“Too much conservation is about sequestering nature,” TNC’s chief scientist, Peter Kareiva, says. Environmentalists have always worked with local people, he points out; that’s not new. “The difference is that now we’re being more explicit about it. Instead of collecting data to see how the birds and trees are doing, we do household surveys to see, if we set up a marine protected area, whether the people in those communities feel better off. That’s a down-to-earth, concrete change.”

People? Really? Since John Muir first walked the Sierra, hasn’t the point of conservation been to protect nature from people?

Not anymore. In a slow but dramatic shift, the world’s biggest environmental NGOs—the Nature Conservancy, the World Wildlife Fund, and Conservation International—have retooled their goals. Saving chunks of nature by fencing people out is too piecemeal, too arrogant, they’ve come to believe. What’s more, it doesn’t work on the scale we need.

“The historic approach will fail,” says Peter Seligmann, Conservation International’s co-founder and CEO. If we don’t rethink our tactics, he believes, “we will have islands in a sea of development, and islands are always eventually eroded.”

That’s a strong statement coming from Mr. Biodiversity himself. CI invented the term “hot spots”; since its founding, in 1987, when Seligmann and others peeled off from the Nature Conservancy, the group has championed the preservation of wild places above all else. But over the past two years, CI has embarked on a painful journey of consultant-aided soul searching. This fall, it announced a new mission: “to empower societies to responsibly and sustainably care for nature for the well-being of humanity.”

In some ways, CI can afford this kind of drama; it’s the only big conservation NGO not beholden to public members. But the turnaround required some harsh reexamination of its past successes. “With our conservation partners, we’ve put some 500 million acres of priority lands and waters in protected status,” Seligmann told me. “That’s an area about 30 miles wide that wraps around the equator. It seems really big—until you go to outer space and you look at the earth and you see it’s actually a tiny bit of land. You look at the issues of climate change, consumption, and the state of the world’s oceans and you realize that, although we’ve succeeded in putting a lot of land and waters into what I like to refer to as ‘the conservation pantry,’ we haven’t changed the hunger of development, nor have we reduced the capacity of development to reach into that pantry whenever they want something and pull it out.”

Biodiversity is still crucially important to CI, he says, “but it has now become the indicator of the health of the ecosystem we’re focusing on, as opposed to the driver of where we’re going to work.”

On the face of it, using biodiversity—the glorious variety of nature in all its forms—in the service of human well-being sounds pretty cynical. Tough times, snail darter! Nice knowin’ you, polar bear! For those of us raised on the American idea of wilderness—on the sacred mission of keeping some places immune from being paved, bulldozed, and mined—scrapping that notion rips at the foundation of our beliefs. When I brought this up with Kareiva, he reminded me, quite gently, that the rest of the world is not made up of “European or North American affluent white people who enjoy taking nature hikes.”

“As the conservation movement has gotten outside of the U.S.,” he said, “it’s had its eyes opened to global realities, and the realities are that it’s not about the affluent U.S. having nature reserves. It’s about meeting lots of needs.”

Some of those needs have been ignored ever since the U.S. first pushed Native Americans out of Yosemite, in 1864. “Fortress conservation,” the practice of fencing off protected forest or savanna, has created a new class of “conservation refugees”—people forced from subsistence living within a landscape to straight-up poverty outside of it after it gets “preserved.”

“If we continue to embitter millions of people by moving them off the land and settling them in these shabby little settlements outside their land, many of them are going to go back in and poach and cut trees and sell trees and make life impossible for conservation,” says Mark Dowie, author of the book Conservation Refugees, a searing indictment of the big NGOs published last spring. “We said, Duh—it’s not working.”

A couple of things finally led the big NGOs to their “a-ha moment,” as Kareiva describes where we are today. One was a global pushback from local people, which led the World Wildlife Fund to adopt a set of principles for the treatment of local peoples as early as 1996 and which has gained more steam in the past ten years. In 2003, Nelson Mandela told the World Parks Congress, “I see no future for parks, unless they address the needs of communities as equal partners.” The next year, Masai leader Martin Saning’o stood up at the Bangkok summit of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), speaking on behalf of more than 100,000 Masai herders who’d been displaced in the name of biodiversity. “We were the original conservationists,” he said. “Now you have made us enemies of conservation.”

Like the UN, the IUCN has limited authority. But it can, and did, adopt resolutions concerning the treatment of traditional people, which filtered down to the foundations that fund the big NGOs. One way to look at this awakening is that, to get funding, they had to play nice. The other is that more and more scientists, especially younger ones, became convinced that the old ways wouldn’t work.

“There’s been a growing awareness among conservation biologists that, even in the best projections, we won’t secure more than 5 percent of the world’s biological diversity in protected areas,” says Steve McCormick, president of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (conservation’s single biggest foundation funder) and the former Nature Conservancy CEO who pushed TNC in this direction as early as 2001. Meanwhile, he says, “scientists are making the direct correlation between conservation and human well-being. To me, that is a very hopeful precept.”

