If you only read one thing this week…

James ‘Gus’ Speth is the Dean and Professor in the Practice of Environmental Policy at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. Amongst other things, he was co-founder of the Natural Resource Defense Council and founded the World Resources Institute, as well as serving as Administrator of the UNDP.

His book Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment (click here to buy it from Powells) is about how environmentalism has so far failed to arrest the destruction of the planet. “The climate convention is not protecting climate, the biodiversity convention is not protecting biodiversity, [and] the desertification convention is not preventing desertification.” Potential for effective environmentalism, he says, now rests upon actions analogous to “jazz”: volunteerism and improvisation.

Read the transcript of an interview with Speth at the Carnegie Council, where he summarizes the main premise and deals with audience questions here. If you can’t get enough, there’s more of Gus’s writing here.