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 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.

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.

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?’

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.