Gus Speth is a writer living in central Vermont and coastal South Carolina with his wife Cameron of 61 years. See www.gusspeth.org.

     In 2009 Speth completed his decade-long tenure as Dean, Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, now the Yale School of the Environment.  From 1993 to 1999, he was Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme and chair of the UN Development Group.  Prior to his service at the UN, he was founder and president of the World Resources Institute; professor of law at Georgetown University; chairman of the U.S. Council on Environmental Quality (Carter Administration); and senior attorney and cofounder, Natural Resources Defense Council. He served on the faculty of the Vermont Law and Graduate School as Professor of Law from 2010 to 2015 and is now a fellow of the Tellus Institute, the Wellbeing Economy Alliance, and the Democracy Collaborative and an honorary director at NRDC and WRI.

      He is the author, co-author or editor of a dozen books including the American Crisis series published by Yale University Press: Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment (2004), The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability (2008), and America the Possible: Manifesto for a New Economy (2012). In 2014 he published a memoir, Angels by the River (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2014). Between 2019 and 2025 he published six books of poetry. See www.watershedpublications.org. Speth edited The New Systems Reader: Alternatives to a Failed Economy (with Kathleen Courrier, Routledge, 2021) and authored They Knew: The US Federal Government’s Fifty-Year Role in Causing the Climate Crisis (MIT Press, 2021). Most recently, he is the author of a novel, Jericho River. See www.jerichoriver.com.

     Among his awards are the National Wildlife Federation’s Resources Defense Award, the Natural Resources Council of America’s Barbara Swain Award of Honor, a 1997 Special Recognition Award from the Society for International Development, Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Environmental Law Institute and the League of Conservation Voters, the Blue Planet Prize, the Thomas Berry Great Work Award of the Environmental Consortium of Colleges and Universities, and the Thomas Berry Award of the Forum on Religion and Ecology.  He holds honorary degrees from Clark University, the College of the Atlantic, the Vermont Law School, Middlebury College, the University of South Carolina, Green Mountain College, the University of Massachusetts/Boston, and Unity College.

Speth graduated summa cum laude from Yale University in 1964 with a BA in Political Science, and subsequently earned an MLitt in Economics from Oxford University in 1966 as a Rhodes Scholar and his JD from the Yale Law School in 1969. After law school, he served as law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Hugo L. Black.