ROCKY ANDERSON
Mayor of Salt Lake City

In Salt Lake City, we've been able to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions in our municipal operations by 31 percent in four years. We've eliminated 143 cars from the city's light vehicle fleet, and replaced 41 SUVs with smaller, more efficient cars. By retrofitting all city and county buildings with compact fluorescent bulbs, we save the city $33,000 a year. We then invest one third of that in wind power, making Salt Lake City the state's largest purchaser of wind power. We also changed all the city's traffic lights from incandescent bulbs to LED lights, which saves about $50,000 a year in electricity while also reducing annual carbon emissions by 500 tons. Those are just a few small, easy changes that net

JEROME RINGO
President, The Apollo Alliance

Today the environment is at the forefront of everyone's thoughts, not only in this country but also worldwide. I haven't seen an issue with such a magnetic capacity to bring people together since the Civil Rights movement.

Excessive temperatures have a greater impact on the poor who have less access to air conditioning and proper heating. Poor people have less access to health care to deal with climate-related medical problems. Water is a major problem worldwide, either because there's too much of it-the poor tend to live in flood zones-or not enough that's safe to drink.

The most powerful mechanism of change is our right to vote. We have the ability to elect officials who are going to focus on and

THOMAS E. LOVEJOY, PH.D.
President of H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and The Environment

The ocean's food chain is at risk
We were one of the first to call attention to the acidification of the oceans. The oceans take up a huge amount of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year. A portion of that carbon gets turned into carbonic acid, so that the more carbon dioxide there is in the atmosphere, the more acidic the oceans become. The oceans are now 30 percent more acidic than they were before the Industrial Revolution. It's the most chilling change I've seen in my professional career. If it continues, tiny organisms at the base of the food chain will have their shells dissolve while the animals are still alive. It will

ANDY RUBEN
Vice President for Sustainability, Wal-Mart

New stores will use less energy
Hurricane Katrina was a big turning point for us. It showed us that we've got a role we can play that might be greater than we realized. Two years later, we have prototype stores-the first is in Kansas City, Mo. It uses LED lighting in the freezers, and a heating and cooling system without a fan. That store uses 20 percent less energy than a store we'd have opened in 2005. One product we're promoting heavily are compact fluorescent light bulbs, or CFLs. They account for only 5 percent of light-bulb sales, but at Wal-Mart we've been redoing our aisles to make CFLs more visible. Today 20 or 30 percent of the light-bulb aisles will be CFLs, mostly at eye

K. R. SRIDHAR
Founder and CEO, Bloom Energy

Look at the crisis as an opportunity
I think the debate about the climate crisis in this country has been framed the wrong way. We've been talking about it from the perspective of the cost to society, rather than the point of view of the opportunity for profit. People are missing that this is a $4 trillion market for energy, and that's before we factor in the supply-demand imbalances that will occur as China and India ramp up their energy use. There is both a climate crisis and an impending energy crisis, and as Stanford economist Paul Romer has said, a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. Energy is just the capacity to do work, and work is what creates economic output. I'm not against

LAURIE DAVID
Environmental Activist and Producer of 'An Inconvenient Truth'

Everybody can do something
One important lesson I've learned in advocating environmental progress is that the perfect is the enemy of the good. It's not about everyone doing everything. Those days are over. In fact, that's part of what held back the movement. We can't hold people up to a gold standard, because that's unattainable. We're all guilty of being part of this problem. I have a swimming pool that I keep heated for our kids and a house that's got a big carbon footprint. I recognize that and try to do other things, not to justify it but to do the best I can. I can't do everything. But it's about everybody doing something. And if everyone would do something, we

FRAN P. MAINELLA
Honorary Doctorate and Visiting Scholar, Clemson University; Former Director, National Park Service

We've got to get our kids outdoors more
Linking our children back to nature is one of the most challenging environmental issues we have. When I used to come home from school, my mom and dad just said, "Go out and play, and come back in time for dinner." But today, because of security issues, children aren't going outside and playing in nature as much anymore, because we want to know where they are every minute; there's a greater need for supervision. And, as much as we love our technology, many children prefer to come home and be on a computer and in a chair rather than being out of doors-it's what Richard Louv [a visiting

