Books The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability
Books and Publications Average Rating:

Rating: - A Book That Must Be Heeded
This is a book that must be heeded. It is about the most crucial, portentous issue of our time: the rapid destruction of the natural world by human activity and human institutions. Other issues that now dominate the news and with which we are preoccupied--the war in Iraq, the presidential campaign, the faltering economy, the health care debacle--are from a broad perspective merely transient. They will pass. But The Bridge at the Edge of the World makes us look unflinchingly at a crisis that will not pass--the eroding ability of our planet to support life. Global warming is only one of the megaproblems that threaten our future. Others include the toxification of the environment, the loss of biological diversity, dwindling per capital supplies of water and arable land, too many people consuming too many resources and producing too much waste. Dean Speth is most trenchent in pointing to the underlying causes of our environmental failure: market capitalism that does not value the environment, human health or the future of life; corporations whose only duty is to profit; government that fails to protect us from corporate misdeeds and, of late, has abetted those misdeeds. We are standing before the abyss. Speth warns. But he offers a bridge across that fatal chasm. A better economics that reflects the realities of what is happening to the world. A new politics that recognizes and addresses the real crises facing humanity. And a new consciousness by all of us to end our indifference and lethargy and demand that we do what is needed to protect the future for our children and grandchildren. This is a quiet, beautifully written book, but what it contains is explosive enough to wake us all up.
Philip Shabecoff

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Rating: - An Eloquent Call for Transformation to Save Our Planet - Includes a Spiritual Challenge That's Great for Groups to Ponder
When dozens of major Southern Baptist leaders broke news in the spring of 2008 with a letter to the world about climate change, it was a major milestone in this era of global change. Their letter simply underlined what millions are coming to see, already. We all need to help forge a powerful new linkage between spiritual values and values concerning our natural world. The Southern Baptist leaders wrote, in part, "We believe our current denominational engagement with these issues has often been too timid, failing to produce a unified moral voice."

Coming from this very traditional American center of religious authority, this was an important prophetic voice in the conversation about where we're all heading in the tumbling and turning of cultural and social tidal waves these days.

And, while phrases like these that may sound disturbing, Yale University's Dean of the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies James Gustave Speth shows us - loud and clear toward the end of his new book - that this tumbling just might turn out to be good news.

That's because his eloquent book about our environmental crisis begins by outlining "next steps" that we all need to consider in a whole range of sectors in our society: politics, business, education and so on. But then, he comes to his final section: "Seedbeds of Transformation."

He writes: "Many of our deepest thinkers and many of those most familiar with the scale of the challenges we face have concluded that the transitions required can be achieved only in the context of what I will call the rise of a new consciousness. For some, it is a spiritual awakening - a transformation of the human heart. For others it is a more intellectual process of coming to see the world anew and deeply embracing the emerging ethic of the environment and the old ethic of what it means to love thy neighbor as thyself. But for all it involves major cultural change and a reorientation of what society values and prizes most highly."

This book is a non-traditional choice for small-group study in congregations, but I think you'll find it a very thought-provoking (and discussion-provoking) choice. Speth is a scholar, but he writes as a gifted teacher. This book, too, is a prophetic challenge. Let's listen, learn and explore our new roles and responses.