What We Have Instead

Gus Speth recently served as dean of Yale's school of environment and forestry and as professor of law at Vermont Law School. At the United Nations, he was the head of the UN's Development Program. Prior to that, he was co-founder of both the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the World Resources Institute (WRI), where he led on many environmental issues over a period of 17 years. During the Carter years, he served as chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. In jail in Washington DC with Bill McKibben and others on a climate protest, Speth said the following of his 3-day stay, "I've held a lot of important positions in this town, but none seems as important as this one."