The 11th Hour is a documentary film produced and directed by Leonardo DiCaprio,

Leila Conners Petersen (who was for many years an editor at NPQ) and Nadia
Conners which was distributed by Warner Brothers to theaters this summer. Below
are excerpts from some of the broad array of scholars, thinkers, scientists and activists
portrayed in the film.

Environmentalism was once the project of a passionate few. Now, millions of people
have responded to ecological destruction and have created the groundwork for a
sustainable and just world. With the onset of global warming and other catastrophic
events, environmentalism has become today a broader unifying human issue. We as
citizens, leaders, consumers and voters have the opportunity to help integrate ecology
into governmental policy and everyday living standards. During this critical period of
human history, healing the damage of industrial civilization is the task of our
generation. Our response depends on the conscious evolution of our species, and this
response could very well save this unique blue planet for future generations.

LEONARDO DICAPRIO, one of Hollywoods leading actors and an environmental

activist

When you look at the history of humanity its basically about the relationship between
the two most complicated systems on earthhuman society and nature. If people have
not lived in a good balance in that regard, then they will be gone. At the end of the
day, when we all talk about saving the environment, in a way its misstated because
the environment is going to survive. Were the ones that may not survive, or we may
survive in a world that we dont particularly want to live in.

KENNY AUSUBEL, founder of Bioneers

As we destroy nature, we will be destroyed in the process. Theres no escaping that

conclusion.

DAVID ORR, Environmental Studies Center, Oberlin College

Life on Earth is possible only because a number of parameters lay in certain very
narrow ridges. Some of these clearly are environmental. The Earth has just the right
temperature and pressure to have water.

STEPHEN HAWKING, theoretical physicist and author of A Brief History of Time

Earth is a planet thats just right up from the sun and has just enough of that atmosphere
of a certain composition where more heat stays here than radiates out to space. Gases
in the atmosphere trap some of that heat and thats why were not an ice ball. Some
scientists have compared this whole business of the different planets going away from
the sun as being like the Goldilocks effect: One planet is too cold. Another is too
warm. This one is just right. And we just happen to be there.

ANDY REVKIN, environmental correspondent for The New York Times

Forty million centuries ago, a cell formed, and that cell had a gene and that gene is the
password to every single other form of life there is. The amazing thing about the
human body is that it has 100 trillion cells, 90 percent of which are not human cells.
They are fungi and bacteria and micro-organisms. In short, the thing that makes us
human is not human. Within us is basically the back story of life on Earth, right back
to that first original cell 40 million centuries ago.

If you could, for a moment, stop and feel what is happening in your body there are 6
septillion things going on at the same time. Thats a 6 with 24 zeros after it going on
right now, right this instant as you sit in your chair. Then in the next instant, within 10
seconds, a hundred more things have happened than in all the stars and planets and
asteroids in the known universe right there in your body. And that is called life.

PAUL HAWKEN, author of Natural Capitalism: The Next Industrial Revolution

Homo sapiens, sapiens is an incredibly young species. We came very late in the
calendar year of the Earth. In terms of the Earth calendar we know, it started Jan. 1
and now were Dec. 31. We humans just got here 15 minutes before midnight on Dec.
31 and all of recorded history has blinked by in the last 60 seconds.

JANINE BENYUS, co-founder of the BioMimicry Guild

We are fundamentally groups of animals, randomly scattered throughout the planet,

slowly coalescing in groups that are more powerful, larger and very much conditioned
by two essential characteristics. One is opportunism and the other is greed. All the
animals and vegetables are opportunistic creatures. They do what is necessary in order
to survive.

PAOLO SOLERI, arcologist (ecological architect) and founder of Arcosanti

It was the human mind that threw us out of balance with the rest of nature. The tragedy
is that it was the human mind that was the key to our very survival.

When we began to evolve in Africa about 150,000 years ago, compared to the other
animals that must have been on the plains of that time, we werent very impressive.
We werent very many and we werent very big. The key to our survival and our taking
over the planet was the human brain because the human mind invented the concept of
a future. Were the only animal on the planet that was able to recognize we could effect
the future by what we do today. We look ahead, recognize what the opportunities are,
where the dangers lie and choose accordingly to survive. That was the great survival
strategy of our species.
One consequence of our survival strategy is that we live in a human-created
environment where its very easy to think were different from other creatures. Were
smart, we create our own habitat, we dont need nature. Its the economy thats the
most important thing. And in focusing on the economy, weve forgotten those ancient
truths that kept us plugged in to nature, that helped us understand that if we do
something to offend the natural will, were going to pay a price, so we should treat
nature much more gently. Thats the lesson that weve forgotten and were paying a
price for today.

