The Pacific Yew can be cut down and processed to produce a potent chemical, taxol, which offers some promise of curing certain forms of lung, breast and ovarian cancer in patients who would otherwise quickly die... It seems an easy choice - sacrifice the tree for a human life - until one learns that three trees must be destroyed for each patient treated.

If the only tool we use to analyse what's valuable is a price tag, then those things that don't have price tags begin to look like they have no value.

No controlling legal authority

The global environment crisis is, as we say in Tennessee, real as rain, and I cannot stand the thought of leaving my children with a degraded earth and a diminished future.

American democracy is in grave danger from the changes in the environment in which ideas either live and spread or wither and die.

As human beings, we are vulnerable to confusing the unprecedented with the improbable. In our everyday experience, if something has never happened before, we are generally safe in assuming it is not going to happen in the future, but the exceptions can kill you and climate change is one of those exceptions.

I drive a hybrid, and we've changed our light bulbs and windows and installed solar panels and geothermal ground source heat pumps and most everything else.