I feel more confident than ever that the power to save the planet rests with the individual consumer.

When we held the first Earth Day, everyone said it was a success because of the huge turnout. It was probably the largest planned event across the country.

With time environmental issues got much more complicated. It is pretty easy, if you know what you are doing, to stop a company from pouring poison into a lake where kids swim. It is much harder to address all the myriad greenhouse gases emitted by different sources - from petrochemical refineries to hundreds of millions of peasants cutting down trees for their incredibly inefficient cook stoves.

I would love to see a fundamental re-thinking of whether we truly want to be the world's largest debtor nation, feeding an insatiable desire for mall-crawling with cheaply made crap from all over the world.

I suppose I'd characterize myself as having a faith-based optimism. My faith is parental and Darwinian.

America has the technology and resources to meet all its energy needs while safeguarding the earth's climate. The urgent question now is, 'Do we have the will?' At least one city does, and I'm proud to live in it.

There really wasn't an environmental movement 30 years ago. The Sierra Club national office in 1969 consisted of one full-time volunteer.