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.

The highest and best use of our time that really matters over the next decade will be working to elect clean-energy candidates, especially in swing states and swing districts around the country.

Electing clean-energy leaders into the Senate, the House, and the Oval Office - and getting it done in the next few years - is the only real solution to climate stabilization at acceptable levels.

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.

The most rational defender of nature is driven by a passion for wildness that cannot be explained by an appeal to logic.

The human response it calls for is truly heroic, requiring nothing short of rewiring the entire planet with a new generation of clean-energy technologies - and doing that very soon... Are we, as a species, capable of that kind of deliberate global response?

It will be politics that determines the material welfare of future generations: the pace at which we advance toward "our destination of economic bliss," andnperhaps, whether we continue to advance at all.