Senator and Mrs. Kerry

"In this book, Senator John Kerry and Teresa Heinz Kerry offer a compelling narrative, documenting the challenges confronting us. And they celebrate an inspiring new generation of Americans determined to serve their country in the most essential way: by doing whatever is necessary to secure its future. These men and women have had to act without meaningful support from their own government. but they have understood that our relationship to our environment—within our homes, communities, states and nations—is the great challenge of our time, and one that we cannot, in good conscience, ignore any longer. From scattered individual efforts, the new environmentalists have rallied community support and have developed new bipartisanship in problem solving. Their examples, from the leading edge of the environmental frontier, offer a vision for a future that all of us can share, and the prospect of an opportunity that every citizen can benefit from." - from rei.com


from grist.org
"The activists you spotlight embody what you call a "bottom-up" approach to environmental activism. You argue that it's more effective than a "top-down" approach. How so?

THK: Whenever we've had systemic and sustainable change in this country, it's because the grassroots has been ready to accept it. Top-down activity from the government cannot take root unless there's bottom-up acceptance. In other words, I don't think the feds can implement aggressive, massive change unless there's a readiness at the ground level. I think we're at that moment right now.

JK: You're going to have to do both. You can't deal with global climate change unless there's a government policy to have carbon priced, to have an economy-wide cap, to create incentives for capital to flow toward solutions. But the pressure to make all that happen is going to come more from the bottom up. That's what spurred the first environmental movement in the 1970s when we got the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, marine mammal protections, and all those other laws. We believe that a similar explosion of grassroots activity is happening today."

This book was written a long time ago, when I was 9. I'm thinking I will read it after Omnivore's Dilema kids edition.