That’s the second factor in this shift: the rise of a powerful conservation idea called ecosystem services. Think of the economic value of the Louisiana wetlands in mitigating storm surges, or tropical forests in sequestering carbon. This idea will play big in December at the United Nations Climate Change Conference, in Copenhagen, where proponents will push a program called REDD (short for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation). To grossly oversimplify, REDD involves the West paying developing countries to keep forests intact.

But conservation for people is anything but unanimous. Noticeably absent from this trend is the fourth major NGO, the Wildlife Conservation Society. “The Nature Conservancy has made aggressive statements in the last few years about the need to reorient their target=s toward places and dimensions that meet human needs,” says Kent Redford, director of the Wildlife Conservancy Society Institute, WCS’s internal think tank. “Now, that is a shift. We’re not doing that, and we’re not going to do that. We are a proud and unabashedly a nature-conservation organization focusing on wild­life and wild places.”

There are several flaws in the new philosophy, says Redford. First, if you work primarily where you can help people, you’re going to be working in places where wildlife is not. Second, conservationists should keep their eye on the ball. If you’re saving tigers in the Hukong Valley, in Burma, count tigers. If you’re saving people, do that. The WCS works with local populations all the time, he says, “but that’s not because we’re interested as an organization in making their lives better. It’s just that making their lives better is an important thing to do to achieve the conservation of the forest and the animals living in it.”

The link between conservation and poverty alleviation is highly contested, Redford says. “It’s a leap of faith on the part of many of us in our profession. And it’s closing your eyes and jumping and just hoping somebody’s got a big sheet at the bottom.”

“This is not without controversy,” agrees McCormick. “In some cases where you have human activity, it’s not going to be 100 percent conservation. For those for whom it’s all-or-nothing, accepting some loss of [wildlife] populations because humans are taking some use of landscapes—that’s not acceptable.”

Am I one of those all-or-nothing people? I don’t like to think so, but I wonder, Is it OK to tell the polar bear and the Siberian tiger to just hold on, that we’ll save them by saving ourselves? Realism has its promise—we’ll never succeed by merely putting Band-Aids on hot spots. But I miss that romantic old idea that other species have as much right to this world as we do.

For Kareiva, that’s what it comes down to: a matter of rights. “For me at least,” he wrote on TNC’s blog this spring, “the rights of people for self-determination take supremacy over any species or biodiversity tally.” When I asked him about that, he brought up a riddle, an impossible dilemma first posed by conservation biologist Michael Soulé.

“You’re down to one snow leopard, and that leopard is a pregnant mom,” Kareiva said. “And if she lives and has a litter of four or five, you could maybe recover the whole species. And you’re up on a ridge and she’s creeping up and about to kill and eat a small two-year-old child. You have a gun, and you have a choice: You can either kill the leopard and save the child’s life, or you can sit by and watch the leopard kill it. That’s your only choice. I would save the child.”

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They’re about to. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 will provide $500 million for green-jobs training—and that’s only part of nearly $60 billion in overall renewable-energy investment, which will push the demand for those green workers even higher. With a lot of the cash funneled through competitive grants, states are scrambling to come up with training programs to grab their slice of the pie. It doesn’t matter if your state is red or blue, or whether or not you believe in global warming: As one New Mexico rancher told John Fogarty, director of the Santa Fe–based policy group New Energy Economy, “if I were a chocolate maker, I would not need to believe in the Easter Bunny to get excited about Easter.”

I figured my own state was as good a place as any to explore the new green workscape. The Land of Enchantment may rank a mere 37th in the nation in renewable-energy generation today, but we’re No. 2 in solar-energy potential, No. 4 in geothermal, and No. 12 in wind. In addition to the $1.8 billion the state is expecting in stimulus funds, New Mexico has a brand-new “green cabinet,”our own green-jobs act, and $1 million a year in state funding for apprenticeship programs.

But as I learned, you can’t just go out and get yourself one of them green jobs. First, while any American, jobless or not, can call up the federal Employment and Training Administration’s One-Stop Career Center Helpline, the real government boosts will go to people who’ve traditionally gotten the shaft: low-income populations, at-risk youth, returning veterans, single moms, and, here in the Southwest, members of the Navajo Nation, where unemployment rates hover near 50 percent. If you’re currently employed, that means no jobs training for you.

Second, this ain’t your grandfather’s CCC. While the National Park Service has plenty of opportunities for young people who want to fix trails or pull weeds, a big chunk of its $750 million in stimulus money will pay for renewable-energy projects. And to do that kind of work, you need serious technical training.

MY SHORTCOMINGS were cruelly brought home again on New Mexico’s windswept eastern plains, at the North American Wind Research and Training Center, at Mesalands Community College. Already booming with career changers, community colleges will serve as the states’ primary renewable-energy training grounds. San Juan College, up in Farmington, started offering a one-year solar-energy certificate back in 2000—and now has an eight-year waiting list. In Tucumcari, where Mesalands’ new 1.5-megawatt turbine spins 300 feet above the neon of Route 66, the training center was hatching its first class of wind technicians.

The first myth busted by program director Tracy Rascoe was the idea that you can breeze your way to a green job. People have this idea, the former Navy sonar operator said, that they can just “go to the Mesalands drive-through, pull up to the box, and say, Yes, I’d love an associate of applied science in wind-energy technology!”