DAVID SUZUKI, ecologist, broadcaster and professor emeritus at the University of

British Columbia

The big rupture came in the 19th century with the advent of the steam engine and the
use of fossil fuels in the Industrial Revolution. This was a great rupture from earlier
forms and rhythms of life which were generally regenerative. What happened after the
Industrial Revolution was that nature was converted to a resource and that resource
was seen as eternally abundant. This led to the idea of, and the conception behind,
progress, which is limitless growth, limitless expansion.

NATHAN GARDELS, editor of NPQ

For the vast majority of human history we lived on current sunlight. Sun fell on the
fields, the fields grew plants, the plants made cellulose, animals ate the cellulose, we
ate the plants, we ate the animals, and we wore clothing made out of the plants and
animals.

So, the sunlight that fell on the Earth in a year was the maximum amount of sunlight
that we could use. From the earliest evidence of human civilization 150,000 years ago
up until a few thousand years ago, pretty much thats how we lived. As a result,
population never surpassed a billion people. And then we began discovering that there
were these little pockets of ancient sunlightsome coal here, a bit of oil there. Slowly,
between these reserves and the spread of the agricultural revolution, the Earths
population crept up until we hit our first 1 billion people. It didnt take us a hundred
thousand years to go from 1 billion to 2 billion. Our second billion only took us 130
years. We hit 2 billion people in 1930. Our third billion took only 30 years, 1960.
When John Kennedy was inaugurated, there were half as many people on the planet
as there are today.

The reason weve been able to have this exponential growth of population is because
of the ancient sunlight that was stored in the Earth 300 and 400 million years ago. And
if we were to have to go back to simply living off current sunlight, lacking technology,
the planet couldnt sustain more than half a billion. At the most we could sustain a
billion people.

THOM HARTMANN, comments on the Air America Network

Oil is really the basis with which we sustain complexity and with which we solve our
problems. In a sense, all of our lives are subsidized. We are subsidized by oil. When
we shop for anything in the store, we dont pay the full price. We dont pay the full
cost of what it took to produce those products.

JOSEPH TAINTER, author of The Collapse of Complex Societies

The real problem is that there are too many of us, using too many resources too fast.
Oil has enabled us to do that. We use oil to increase the rate at which we extract all
other resources from topsoil to fresh water, from aluminum to zinc.

RICHARD HEINBERG, author of The Partys Over: Oil, War and the Fate of
Industrial Societies

We borrow about $800 billion a year from the world to finance the excess of our
consumption over what we produce. About a third of that, about $250 billion a year,
is for oil imports. So, we borrow from the world, we issue IOUs, Treasury bills,
whatever, to the tune of about a billion dollars every working day to finance our oil
imports.

JAMES WOOLSEY, former director of the CIA

Theres a lot of harm that comes from the use of fossil fuels. Economists would call
these costs externalities because theyre external to the price that you pay at the pump.
For example, asthma rates among children are growing in many parts of the US. Acid
rain is caused by burning coal. Burning fossil fuels contributes to global-warming
conditions. And at least part of the cost of keeping US troops in the Middle East is to
safeguard oil assets. These are all subsidies paid for the use of fossil fuels.

VIJAY VAITHEESWARAN, correspondent for The Economist

We dont know the future, we know the past. We know the past in part through Greek
mythology. What most applies to our situation today is the famous myth of
Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods, the myth of hubris, of man overreaching
and then having his liver eaten out continually by eagles sent by the godsnemesis.
Its the revenge of the gods or the revenge of nature.

Were seeing this now already, only 200 years after the Industrial Revolution. We
didnt know what we were creating, we didnt know the damage that was being done.
As we go forward, with technology even more powerful than before, we have
magnified the presence of the human race inside the ecology. We can do vastly more
damage with our technological prowess than we could before, and therefore we have
to be even more cautious.

