E-Mail This Article to a Friend ENVIRONMENT No more slack from Mother Nature BY DAVID S. BERNSTEIN

In 1980, as chair of President Jimmy Carter’s Council on Environmental Quality, James Gustave "Gus" Speth co-authored the first major report warning of global climate change. Since then, Speth has led the World Resources Institute, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the United Nations Development Programme, and now the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University, where he is dean. He’s still warning a largely unreceptive world audience of climate change and other dire environmental problems in his new book, Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment (Yale University Press, 2004), and will be in Boston for the CERES 2004 conference next week. He spoke with the Phoenix from his home in New Haven, Connecticut.

Q: Your book says that people have been uninterested in global environmental issues. Is it that people aren’t concerned, or that politicians are not reacting?

A: The book makes a distinction between the domestic issues we’ve been working on since the first Earth Day in 1970 — and by that I mean local issues really, local air and water pollution are classic examples — and the broad global issues, which require international action. These issues, while they have certainly mobilized some people in our country, don’t have the strong constituency that the domestic issues do, and therefore US politicians have not attended to them with any priority. And I hate to say it, but it transcends party on that score.

Q: Four years ago, the Green Party ran a candidate, Ralph Nader, who said there’s no difference between the two major parties. Was Nader the correct vote for environmentalists?

A: It is the height of folly to think that there is no difference between the two parties. If you look at the voting records in Congress on the environment, the differences between the two parties couldn’t be more stark. Unfortunately, I think we need bipartisan support on this. But saying that there isn’t a difference, as Nader did, is really misleading.

Q: Are there lessons from, say, ozone depletion, about which you write that the country did an excellent job, that could serve as guidelines for progressing on other problems?

A: The ozone-depletion issue looked like a domestic issue at the time, because the threat was skin cancer. Still is. That’s the kind of thing that really mobilizes people. Secondly, it was a problem you could get at by a fairly simple regulatory approach. But when you have a situation that is vastly more complicated and politically difficult, you need to attack it from a lot of different angles.

Q: It seems like environmental issues have been framed as the US being asked to make sacrifices for the Third World.

A: I think it does tend to get framed that way, but it’s quite misleading. We have a huge stake in global warming in this country. Take New England. The whole maple-forest regime of New England is slated to disappear.

I think that we have reached the point with climate change and these other issues where it is urgent to respond. Whatever slack Mother Nature cut us is gone.

James Speth will discuss Red Sky at Morning at a Cambridge Forum event at First Parish Unitarian Universalist Church, 3 Church Street, in Harvard Square, on April 14 at 7:30 p.m. For more information, call the Cambridge Forum at (617) 495-2727.