In his new book, The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability, Dean Gus Speth asserts that today’s environmental reality is linked powerfully with growing social inequality and the neglect and erosion of democratic governance and popular control. Speth examines how these seemingly separate areas of public concern are intertwined and calls upon citizens to mobilize spiritual and political resources for change.

A national policy to cut carbon emissions by as much as 40 percent over the next 20 years could still result in increased economic growth, according to an interactive website reviewing 25 of the leading economic models being used to predict the economic impacts of reducing emissions. Robert Repetto, an economics professor at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies who created the site, said, “As Congress prepares to debate new legislation to address the threat of climate change, opponents claim that the costs of adopting the leading proposals would be ruinous to the U.S. economy,” he said. “The world’s leading economists who have studied the issue say that’s wrong. And you can find out for yourself.”

Predators have considerably more influence than plants over how an ecosystem functions, according to a Yale study published in Science. The findings, according to the author, Oswald Schmitz, Oastler Professor of Population and Community Ecology at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, are a “revolutionary” shift in thinking on the subject. Ecosystem ecologists have long held that plants and their interaction with the soil determine the type and abundance of herbivores and carnivores in an ecosystem. Schmitz’s paper, “Effects of Predator Hunting Mode on Grassland Ecosystem Function,” shows that the opposite is true. “Most ecosystem ecologists think that the supply of nutrients in plants determines who can live up in higher trophic (feeding) levels,” said Schmitz. “This study shows that it’s the top trophic levels determining how the plants interact with the soil.”

Lloyd Irland, an F&ES expert on the Northern Forest, contends that unused wood from harvested trees at home could help reduce our dependence on imported fossil fuels.

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