NATHAN GARDELS
One of the most serious consequences of our actions is global warming brought about
by raising levels of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels. The danger is that
the temperature increase might become self-sustaining if it has not done so already.
Drought and deforestation are reducing the amount of carbon dioxide recycled into the
atmosphere and the warming of the seas may trigger the release of large quantities of
CO2 trapped on the ocean floor. In addition, the melting of the Arctic and Antarctic
ice sheets will reduce the amount of solar energy reflected back into space and so
increase the temperature further. We dont know where the global warming will stop,
but the worst-case scenario is that Earth would become like its sister planet, Venus,
with a temperature of 250 degrees Centigrade, and raining sulfuric acid. The human
race could not survive in those conditions.

STEPHEN HAWKING

The record shows that greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide in particular, did not go above
280 parts per million over the last 650,000 years. Were now more than 400 parts per
million, coming close to what many scientists are now referring to as a tipping point.
A tipping point is where we lose control of climate. And once weve lost control of
climate, then Katrina scale of events will become simply the norm.

DAVID ORR

Unless were able to very quickly and very dramatically reduce our use of fossil fuels,
the computer modeling is pretty clear. Having increased the temperature one degree
so far, well increase it about another 5 degrees. That will make the Earth warmer than
its been for tens of millions of years.

BILL McKIBBEN, author of The End of Nature

Theres no doubt that the speed of natural changes is now dwarfed by the changes that
humans are making to the atmosphere and to the surface.

JIM HANSEN, NASAs chief climate scientist

Climate change is happening first and fastest in the Arctic. We are starting to see that
things are happening even faster than what scientists have indicated. By the end of the
century, perhaps even in a few decades, the Arctic will be quite ice free, especially in
the summertime.

SHEILA WATT CLOUTIER, recipient of the UN Champions of the Earth award.

Climate change is a national security problem in the sense that Florida might be the
first affected as well as other coastal parts of the US; but more importantly than that,
its an international security problem.

JAMES WOOLSEY
The UN estimates that by the middle of the century, there may be a 150 million
environmental refugees at any given time from climate change.

BILL MCKIBBEN

What we saw with Katrina is just prologue. The worst is yet to come on that front.
Global warming is real, and its destructive impacts defy the imagination.

RAY ANDERSON

The problem that confronts us is that every living system in the biosphere is in decline,
and the rate of decline is accelerating. There isnt one peer-reviewed scientific article
published in the past 20 years that contradicts that statement. Living systems are coral
reefs, theyre our climatic stability, our forest cover, the oceans themselves, aquifers
and water, the conditions of the soil, biodiversity. The fact is, there isnt one living
system that is stable or improving. Those living systems provide the basis for all life.

PAUL HAWKEN

Wed better first of all acknowledge that the planet is seamless. For instance, the
fertilizer and the pesticides that are applied in the fields of the upper Midwest go down
the Mississippi and 1,100 miles away, theres a dead zone.

WES JACKSON, president of The Land Institute

Seventy countries in the world no longer have any intact or original forests. And here
in the US, 95 percent of our old-growth forests are already gone. Forest loss is also
effecting climate change because forests are the greatest terrestrial storehouse of
carbon. Logging in Canada alone puts as much carbon into the atmosphere as all of
the cars in California every year.

TZEPORAH BERMAN, program director of ForestEthics

In many cases forests will not grow back and that land is then converted to grassland.
But in the case of rainforests, when the trees are removed they do not come back. The
land becomes extremely dry and the nutrient cycling that those trees used to do is no
longer functioning. That leads next to deserts. Weve seen them and weve watched
them grow around the world as we have removed trees from along the edges of very
dry areas. Desertification has spread where there used to be forests.

GLORIA FLORA, a member of the US Forest Service for 22 years, is director of

Sustainable Obtainable Solutions

In my own part of the world, I keep telling people, Let us not cut trees irresponsibly;
let us not destroy the forested mountains. If you destroy the forests on these mountains,
the rivers will stop flowing and the rains will become irregular and the crops will fail
and you will die of hunger and starvation. The problem is, people dont make those
linkages.

