No generation before us has faced a decade of choices that will so profoundly impact the course of life on this planet as those we now face. And no generation before us has had the opportunity to enrich the future so vastly.

I tell my graduate students [at Bard College], ‘There are two ways to change the world: through policy, or through sustainable business.’ With sustainable business, individuals build solutions within the current system… Sustainable business asks, ‘How would nature do this?’

The fate of hundreds of thousands of species on this planet may be decided in the next decade. To slow the rush to extinction, we need to achieve real, substantive political power, and we need to get there fast.

In the year 2007, seals, otters, lions, turtles, frogs, apes, snakes, butterflies, polar bears, cheetahs, whales are disappearing along with their variously furnished homes: cloud forests, rain forests, ice pack, boreal forests, coral reefs, forests of deciduous trees, conifer and palm.

One hundred years ago, visionary political leaders from the Progressive Era established a system of national forests and parks in our country that are the envy of the world and today are the treasure of an entire nation. Why not a similar, global vision for our generation?

A new politics can spark the clean-energy revolution that will serve as a foundation for a new era of human prosperity, protect the world's forests, stabilize the climate, and preserve the diversity of life on the planet.

Stabilizing the climate is not about saving the human species... Stabilizing the climate is a precious opportunity to pass on to all future human beings gifts of immense value, gifts that, once gone, will be beyond the imagination and skill of humanity to recreate.