Red Sky at Morning by James Gustave Speth, Yale University Press, $24, ISBN 0300102321 Reviewed by Fred Pearce
IT feels like another era; and it was. Back in the 1970s, the US under Jimmy Carter led the world not just in environmental sciences (it still does), but in environmental policy making too. A young Gus Speth chaired the council that produced Carter’s ground-breaking Global 2000 Report. I still have a copy. Its 800 pages remain imperious.
Since then Speth has founded and run numerous high-rolling environmental groups in Washington DC and, after the Earth Summit of 1992, injected a green agenda into the UN Development Programme, which he ran for six years. Speth’s memoir Red Sky at Morning charts how Carter’s successors first abdicated their leadership of global environmental decision-taking and then adopted wrecking tactics. They are to blame, he says, for the fact that a raft of UN international environmental laws that Speth helped to draw up, “simply aren’t working”.
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He is intelligent on thorny issues such as the links between globalisation and the environment. And he is coruscating about fraudulent philosophies like FROG, or First Raise Our Growth, which hold that environmental action should always be put off because it might impede the economic growth that will pay for the clean-up. “Big trouble is coming down the pike,” he says.