WANGARI MAATHAI was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her work planting
trees in Kenya

Whats the volume of a tree in terms of how much water can be contained there? I
asked the US Forest Service research scientists to calculate what the water volume was
from one 100-foot-diameter tree. It turns out that it can grab 57,000 gallons of water
in a 10- to 12-inch flash flood. It captures it in that sponge, prevents it from running
off, cleans it and puts it back in the aquifer. Take that one tree away and youve got a
flood, youve got soil erosion. Youve lost those 57,000 gallons from the local water
supply, and then that water is rushing on down stream, hurting people, hurting
communities and ultimately polluting the ocean.

ANDY LIPKIS is founder of TreePeople

We really could tip the ocean into a different state. The health of the ocean as we know
it depends on the water turning over, the surface water sinking to the bottom and the
bottom water coming up to the top. Its conceivable that we could turn that conveyor
belt off by warming the surface of the ocean a little bit too much. If we do that, with
all of our dead zones, we could make the whole surface of the ocean stagnant. Thats
a terrifying thought. The last time that happened was at the end Permian mass
extinction. More than 95 percent of all the species on the Earth went extinct at that
time.

JEREMY JACKSON, an oceanographer at Scripps Institute and co-founder of the

Shifting Baselines Media Campaign

On the issues of climate change and environment, the political system has failed us.
Its not first and foremost a crisis of technology; it isnt even a crisis of public opinion.
If you ask the public whether it wants solar energy, efficient appliances and efficient
cars, the answers are overwhelmingly yes. The crisis is in that bridge across this chasm
of public opinion to public policy thats called government. Thats where the failure
has been, that bridge has fallen into disrepair.

There was a time in the 1960s and 1970s when Republicans and Democrats in the US
joined together to pass the major environmental laws at the timethe National
Government Policy Act, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered
Species Act. That system is now broken. Part of the crisis is, as everybody knows, that
there is too much money in the political system.

DAVID ORR

The most basic thing to understand about our global economic system is that its a
subsystem of a larger system. The larger system is the biosphere and the subsystem is
the economy. The problem, of course is that our subsystem, the economy, is geared
for growthits all set up to grow, to expandwhereas the parent system doesnt
grow, it remains the same size. So as the economy grows, it encroaches upon the
biosphere. This is the fundamental cost of economic growth. Its what you give up
when you expand. You give up what used to be there.

HERMAN DALY, former senior economist on environmental policy at the World

Bank

Economists dont include in their calculations all of the things that nature does for us
for nothing. Some technologies would never be able to do what nature does, for
example, pollinating all of the flowering plants. What would it cost us to take carbon
dioxide out of the air and put oxygen back in it, which all the green things do for us
for nothing? Its possible to do a crude estimate of what it would cost us to replace
nature. Several years ago it was estimated that it would cost us $35 trillion a year to
do what nature is doing for us for nothing. At that time, all the economies of the world
added up to $18 trillion. So nature was doing twice as much service for us as the
economies of the world. In the madness of conventional economics, this is not part of
the equation.

DAVID SUZUKI

The throughput of the industrial system has to be reinvented from mine and wellhead
to finished product that ends up in a landfill or incinerator. For every truckload of
product with lasting value, 32 truckloads of waste are produced. We have a waste-
making system. Clearly, we cannot continue to dig up the Earth and turn it to waste.

RAY ANDERSON, founder of Interface

Were now subject to $500 billion worth of advertising each year. By the time young
people enter college theyve seen thousands of hours of television, four hours and
some minutes per day on average. As a result, one study has shown that college
students could identify a thousand corporate logos but fewer than 10 plants and
animals native to their own place. So weve become not only consumers, but hugely
ignorant of the terms by which we live on the Earth.

DAVID ORR

The average American goes shopping in one way or another five times a week. During
the day we spend most of our time working to make the money so that we can shop.
And theres a growing weariness of having to hold up the global economy, to keep up
with the Joneses. While everything is getting biggerour bathtubs, our houses, our
vehicles, our waistlineswere running out of time. We have less time to do the things
we really care about.

BETSY TAYLOR, founder of the Center for the New American Dream
In America people are so insulated by our astonishing concentration of wealth.
Americans spend more money maintaining their lawns than India collects in tax
revenue. Were anesthetized by our own wealth. We forget how the majority of the
world lives.

