BOOK REVIEWS

Red Sky At Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment
by James Gustave Speth, Yale University Press, 2004.

Reviewed by Michael Conroy, Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and Rockefeller Brothers Fund

It is rare for us, as environmental grantmakers––largely in the United States––to find one place where the threats we face globally can be linked without polemics to the history of perspectives and positions taken by our nation. Gus Speth is founder of the World Resources Institute, co-founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council, advisor on environmental issues to both Presidents Carter and Clinton, and my colleague at Yale. In this book he crystallizes the challenges we face at the global environmental level and pulls no punches about the role that the United States has played in exacerbating those crises.

Listing ten global-scale environmental concerns, from ozone depletion to acid rain, Speth analyzes the often-feeble international efforts to date, and notes that "if there is one country that bears most responsibility for the lack of progress on international environmental issues, it is the United States."

We need, these days, bases for optimism. And I read this book as a treatise on what can be. Speth closes the book with optimistic assessments of how good environmental governance is emerging worldwide despite the obstacles raised by bureaucratic, legalistic, and largely ineffective international agreements on environmental remediation. He calls for "eight transitions" toward an environmentally sustainable world. They touch on continued stabilization in population growth, reduction in mass poverty, and improved technologies. And they extend to "environmentally honest prices," sustainable consumption levels, and good governance. Could this be a policy strategy for a new regime in the United States? Is it possible, we ask as we read this capsule summary of the past 40 years of global environmental efforts, that the US could rise to the global challenge? "The world needs," Speth concludes, "a United States that leads by example and diplomacy, with generosity and compassion."