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

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?

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.

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.

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

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.