Gus Speth

James Gustave Speth is author of America the Possible: Manifesto for a New Economy (Yale Press) and, most recently, They Knew: The U.S. Federal Government’s Role in Causing the Climate Crisis (MIT Press). He has served as Dean of the Yale School of the Environment, as President of the World Resources Institute, and as Administrator of the UN Development Programme. He was Chair of the US Council on Environmental Quality during the Carter Administration.

Leafy tree in the green paddy fields of Don Det (Laos), under a heavy cloudy sky in August 2017 during the monsoon.

Clearing skies: Opening a new path on climate and the future

Adapting to climate change does not address the societal systems and values that spawned the current crisis. What’s needed is “systemic adaptation” that fundamentally changes our economy, our politics, and our priorities in ways that put community and the planet first.

December 24, 2023

Northwest Coast totems

Five Steps to Climate Sanity: Beyond Both Despair and Hopium

We must act even in the face of hopelessness, warriors defending a sacred place, simply because it is the right thing to do, rebelling beyond hope because the human spirit tells us with insistence that what is unacceptable—all the suffering, all the loss, all the tears—must not be accepted. Fight.

October 25, 2023

path

Is there a way forward?

The threat to democracy is recognized, and the fight for a democratic future is joined. All is not lost, but it is already a close call.

June 2, 2023

Through a Glass, Darkly

Perhaps sooner than most think, there should come a point when public demand in the United States for corrective action to free us from fossil fuels is sufficiently intense that, if Congress and a  unified NGO community are prepared, then at that point decisive, major legislative action could finally be possible. 

March 10, 2023

United States Capitol

Can Transformative Change Come to America?

Perhaps sooner than most think, major legislative action regulating greenhouse gas emissions will finally be possible. But that moment will not arrive without deep struggle, organizing, and collective persistence.

August 17, 2022

People's State of the Nation

A People’s State of the Nation

These measures of our current situation—this “People’s State of the Nation” as it were—point to where American efforts must be. Even a few minutes with your head bowed over this material—which shows the U.S. woefully behind our peer countries—should convince you that we have let our national situation deteriorate for far too long. 

April 2, 2019

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