WADE DAVIS, named an Explorer of the Millennium by National Geographic

As a civilization, consumerism is our leading ideology. You might even call it

consumer democracy in the sense of a regime designed to give people what they want,
when they want itwhich is now. And people want consumer goods.

Once commodities become cultural symbols, whether its a cell phone in rural China
or a Lamborghini in Malibu, theres no stopping it. People believe in choice, and
choice means consumerism for most people. There is no mileage in trying to save the
planet by telling people theyre making the wrong choice. Its not going to work. You
have to change the object of desire in order to get the root of the problem. You have
to change the impetus behind limitless expansion. In a phrase, we have to shift from
well-having to well-being. Fundamentally, it is a cultural transformation.

NATHAN GARDELS

We humans have always had material desires. Its not that consumption is bad, its
that its gotten totally out of balance.

BETSY TAYLOR

Media is the instrument by which knowledge is passed along in our society. We no

longer get knowledge directly from the Earth. Were no longer in touch with the
sources of our survival. Most of us in Western industrial society no longer grow our
food or take care of our own subsistence or learn directly from our own experience.
Basically were like an astronaut in space, floating around in a metallic, recreated
universe, disconnected from the Earth. Were dependent completely upon the
information that is sent to us from very, very far away.

JERRY MANDER, founder of the International Forum on Globalization

Were psychically numbed. We numb our senses from morning till night, whether its
with noise or loud music or light at night. We rarely see the beauty. And if weve lost
the feeling of the beauty of the world, then we are looking for substitutes. As Eric
Hoffer said, You can never get enough of what you dont really want. We rush
around permanently needy and dont know what it is weve lost. What weve lost is
the beauty of the world. We make up for it by attempting to conquer the world, to
possess the world.

JAMES HILLMAN, psychologist, co-founder of the Dallas Institute of Humanities

and Culture
One can see from space how the human race has changed the Earth. Nearly all of the
available land has been cleared of forest and is now used for agriculture or urban
development. The polar icecaps are shrinking and the desert areas are increasing. At
night the Earth is no longer dark, but large areas are lit up. All this is evidence that
human exploitation of the planet is reaching a critical limit. Yet, human demands and
expectations are ever increasing. We cannot continue to pollute the atmosphere, poison
the ocean and exhaust the land. There isnt any more available.

STEPHEN HAWKING

We dont know at what pointwhen we lose biodiversitythat the system will start
to fall apart. I believe in the resilience of nature. Once the human species becomes
extinct, just as many species have become extinct before us and many species will
become extinct after us, the Earth may well spin on its axis happily without humans.
The microbes and insects will inherit the world unless we cause such a dramatic
climate shift that the Earth becomes an arid, cold planet like Mars.

PAUL STAMETS, author of Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save
the World

I dont believe for a minute that life will be extinguished. Even though weve radically
altered the air, the water and the soil of the Earth, life has been incredibly tenacious
and adaptable. But as a species at the very top of the food chain, were the most
vulnerable.

Life has existed on Earth from 3.8 to 4 billion years. Over that time there have been a
lot of species. But 99.9999 percent of all species that have ever existed are now extinct.
So extinction is a natural part of life. Extinction is what has enabled life to flourish
and evolve and change with the conditions of the changing planet. The planet hasnt
been stuck in one condition over 4 billion years.

The tragedy of human existence is that were an infant species. Not only are we
hastening the conditions for our own demise, were taking 50,000 to 55,000 species a
year with us. The tragedy is not only the potential extinction of humankind but the
enormous extinction crisis that were causing right now.

DAVID SUZUKI

Whats daunting is that no civilization that has exceeded its ecological limits has ever
recovered. And the damage previously in history has always been localized because
theyre smaller in scale. The difference today, because of globalization, is that we now
have the capacity to blow it on a global scale.

KENNY AUSUBEL
Maybe its not so consciously articulated, but there is a sense that Yeah, were
creating a lot of problems. I do think theres an environmental consciousness out
there. But there is also a residual belief that technology can take care of it, as if we can
perform some kind of planetary liposuction at some point. There is a sense that if we
waste and we grow and we create problems, somehow we can fix them.

NATHAN GARDELS

My concern about the disintegration of life-support systems in many areas is that it

will lead to social disintegration. In effect, more and more failed and failing states.
Each year now, the list of failed and failing states gets longer and the question is, how
many failed states do you have to have before you have a failed global civilization?

