Bill McKibben: “Modern environmentalism can fairly be described as an American invention. It got its rhetoric from John Muir, its fighting savvy from David Brower, its sense of the world from Rachel Carson, and its institutional framework from the Congress of the Nixon years, which bowed before the loud will of the American people in the years after Earth Day I. The rest of the industrialized world followed, its NGOs patterned on the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth, its laws modeled on ours. We paved the road; we drove innovation.

So it is odd for American environmentalists to look up now and realize that we no longer play a leading role of any kind. If you spend much time at international conferences, you see that we are no more the center of gravity, the fount of new ideas. Long before President Bush ditched the Kyoto treaty, we were drifting toward the back of the pack.” —TomPaine.com