VOTE FOR THE ENVIRONMENT

The climate crisis is a true planetary emergency, wrote Al Gore in "An Inconvenient Truth."

Reality is:

Our planet:

Record temperatures,
Powerful hurricanes,
Melting glaciers and ice-caps, and much more.

Our relationships:

Conflict in the oil producing Middle East,
Terrorist threats to oil production,
China’s burgeoning demand for oil,
Record gas prices until election time, and much more.

We and our machines are altering nature. Global warming is real. It isn’t coming; it is here. Anyone who says it isn’t is intellectually dishonest, and their motives must be challenged. When we change the atmosphere, the global transformation we talk about is now biospheric. Nature is no longer an independent force; people are the most powerful force, and we are destroying our home.

We place our freedom at risk as we destroy our home. Americans are energy pigs. We consume a quarter of the world’s oil supply and import more than 60% of what we consume. Every gallon of gasoline we buy pays a terrorist to kill us and puts 5.6 pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

We consume our biomass like crazed addicts. We do not understand or seem to care that we are interconnected to all of life—our waste is needed by billions of people just like us. We endanger everyone on this planet and future generations for all time. The United States is in danger of moving from being the beacon of hope in the world to being the villain of the planet as we destroy our home. As we remain dependent on fossil fuels, we give up our freedoms and deplete our treasury to protect ourselves. We diminish ourselves as a culture and as people.

Our way of life is not sustainable on a planet of finite resources and a sensitive and varnish thin atmosphere. We approach the limits of what we can do to ourselves and survive. Is the legacy we want to leave for those who come after us?

Despite the evidence, most political leaders continue to deny our peril. History will judge our politicians and the rest of us harshest for the fundamental failure to see reality as it is, our failure to adapt to the world around us, and our failure of imagination if we do not change.

We elect our politicians at all levels. They mirror us. Our leaders do not ask more of us. We don’t want to give more of ourselves. We are responsible. Our political leaders carry a heavy burden into the judgment of history. So do the adults of our society.

It is time for us to be one with the rest of the world and to live within the limits of nature as together we meet this moral, ethical, and spiritual challenge. We need to “leapfrog” our crises and visualize a new and vital way of living together on this planet. We share a universal responsibility to do so and to do so soon.

The core question is: “Can we react and adapt to what we now know is true fast enough to minimize the damage to life?

As we prepare to vote on November 7, 2006, I hope we ask our leaders what they want for our nation, our grandchildren, and our world. I hope George W. Bush is our last “petro president.” All future candidates, whatever the political party, need to be renewal candidates who are pro-environment AND pro-business AND pro-humanity.

We fight the wrong war in Iraq; the right war is the war for energy independence.

Make your vote count.