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This blog is a deconstruction of James Gustave Speth’s book “The Bridge at the Edge of the World : Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing form Crisis to Sustainability”. If Christians can spend a life focusing on the Bible, then it should be no problem that an advocate for Strong Sustainability choose a book for a long meditation too. The book was published in 2008 and I describe it as an aggregation of ‘Sustainability Group Think’.
The word ‘Sustainability’ gets thrown around a lot these days and Dean Speth has created a book which gives the term clarity and purpose as a road map to transforming our society.
The objective of this blog is to extract the writings and people that Dean Speth quoted as he describes the world—”I have drawn on the writings of many people and have let them speak for themselves”. The idea is to extend this project he has started by taking him up on his offer—”I am searching for answers, and I hope my readers will join me in this effort”. A blog can link to the organizations and publications that Dean Speth has quoted. As an example check out this next passage about Dean Speth himself.
James Gustave Speth is the Dean at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, “founder of two major environmental groups (the Natural Resources Defense Council and the World Resources Institute), former chairman of the President’s Council on Environmental Quality (under Jimmy Carter) and a former head of the U.N. Development Program” (Washington Post / Ross Gelbspan).
His research statement offers this:
I have sought in recent years to help synthesize available information on global-scale conditions and trends in environment and natural resources. There is some uncertainty, some debate, and much ignorance on basic dimensions of global change such as species and biodiversity loss, tropical deforestation, desertification, climate change, ozone layer depletion, overfishing, fresh water shortages, and environmental toxification. Correspondingly, I have addressed issues relating the underlying forces or drivers leading to these changes.
In the process of doing this blog project, I hope to personally focus on what Strong Sustainability means by focusing on ideas advanced in the book. For instance I will extract the concept of being an ‘Ecological Economist’ plus how do we meaningfully transform ‘The Corporation’ and ‘Make the Market Work for the Environment’.
We can utilize the institutions and processes that already exist in our society in order to transform our society away from a materialism that is destroying the ecology which supports life towards a spirituality that coexists with the world we inhabit.
- Kevin Jennings, June 5th 2008