Today's environmental reality is linked powerfully with other realities, including growing social inequality and neglect and the erosion of democratic governance and popular control," he says. "As citizens we must now mobilize our spiritual and political resources for transformative change on all three fronts." Speth contends that this situation is a severe indictment of the economic and political system we call modern capitalism. Our vital task is to change the operating instructions for today's destructive world economy before it is too late. His address will provide steps to do this.
Speth, whose official title is the Carl W. Knobloch, Jr., Dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and Sara Shallenberger Brown Professor in the Practice of Environmental Policy at Yale, holds a JD from Yale Law School. He currently serves on the boards of the Natural Resources Defense Council, which he co-founded, World Resources Institute, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Population Action International, The Center for Humans and Nature, and 1Sky.
Before teaching at Yale, he served as administrator of the United Nations Development Programme and chair of the UN Development Group. Prior to that, he was founder and president of the World Resources Institute, professor of law at Georgetown University and chair of the United States Council on Environmental Quality. He received an honorary degree from COA in 2001.
 The Straus Innovator Award is a yearly honor given by College of the Atlantic to highlight innovative, cutting edge practices that make a positive and tangible contribution to the health of our global civil society. The award celebrates the life of Don Straus, a COA lifetime trustee, whose commitment to empowering individuals to impact the world continues to inspire new generations of innovators. The award is given to an individual whose innovative thinking best represent Straus' values and the core ideals embedded in a human ecological approach to problem solving. Speth is the first recipient.
Throughout his career, Speth has provided leadership and entrepreneurial initiatives to many organizations working to combat environmental degradation, including the President's Task Force on Global Resources and Environment, the Western Hemisphere Dialogue on Environment and Development and the National Commission on the Environment. Among his awards are the National Wildlife Federation's Resources Defense Award, the Natural Resources Council of America's Barbara Swain Award of Honor, a 1997 Special Recognition Award from the Society for International Development, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Environmental Law Institute, and the Blue Planet Prize. Additional publications include Global Environmental Governance, Worlds Apart: Globalization and the Environment and articles in Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, Environmental Science and Technology, and the Columbia Journal World of Business.
Speth's talk, "The Coming Transformation: Capitalism and the Environment," at Gates Center of College of the Atlantic at 7 p.m. Sept. 15, is free and open to the public. For more information, call 288-5015.
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