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.

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?

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

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.

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?

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.