JOHN R. MCNEILL
Former Cinco Hermanos Chair Of Environmental and International Affairs, Georgetown University

The next 50 years are make-or-break
The way I look at it, global climate change and the environment have been important for quite some time. I hope they stay here in the forefront of the U.S. consciousness, but they may not. Something could relegate those issues to the margins tomorrow. Since 9/11, the situation has been fairly simple and straightforward: issues of terrorism and security have seized the public imagination to the extent that everything else has become a lesser priority. Anything that has a longer time horizon, like climate change, with a slower fuse to anticipate catastrophe, has to wait.

But clearly the salience of

Technology provides us with some answers to the environmental challenges we are facing. Hybrid technologies have recently made it to the auto market, promising more fuel efficient transportation and less greenhouse emissions. Hydrogen fuels are a very promising alternative to the dirty energies we are using today. Ultra-clean and unlimited, it is the fuel of the future.

Renewable energy sources such as photovoltaics, wind and thermal energies and future renewables we can't imagine yet, promise to someday replace the dirty energy coal burning power plants used throughout the world today, maybe sooner than later for the residential communities.

Although technological advancement does have promises, it does not and will not get us out of

Sustainability? I don't believe there is such a thing anymore. If we were to sustain our current rates of consumption, habitat destruction, emissions, etc. the Earth's biosphere will collapse within a century.

The concept of sustainability at this point is flawed. It is now not a matter of "sustainability", it is a matter of retreat. We need to drastically reduce consumption, drastically reduce emissions, halt all critical habitat destruction, reduce an exponentially growing human population, end industrial pollution, end the expense of war in both monetarily and human life, and educate the world.

We need to rebuild a vast network of environmental habitats linked continuously throughout continents. We need to dive headlong into clean

We are products of evolution. We are the result of 4 billion years of the evolutionary process. The Evolution of Life is the result of the continuing cooperation of Earth systems. Any system that does not participate in the complement of the entire system will eventually fail, without exception. This is death. Death in the natural world is not the result of competing species. Death is the necessary ingredient life needs to remain in harmony with the bigger process of life called Evolution. If death is not in harmony with the bigger process of life, it is not necessary, and is therefore detrimental to the process of evolution.

Darwin got it wrong in one important aspect: Survival of the Fittest. We have used this phrase to justify

God is the Creator, the Creation and the Created. God not only created a being in his image, but also created the natural world, the world the bible calls Creation, Adam and Eve called Eden, and we call Earth. If we are created in his image and likeness, is it not God's will that we are to be respecters of all life, of all creation? God's will is not that man is to have dominion over nature, but that man is to be good stewards of His Creation. Eden was created for man's pleasure, not for his disposal.

My dream for mankind is not just to live sustainably, but also to enhance the quality of life for all God's creatures. We are here to participate in the creative, divine process that has been guiding life since the first day of

Our consumerism is not on a future collision course with the biosphere, it collided the day consumerism was defined and implemented as the economic standard and unit of measure for success. The theory and practice itself is based off a system that is so obviously unsustainable that a grade school student has enough knowledge to label it foolish and ignorant.

We have collided as a species with our only home and are in the process of following through. Sustainability will become our new measuring tool but only in the sense that it dances in relation to consumption. We need to look at our planet and life a different way. Everything we need to survive and flourish is abundantly available to us as long as we work within the confines of common

Should you become a vegetarian?

Becoming a vegetarian stems for the most part as a result of a spiritual quest by an individual or a society who decides to stop eating meat. Progression of spirit NEVER involves BECOMING a meat eater. So, we can safely assume that consideration and implementation of becoming a non-meat eater is positive spiritual progression. As people on a spiritual path, becoming vegetarian is an unavoidable eventuality. Therefore, the sooner the better!

Now, the decision to become a vegetarian comes to the individual by two ways, one is from the IDEA that becoming a vegetarian will progress you spiritually (which is true), or the REALIZATION during your spiritual quest that you have no choice in the matter. If you are at a