DAVID HEYMANN
Professor of architecture at the University of Texas at Austin

In the summer of 1999, I received a call from Laura Bush. She and then-governor George Bush wanted a design for a house that would blend into the landscape of an extraordinary piece of land they had just purchased in Crawford, Texas. We talked at length about environmental systems, and Laura was clear at the outset that they wanted to do everything possible to protect the land. It is exceptionally beautiful, with deep bluffs, streams and stands of native live oak.

The house is designed to use a quarter to a third of the energy of a normal house its size. With some modification, it could run entirely off the grid. There are dozens of features that contribute,

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

MARY T'KACH
Executive director, Environmental Sustainability for Aveda

Since our inception in 1978, our focus has been on producing plant-based personal-care products. Currently, 90 percent of the essential oils that go into our products are certified organic, and, as we continue to learn about the functionality of plants, we are able to use even more. That's been a lot of work for our suppliers. In terms of the industry, we're certainly a leader, as a lot of companies have come into organics. In the scope of personal- care products, we're small but we've been a catalyst for so much change. The packaging of products, to how stores get designed, we're always getting chased. So it's good to see the big players step in and say there's some

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

MAJORA CARTER
Executive Director And Founder, Sustainable South Bronx

A chance to fix a neighborhood
There is a huge hole in our economic fabric where clean tech should be. And residents of this community can be trained to fill these "green collar" jobs. Instead of all these economic-growth agencies pushing for stadiums or big-box stores where the average wage is $7 an hour, the city could invest in cleaner transportation systems such as barges and rail lines to connect us to the rest of the city. We could take all the waste grease from the food industry that now gets trucked here for disposal and process it instead into biodiesel fuel. Workers will install "green roofs" on commercial buildings, which will provide cooling and generate

Consciousness is the creator creating the creation and all of the above. It does not cease upon physical death because it underlies and creates the physical. A portion of the conscious spectrum is gone, i.e. your body & your life, but the mind, its personality and all it has experienced continues in more subtle realms. You want proof of life after death? You go to school for years and years and years to get educated and secure the perfect job but won't spend a solid month confirming the existance of the other realms or even a few weeks seriously contemplating the possiblity. It's there, it's been explored, it's been studied. It is subjective and until you begin to entertain the possibility, it is impossible to know the truth until

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

Political Freedom and Spiritual Liberation

Essay by Georg Feuerstein (www.traditionalyogastudies.com)

Proposition 1: "Politics and spirituality don't mix."

Proposition 2: "Take care of your inner life and the rest will fall into place automatically."

Proposition 3: "An apolitical spirituality is short lived."

 

In my teens, when I first set foot on the self-transcending path, I wholeheartedly subscribed to Proposition 1, which I heard many times in so-called spiritual circles. I was optimistic about the possibility of attaining enlightenment in this life and regarded politics as one of the most noxious and obnoxious aspects of material existence, an untrammeled exercise of the ego and therefore as being by definition contradictory and inimical

DEIRDRE IMUS
President and Founder, Deirdre Imus Environmental Center for Pediatric Oncology At Hackensack University Medical Center, N.J.

Small changes quickly add up
We are only as healthy as our planet. And, unfortunately, it's obvious that we're not doing a good job in keeping our planet healthy for our children. It's clear to me and to many experts in the field that environmental toxins play a role in some childhood cancers and other illnesses. But people get overwhelmed. They believe the problem is just too big. When people saw "An Inconvenient Truth," they were saying, "How can I save the glaciers? How can I save the polar bears?" All you have to do is make simple changes. Most of us use the same cleaning products our mothers used.

RICHARD CIZIK
Vice President for Government Affairs, National Association of Evangelicals

God told us to protect his earth
The protection of the environment is a Biblically rooted epic task straight from God. The status quo [of how we are treating the earth] is simply unacceptable. The idea that we can continue as a nation without exhibiting leadership to the rest of the world in this crisis is simply anathema. We have to be at the forefront of providing energy-efficient green solutions across the board, from autos to heating and air conditioning. We have to show leadership if India and China are to follow. Yet we're at the back of the line; that's not American. I'm a Ronald Reagan sunny conservative, and I know for a fact that evangelicals

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

In Feverish Quest for Leadership

Essay by Georg Feuerstein (www.traditionalyogastudies.com)

Every four years, Americans in large numbers contract a peculiar disease of the nervous system. After four years of political stupor, they suddenly become enormously excited, not to say flipped, over yet another presidential campaign, which determines who will be their next leader; who will convey them closer to the American Dream or take them farther down into collective misery.

This year's-2008-presidential (democratic) hopeful, who is the main focus of popular exhilaration and imagination, is Barrack Hussein Obama. He seems to have arrived on the political scene seemingly from nowhere. This is, however, a misleading impression, because for many

The New Inquisition

Essay by Georg Feuerstein (www.traditionalyogastudies.com)

On November 18, 1992, under the banner of the Union of Concerned Scientists (http://www.ucsusa.org/), 1700 senior scientists from around the world, including most Nobel laureates, issued a serious warning to humanity saying that human beings and the natural world are on a collision course.

They called for a new ethic that would convince reluctant governments and reluctant peoples to make a decisive step toward responsible and sustainable living.

When you look up the website of the Union of Concerned Scientists now, you will not find a glowing progress report. On the contrary, the gloomy news is continuing, and the outlook is even bleaker than it was in 1992.

Perhaps

DAVID STANGIS
Director of Corporate Responsibility, Intel

Being green is just good business
As the largest chip manufacturer worldwide, Intel has been leading the area of environmental excellence for decades. For us, being green is just part of the way we do business. One thing that plays to our advantage is that our manufacturing process essentially gets refreshed every few years. We can anticipate that, so instead of having to retrofit facilities, we've applied a philosophy of design for environmental health and safety that projects eight to 10 years down the road. With each step we take in successive generations of the chip, we employ different manufacturing recipes every two years. So when we went from the eight-inch wafer to the 12-inch