As a sociologist, I often roamed the dirt tracks of the poor sections of my hometown Caracas, and it seemed to me that from the open windows, I would always hear someone singing or strumming the Venezuelan four-string guitar, el cuatro, or see some fellow unselfconsciously walking by whistling...

Evolution equipped us to deal with threats from dependably loathsome enemies and fearsome creatures, but not with the opaque and cumulative long-term consequences of our own technological and demographic success. As cartoonist Walt Kelly once put it, “We've met the enemy, and he is us”…

In 1987, the Brundtland Commission released a report that would define the next 25 years of progress toward a sustainable future. Breaking with earlier conventions that saw development exclusively in terms of economic growth, the report urged policymakers to include social and environmental...

A flurry of articles in recent years shows that loss of knowledge about the past may have contributed to an acceptance of other losses, such as declines in biodiversity. I first identified this form of collective amnesia in a 1995 article describing how fisheries biologists assess changes in...

I believe that the Industrial Age system of education that has spread around the world in the past 150 years will change dramatically in the coming decades. The assembly-line progression of grades (first, second, third, etc.) coordinated by a fixed curriculum and headed by teachers in charge of...

In today's global marketplace, with its ever-diminishing resource stocks, one thing is obvious: demand is outstripping supply. And here is the conundrum: increases in living standards are tightly coupled with growth in resource consumption. We have all heard the dramatic statistic that if all...

Resilience, in the context of earth's ecosystems, is defined as the capacity to absorb a shock, reorganize, and continue to function as before. This basic ability is often taken for granted by the global economy, and yet evidence is mounting that crucial ecosystems are in decline. Without a...

Simply put, there are currently two pressing problems in the developed and in the developing worlds: unemployment and the depletion of the planet's resources. In my opinion, Western fiscal systems are the fundamental cause of both…

The following is an excerpt from a new book by James G. Speth, America the Possible: Manifesto for a New Economy (Yale University Press, 2012). Speth envisions a future America in which citizens have created a sustainable and desirable society, and lived up to our present challenges. The vision...

For more than 100 years, the coal-producing counties of eastern Kentucky have been dependent on the coal industry, which has dominated them politically and, submitting only to the limits of technology, has come near to ruining them. The legacy of the coal economy in the Kentucky mountains will...