Quotes from James Gustave Speth

In the end, despite the large volume of bad news, we can conclude with an affirmation. We can say with Wallace Stevens that 'after the final no there comes a yes.' Yes, we can save what is left. Yes, we can repair and make amends. We can reclaim nature and restore ourselves. There is a bridge at the end of the world.

The economy is now consuming the planet's available resources on a scale that rivals their supply while releasing its waste products back into the environment on a scale that greatly affects the major biogeophysical cycles of the planet.

The full costs of consumption beyond market prices are hard to determine and hard to see, and they are typically underestimated. The benefits of consumption, by contrast, are immediate and tangible, and they are typically overestimated, thanks in part to an enormous and enormously sophisticated marketing apparatus. This asymmetry contributes to our overconsumption.

In 1979, the clash between the White House's call for climate protection and the federal government's fossil fuel energy policies became stark.

The resulting July 1979 report, now more than four decades old, connected policy with scientific understanding of climate change, and was signed by four of our most distinguished American scientists—David Keeling, Roger Revelle, George Woodwell (lead author), and MacDonald.

Enlightened policies in the management of fossil fuels and forests can delay or avoid these changes, but the time for implementing the policies is fast passing.

Long lead times are required for effective action.

He said it would be too late to change course once the impact of the buildup began to be felt.

This national energy policy of the last four decades is, in my view, the greatest dereliction of civic responsibility in the history of the Republic. And it is worse today than ever.

While adverse consequences of 100 years from now are obviously less pressing than those of next year, if they are also of large magnitude and irreversible, we cannot in good conscience discount them.

temperature increase that, in EPA's assessment, was guaranteed to produce substantial climatic consequences, including disastrous flooding.

There are some cherished values that resist being quantified or squeezed into monetary terms, but are no less real for that. Agents of democratic societies are responsible to the people, but we should remember that "the people" refers not only to

the working majority that actually makes current decisions, and not even to the whole of the living population, but to those who came before us, who provided our traditions and our physical patrimony as nations, and to those who will come after us, and who will inherit what we leave behind. Decisions in the environmental arena often touch on this broader sense of public responsibility, and we cannot afford to lose it among the numbers.

One of the volumes, "Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide and the Global Carbon Cycle," noted that CO2 levels had varied in the last million years with a high point, during warm, interglacial phases, of 350 ppm.21 An enormous amount had been learned; the "Projecting the Climatic Effects of Increasing Carbon Dioxide" alone was over 400 pages long, and is full of hard evidence of how much the federal government knew about the impacts of burning fossil fuels.

Yet while the Trump administration's record has been deplorable, this historical analysis points out that, in many respects, the Trump administration's record is not much worse on energy or exacerbating the climate crisis than some prior administrations, and generally continues forward the stamp of approval for fossil energy that every president before Trump has likewise backed.

Changes in soil conditions due to loss of forest cover could slow forest reestablishment. Consequently, there could be a shift in area from forest to non-forest vegetation. Fire frequencies are likely to increase in the region given increased temperatures, unchanged precipitation and higher potential evapotranspiration.

Materialism is toxic to happiness, and we are losing our connection to the natural world.

The pattern is clear: if we could speed up time, it would seem as if the global economy is crashing against the earth - the Great Collision.

Poverty, in the end, is a state of dispossession and deprivation in which people are not only deprived of their income, but also of opportunity, empowerment and, most important, dignity.