David Orr Interview at Treehugger

This is actually hilarious:

 I think there is no such thing here as cheap solutions or end-runs around the way the world works. We are going to have to balance the carbon books, balance the nitrogen books, and build a world that is a lot fairer than what we have at present. My sense is that it is going to be a tough thing.

That raises issues: ‘well what do you tell the public?’ Gustave Speth, the dean of the School Forestry at Yale, refers to a lot of this stuff as "happy talk." There is a lot of happy talk out there that is premised on the belief that you can't tell the public the bad news because it’ll scare them and they'll not do anything, or they will fall into despair.

That wasn't the strategy that Winston Churchill had in 1940;
Churchill told the British people that he didn't have anything to offer them but blood, toil, tears, and sweat. He didn't say, "hey this is a great opportunity for urban renewal in London and we can beat Nazism at a profit."

I think there's a requirement for leadership now in this country at the very top of the government, certainly in the next presidency, to tell the truth, to tell the American public that this in fact is a global crisis. We have to lead it. Time is short.

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/12/the_th_interview_david_orr_1.php