Down to the wire : confronting climate collapse / David - Index of

preface S xvii
country. And for no good reason we were absent without leave
until very recently on the largest issue ever on the human agenda.
The United States, in other words, is not just another country; it
is, rather, the linchpin in the effort to avoid catastrophic global
destabilization.
Finally, this book is a companion of sorts to a project launched
in June of 2006 at a Wingspread conference convened by Ray
Anderson, Bill Becker, and Jonathan Lash, members of President
Clinton’s Council on Sustainable Development, which had gone
dormant in the years of George W. Bush. Among the recommendations
from that conference was one I made to create a climate
action plan for the fi rst hundred days of the next U.S. president. 4
The idea was accepted and funded by Adam Joseph Lewis, the
Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and others. The project was cochaired
by Ray Anderson and Gary Hart and ably directed by Bill Becker.
The fi nal report, presented to John Podesta, director of the Obama
transition team, included some three hundred proposals across a
dozen categories ranging from transportation to land use. That
document was aimed at near-term specifi c policy changes—the
things the next U.S. president and the government would have
to do quickly to respond to the challenge of climate destabilization.
This book, by contrast, addresses the larger issues behind
the immediate policy choices and headlines. It is a meditation on
the leadership we will need to eventually surmount the largest
challenges we’ve ever experienced. My focus is what historian
James MacGregor Burns describes as transformational leadership
that recognizes “real need, the uncovering and exploiting of contradictions
among values and between values and practice, the
realigning of values, reorganization of institutions where necessary,
and the governance of change. Essentially the leader’s task is
consciousness-raising on a wide plane” (Burns, 1978, p. 43). And
we will need a great deal of consciousness-raising in the years
ahead.