LESTER BROWN, president of the Earth Policy Institute

I think there is potential for a dark age. One of the problems that I see is that so many
people who have to individually accept the cost of the transition are unaware that its
coming. Most of our citizens wake up in the morning and worry about the morning
commute and getting the kids to school and paying the mortgage and thinking about a
new car or vacation or whatever. And this is simply too narrow a scale of thinking to
address the problems that we have. We need people to be aware of the global forces
that affect their lives and that will increasingly affect their lives in the future. If this
awareness doesnt develop, then Im afraid the transition will probably be wrenching.

JOSEPH TAINTER

What is happening to our planet is something that should make us think and act
differently. Were not acting because we still are victims of inertia going back to the
time when someone said, and believed it was a mistake even when it was said, that
man is the king of nature.

MIKHAIL GORBACHEV, the last president of the Soviet Union, is founder of

Green Cross International

Some people suggest that in order to live sustainably we have to go out in the woods
and put on animal skins, surviving on roots and berries. But the simple reality is that
we do have technology. The question is how can we use our understanding of science
and our understanding of technology, along with our understanding of how culture
changes, to create a civilization that will interact with science and with the world
around us in a sustainable fashion?

THOM HARTMANN

Now that there are 6.4 billion of us on this planet, we have to imagine what it would
be like to redesign design itself, to see design as the first signal of human intention and
realize that we need new intentions for our future.
Chemistry has given us valuable new materials; we need to shift to closed-cycle and
cradle-to-cradle production, instead of cradle to grave, with energy coming from
renewable resources. Design itself can change our way of mass utilization of things
that are inherently assets instead of liabilities.

WILLIAM MCDONOUGH, an architect, was named one of Times Hero for the
Planet.

Whether were talking about the design of a factory or a building or a road, or even a
town, its much easier to design in isolation, and superimpose a design on what exists.
But if we were to follow natures operating instructions, it designs in exactly the
opposite way. It brings onto the pallet, so to speak, all of the kingdoms of life and then
works symphonically to create an end result which might be a coral reef or might be a
forest.

JOHN TODD is a research professor at the University of Vermont

How we make things in our industrial process is 180 degrees opposite from how life
makes things. Look at the way we make Kevlar, which is our toughest material. We
take petroleum, heat it up to about 1400 degrees Fahrenheit, bubble it in sulfuric acid
and then pull it out under enormous pressure. Now imagine us making our bones or
our teeth, or imagine abalones making a shell. They cant afford to heat it up to really
high temperatures or place it under pressures or chemical baths, so they found a
different way. Now take the spider. The orb weaver spider is basically taking flies and
crickets into the web and transforming them through chemistry in water in the
abdomen. What comes out is this material thats five times stronger ounce for ounce
than steel. They do that silently, in water, at room temp. This is master chemistry!
Mimicking the recipes of these organisms is manufacturing of the future.

JANINE BENYUS

Fungi are the grand molecular disassemblers in nature they are the interface organisms
between life and death. They generate soil. The entire food web of nature is based on
these fungal filaments. The mycilial network that infuses all land masses in the world
is a supportive membrane upon which life proliferates and diversifies.

Mushrooms also have a very bizarre property of hyper-accumulating heavy metals.

Forests are thousands of acres, and so fungi that produce mushrooms grow to
thousands of acres of size. This gives us a ready ability to tap into this powerful
inherent resource that mushroom mycelium have, to remediate environments, prevent
downstream pollution from microbes, from viruses, bacteria and protozoa and also for
breaking down a wide assortment pollutants. This is one of the pedestals of
mycorestorations, using mushrooms to heal environments.

PAUL STAMETS
In nature there is no waste. One organisms waste is anothers food. A waste-free
industrial systemthats the model for the industrial system that must eventually
evolve.

RAY ANDERSON

Think about the tree as a design. Its something that makes oxygen, sequesters carbon,
distills water, provides a habitat for hundreds of species, accrues solar energy, makes
complex sugars and food, creates micro climates, self-replicates. What would it be like
to design a building like a tree? What would it be like to design a city like a forest?
What would a building be like if it were photosynthetic?

