Spirituality and Ecological Hope

by James Gustave Speth, Yale University Press, 2008

Speth’s latest book, published last year, adds another volume to the long list of books predicting imminent ecological disaster if we do not act fast.  His message is urgent.  He realizes we are running out of time.

It’s the messenger as much as the message that matters.  Speth has a long history more in the mainstream of economics and environmentalism.  He is a co-founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council and later served in President Jimmy Carter’s Council on Environmental Quality.  He was president of the World Resources Institute in the 1980s and then an advisor to President Bill Clinton.  From 1993-99, he served as administrator to the United Nations Development Program and then went on to become dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

So this is a voice with a background.  And he writes this:

“How serious is the threat to the environment? Here is one measure of the problem: all we have to do to destroy the planet’s climate and biota and leave a ruined world to our children and grandchildren is to keep doing exactly what we are doing today, with no growth in the human population or the world economy.  Just continue to release greenhouse gases at the current rates, just continue to impoverish ecosystems and release toxic chemicals at current rates, and the world in the latter part of the century won’t be fit to live in.  But, of course, human activities are not holding at current levels — they are accelerating, dramatically. It took all of history to build the seven-trillion-dollar world economy of 1950; today economic activity grows by that amount every decade.  At current rates of growth, the world economy will double in size in fourteen years.  We are thus facing the possibility of an enormous increase in environmental deterioration, just when we need to move strongly in the opposite direction.

Speth is a convert not to ‘environmentalism’ but to urgency.  And he is a convert to the view that industrial capitalism and economies of growth not only cannot save us, but must be transitioned, and quickly, into economies that move us toward sustainability.  And in that context, given the state of the planet, Speth helps to redefine the meaning of human well-being — a meaning that finally detaches from mere consumption of goods and becomes instead heathy communities living within a healthy planet.  Instead of identities defined by lifestyle and acquisition of wealth and material goods, we begin to find our identities by participating in the life of the human  community within the greater whole.

In his critique of growth economics and industrial wasting of the planet, Speth joins his voice to many others who have pronounced that the era forged by these paradigms is coming to end — either by forethought and conscious transition, or else by disaster.  In addition, he brings to environmentalists the challenge to address injustice, the inequities and growing gaps between rich and poor.  The poor will suffer first and worst from the collapse of ecosystems, and the moral obligation confronting western societies that helped propel us to “the edge of the world” is inescapable.

When you read this book, go first to the two pages of graphs that follow the acknowledgements pages, entitled, “The Great Collision.”  Just sit with these visuals for a moment and take in what you see there, what it tells us about how and why we have arrived at this moment of crisis.  I think you will see there what drives the urgency that so many of us are feeling right now, why there is no time to waste.