Dear Mr. Speth, your last book, published when you were Dean of the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies at Yale University (/The Bridge at the End of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, & Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability/ [New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2008]) was an eye-opener. Your interview in /Orion Magazine/ in the Sept-Oct. issue of the same year was “Change Everything Now: One of the nation’s most mainstream environmentalists says it’s time to get a lot more radical.” There your interviewer Jeff Goodell wrote, “He uses his bully pulpit in academia to push for a 1960s-style take-it-to-the-streets revolution. His new book. . .is nothing less than a call for an uprising that would reinvent modern capitalism & replace it with, well, a postmodern capitalism that values sustainability over growth, & doing good over making a quick buck. . .indict(ing) consumer capitalism itself for the rape & pillage of the natural world. His proximate concern is global warming & the impact it will have on life as we know it. But. . .he is after bigger game: the Wal-Martization of America, our slavish devotion to an ever-expanding gross domestic product, the utter failure of what Speth disparagingly calls ‘modern capitalism’ to create a sustainable world. What is needed. . .is not simply a tax on greenhouse emissions, but a ‘new operating system’ for the modern world.”

“All we have to do to leave a ruined world to children is just keep doing what we’re doing today: . ..emissions of pollutants. . .destruction of ecosystems, same toxification of the environment, & we’ll ruin the planet in the latter part of this century. And yet, we know we’re not just going to keep doing what we’re doing. We’re going to grow phenomenally. At the current rates, the world economy will be twice as big as it is today in 17 years. . .This should be a time when can take this fabulous amount of wealth that we’ve generated & enjoy it, & yet we seem to be caught in a system where it’s either up, up, & away or down, down, & out. We careen from crisis to crisis to crisis: personal crises, national crises, economic crises. . .The thing that I hope for is a huge mass movement in the country before it’s too late. . .The nearest thing we’ve seen to this in living memory was the civil rights movement. . .There is a growing sense that something is out of whack in the country, & that we’re on the verge of losing something very important. . .spiritually & environmentally. . .I will call for people to march in the streets. . .It’s time for a million-person march on Washington early in the new administration. . .The climate issue has to be front & center. It’s amazing what can be accomplished if citizens are to march in the footsteps of Dr. KIng. It’s time to give the world a sense of hope again.”

Just so people know who you are.

I will join you on Sat. Gus….

Crackpot time. Gus & Bill