Event Summary
On April 16, the Brookings Institution hosted James Gustave Speth, dean of the Yale School of Environment & Forestry, for a discussion of his new book The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability (Yale University Press, 2008).
Event Information
When
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
3:00 PM to 4:30 PM
Where
Falk Auditorium
The Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Ave., NW
Washington, DC
Map
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In The Bridge at the Edge of the World, Dean Speth argues that no matter how hard activists have worked to stop the tide of environmental destruction, the current has simply been too swift and too deep. In order to preserve a livable planet, the tide itself must be altered – American-style consumer capitalism must change. Speth’s view is a broad one that recognizes the connections between environmental issues and other human welfare challenges such as health, freedom, peace, stability and community. Dean Speth has been a leader in the environmental movement for more than 30 years. He is a former administrator of the UN Development Program, former chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality and a co-founder of the World Resources Institute and Natural Resources Defense Council.
Brookings Senior Fellow David Sandalow, author of Freedom from Oil (McGraw-Hill, 2007), provided introductory remarks and moderated the discussion. After the program, Dean Speth took audience questions.
Transcript
DEAN SPETH: Many people have looked at the underlying drivers of environmental deterioration. They've been identified. They of course range from immediate things like the enormous growth of the human population and the dominant technologies that we deploy in the economy, and they range into deeper things like the values that shape our behavior and determine what we consider important in life. But most basically what we know is that environmental deterioration is driven by the economic activity of human beings, and the largest and most threatening of the impacts stem from our economic activity, those of us participating in the modern and increasingly prosperous world economy.
This activity is now consuming vast quantities of resources from the environment both renewable and nonrenewable, occupying the land and returning truly vast quantities of waste products of many, many types to the environment, many of them highly dangerous to living things. The damages are already huge and are now on a path to be ruinous in the future. So the fundamental question facing societies today I believe, the fundamental question, is how can we change the operating instructions of this modern world economy so that economic activity both protects and restores the natural world?
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Participants
Featured Speaker
James Gustave Speth
Dean, Yale School of Environment & Forestry