Angels by the River: A Memoir
James Gustave Speth
Language: English
Pages: 224
ISBN: 1603586326
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Reflections on race, environment, politics, and living on the front lines of change
In Angels by the River, James Gustave "Gus" Speth recounts his unlikely path from a southern boyhood through his years as one of the nation's most influential mainstream environmentalists and eventually to the system-changing activism that shapes his current work. Born and raised in an idyllic but racially divided town that later became the scene of South Carolina's horrific Orangeburg Massacre, Speth explores how the civil rights movement and the South's agrarian roots shaped his later work in the heyday of the environmental movement, when he founded two landmark environmental groups, fought for the nation's toughest environmental laws, spearheaded programs in the United Nations, advised the White House, and moved into a leading academic role as dean of Yale's prestigious School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. Yet, in the end, he arrived somewhere quite unexpected–still believing change is possible, but not within the current political and economic system. Throughout this compelling memoir, Speth intertwines three stories–his own, his hometown's, and his country's–focusing mainly on his early years and the lessons he drew from them, and his later years, in which he comes full circle in applying those lessons. In the process he invites others to join him politically at or near the place at which he has arrived, wherever they may have started.
It Worked for Me: In Life and Leadership
Beyond the Bear: How I Learned to Live and Love Again after Being Blinded by a Bear
A Spoonful of Sugar: A Nanny's Story
My Brother Evelyn & Other Profiles
My Best Friend is a Wookiee: One Boy's Journey to Find His Place in the Galaxy
Vietnam—at the Chicago convention. The convention was a gas, figuratively and literally. I can still smell the tear gas Mayor Daley’s police used to disperse us. But, try as I might, I ended up with only one vote for McCarthy. One. All the others supported the state Democratic leadership’s goal of delivering the full delegation for Hubert Humphrey. Though my efforts were hardly successful, it was a delightful irony of history for the South Carolina governor, Robert McNair, and other state.
Romance, cars and cruising, movies and drive-ins, Protestant religion, parties, hunting and fishing, and I would say, schooling. Yes, schooling. I never felt disadvantaged when I went from Orangeburg High to Yale and actually won an award for my freshman grades. And, believe me, I was no smarter than a dozen other members of the OHS Class of 1960. I offer here two items in evidence of these points. Both were preserved for me by my mother. One is a carefully stored clipping from the Orangeburg.
Wanted. And then, near the end of my six years at UNDP, it finally happened. At a UN event she was also attending, Frances Beinecke approached me about becoming dean of Yale’s environment school. Not only did they want me, but they were willing to wait a year for me. After promoting myself so vigorously, I have to say that was a great feeling. I got that feeling again when the Vermont Law School invited me to join its outstanding faculty and top-ranked environmental law program. I am happily.
Something more positive and constructive to rise from the ashes in New York and Virginia. It is already possible to envision the broad outlines of a positive agenda—one that befits a great nation and a caring people, and one that differs in many respects from the call to arms now being repeated like a drumbeat. Beyond the overt and covert anti-terrorist operations that will, and should, be mounted lie a range of more difficult and subtle challenges that must be addressed if we are serious about.
Burns and I have finally had an opportunity to discuss the matter with [IRS head] Randolph Thrower . . . I think it is vital that we put the brakes on some of these foundations which are busy financing leftwing causes with the tax payer’s money. Certainly we ought to act in time to keep the Ford Foundation from again financing Carl Stokes’ mayoralty campaign in Cleveland.” The NRDC staff celebrates their breeder reactor victory in 1983. Left to right: nuclear program director Tom Cochran,.