The Arctic is the planet's air conditioner and it's starting to break down.

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?

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?

It is time to start going door to door and convincing our neighbours to vote for a clean-energy future.

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 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.