WILLIAM MCDONOUGH

If we were to combine our housing and our waste treatment, our food production and
our energy generation into single integrate systems, we could live beautifully on the
planet with one-tenth or less of the resources that our current civilization uses.

JOHN TODD

This country can move awfully fast if it wants to. Keep in mind that just after Dec. 7,
1941, Roosevelt went to Jimmy Byrnes and said, Youre my deputy president for
mobilizing the economy. Anybody who crosses you crosses me. Get to it. Within six
months, Detroit was completely retooled. Instead of making cars it was making
military trucks, tanks, fighter aircraft. In three years and eight months we had
mobilized and along with our allies defeated imperial Japan, Fascist Italy and Nazi
Germany. Three years and eight months!

JAMES WOOLSEY

These are not technical issues nearly as much as they are leadership issues. How much
time do we have? Well, not much. By my reckoning we ought to be about the business
as rapidly as possible. And this means everybody, every citizen, every government
level, every organization, every corporation. This is all-hands-on-deck time, so that in
the future, 500 years out, lets say, the people look back on this time as our finest hour.

DAVID ORR

There are on Earth today more than 1 million environmental, social-justice and
indigenous organizations. It is the fastest-growing movement on Earth. Were starting
to see them pull together to close the loops and plug the leaks of energy, water, food
and finance to reimagine what it means to be a human being in the 21st century when
every living system is in decline and learning how to reverse that.

PAUL HAWKEN
Its almost as if we had distributed an ambition, without ever having written it down,
so that people all over the world knew what they ought to be working on and were
working on it in their own way, aware that they only had one pixel in this incredible
mosaic of an image of a sustainable future.

BRUCE MAU, a designer, is founder of the Institute Without Boundaries and editor
of Massive Change

The exciting thing is that we can see now what the new economy would look like.
Instead of being powered by fossil fuels, its powered largely by renewable energy.
Instead of having an automobile-centered transportation system, it will have a much
more diversified transport system. Instead of a throwaway economy, it will be reused
economy.

The challenge for our generation is to build that economy in the time thats available,
and I dont think we have a lot of time left.

LESTER BROWN

Virtually all of our major infrastructure changes in this country have been encouraged
in one way or another by the federal government. So I would think the way to deal
with this transition away from oil is not to pretend that energy operates today in an
unregulated free-enterprise market. It does not. What we need to do is go ahead as
affordably as possible offering incentives to move toward alternative fuels and
infrastructure.

JAMES WOOLSEY

If we move from the rigged game that we now have with energy to a genuine level
playing field where there is open competition between dirty and clean, I have no doubt
that the clean fuels will win. Once we send the right signal from the marketplace to
those proverbial two guys in the garage who created Hewlett-Packard, then things will
take off. They need to know that weve fixed our public policies. They are going to be
rewarded when they come up with the killer app to defeat big oil. Once we do this,
there will be a relatively quick shift to cleaner energy.

VIJAY VAITHEESWARAN

Life creates the conditions that are conducive to life. So our technology, our cities, our
schools, what we make, what we wear, what we eat if all of it is oriented around
that one life principle, then we will be here for a long, long time.

PAUL HAWKEN

We need to be slower; we need to be smarter. Slow means disengaging from

consumerism as the main avenue of experience. It doesnt reject any consumption, but
it says, Were not going to live our lives mediated by stuff sold out there in the
market. Were not going to base our identities and our meaning on what we buy.
Instead of the long commute, the bigger car, the bigger house, lets enjoy the local
produce and have time to ourselves. Lets understand that things are thieves of time
because the more things you have, the more time you have to spend working to pay
for them, the more your life is chained to a rhythm of perpetual purchase.

Being smart means reintroducing a term from before the Industrial Revolution
frugality. Frugality does not mean poverty or deprivation. It means the wise use of
resources.

NATHAN GARDELS

If we choose to eradicate ourselves from this Earth by whatever means, the Earth goes
nowhere. And in time it will regenerate, and all the lakes will be pristine, the rivers,
the waters, the mountains, everything will be green again. It will be peaceful. There
may not be people. But the Earth will regenerate, and you know why? Because the
Earth has all the time in the world. And we dont.

OREN LYONS is chief of the Onondaga Nation

Civilizations are mortal. They endure, or dont, based on intelligent decisions we

make, or dont make.