Lisner Auditorium at GWU in DC hosted a conference "Confronting the Global Triple Crisis: Climate Change, Peak Oil and Global Resource Depletion & Extinction" Sept. 14-16, 2007 sponsored by the IPS and IFG. With the talks from this conference still reverberating in my head, I find "The Plenitude: Creativity, Innovation, and Making Stuff" cutting edge, and had Rich Gold been alive he should have been a speaker at that conference. But to understand the connection between the themes of the conference and the book, you have to read the entire book.The real connection to a prophetic and visionary view of where we are as a society and culture with lots of "stuff", comes at the end of the book.One of my climate change friends saw my book and asked what I was reading. A few chapters into the book, I brushed her off with "its a book about innovation".Everyone I know is now Googling "The Story of Stuff" to see an incredible short online cartoon/video by Annie Leonard which was a highlight at the Triple Crisis conference and is now viral online (among climate change activists). For example, Maryland House Member, State Delegate Liz Bobo told me in passing at a coffee shop this AM that she just got the link to "the Story of Stuff and asked me if I had it. Everyone is talking about this video, and all those folks will love this book!So I told the Maryland State Delegate, and I am now telling all my climate change friends to read "The Plentitude", Rich Gold's brilliant confessional, philosophical, moral agonizing about how to live and create. Its short history on innovation helps us understand how we reached our current crisis. But more importantly, this little book raises the key questions, begins the conversation, and provides guidance for all in the West, as we face the creative/moral/spiritual challenges of the 21st Century.I am so sorry that Rich Gold is gone, and so grateful to those who published this wonderful legacy he left us.