Not so fast. Rascoe, a soft-spoken guy with a salt-and-pepper goatee and a sweet 102cc Yamaha motorcycle, has been training wind techs since 2000. Beyond the willingness to climb 300 feet up in a turbine in conditions ranging from 128 degrees to 60 below, he says, they have to be proficient in mechanical, electrical, hydraulic, and computer systems. Rascoe’s job is to impart all this to 25 men and three women from nine states, including a homeschooled 17-year-old Mennonite kid and a tattooed Vietnam vet in his late fifties.

“How’s it going?” Rascoe asked the class.

“Plugging along,” somebody volunteered.

“Anything else?”

“Notice our big baby’s cranking away!”

Indeed, the massive GE turbine’s three 121-foot-long blades were casting quick shadows on the dirt lot outside—whoosh, whoosh, whoosh. Inside its huge tubular tower, painted futuristic white and filled with a steady thrum, was an intimidating wall of circuit boards controlled by a tiny laptop, all of it dwarfed by a 300-foot ladder soaring up into the darkness. It was the perfect student lab. But no touchy the turbine until you’ve crossed a few academic hurdles.

Rascoe settled me in at the computer lab with a group working on their e-learning modules, and I started clicking through Basics of Hydraulic Motors, diligently scribbling notes about actuators and fluid pressure until I was ready for the “self-test.”

Buzz! Zzzzz! Ten out of ten wrong.

“This could be the beginning of a whole new career for you,” the guy next to me joked. But while I was off to a rough start, my scores did improve, thank you. Plus my poor mechanical skills didn’t rule me out for admission—all I’d need to be accepted was high-school-level English and math, a $200 deposit, and the ability to lift 75 pounds. Most people in the class, in fact, had post-secondary degrees: Chris used to be a mortgage broker in Albany. Taylor was a National Guard trombonist. Max had just sold his landscaping company in Fort Worth. And Chase, a Kentucky native, ran logistics for a freight company before diesel climbed to $5 a gallon last summer.

The program takes two years, it’s true, but in-state tuition is only $600 a semester—a pretty good investment for a job that starts at $25 to $35 an hour. “Now’s the time,” Rascoe told the students over in the AC/DC electricity lab. “You don’t get a second chance out there to learn this foundation stuff. You’re up in a turbine and you have a situation, you can’t call Mommy and Daddy.”

If they learned their skills cold, he constantly reminded them, the opportunities were huge. Rascoe had seen good people move up from techs to vice presidents in five or six years. “A wind turbine doesn’t go whoosh, whoosh, whoosh,” he said. “It’s ching, ching, ching!”

IN THE MOST DISMAL economy in decades, can the outlook be as rosy as all that? “Green jobs are not automatically good jobs,” a report by D.C. nonprofit Good Jobs First recently cautioned. Wages for some wind and solar manufacturers, the study found, lag behind comparable jobs in durable goods. And the credit crunch hasn’t spared the renewable-energy industry. T. Boone Pickens delayed his 4,000-megawatt wind farm in Texas, and both solar and wind companies have had layoffs.

“Even an Olympic swimmer can be carried out to sea by a riptide,” John Fogarty says. “And we have one heck of a riptide going with our economy.” But while renewables have been hit like everything else, the stimulus bill’s heavy focus on energy means that the sector is poised to bounce back much higher and faster than others.

“I agree that, right now, it’s not there,” he says. “It’s hard for somebody who is unemployed and wants to get into the clean-energy business to find a job. But if somebody went to a two-year solar program, I guarantee that they will write their own ticket.”

Consider this: The shortage of trained renewable-energy workers is so acute that General Electric has committed to hiring all of Tracy Rascoe’s 60 to 80 graduates for the next three years. Now multiply that shortage by the 32 states that have alreadymandated renewable-portfolio standards of 15 percent or higher by 2020. Factor in the sales and administrative jobs that come with a new industry and you’ve got a track with explosive growth.

I KNEW I WASN’T the only one experiencing a nagging anxiety about being left out of the big green party. And I’d burned enough hours wandering in the wilderness of government help lines and Web sites to see that the bureaucratic jungle is tangled and dark.

The person who finally turned my worry to possibility was Kevin Doyle, founder of the Boston-based consulting firm Green Economy. “How did green jobs come to mean renewable-energy jobs?” he asked. What about conservation biologists? Park rangers? “Once you stop defining your green opportunities around six or seven job titles in clean energy, then you’re back where you were and, frankly, where you always are, which is: Who are you? What do you want to do?”

That’s all very nice, I said, but when you’re in free fall, the last thing on your mind is the color of your parachute.

Au contraire, said Doyle: Following your bliss is precisely your smartest move. Take, for example, a Wall Street casualty. “OK,” he posited, “you’re 55 years old. You’re out of work; you don’t see any opportunities in your previous training; you’re competing against younger, hungrier people. So what’s your first step?” It is, he said, to identify people who do what you’d like to do, go talk to them, and measure the gap between their experience and yours. “You might fail,” Doyle allowed. “It’s risky, and the older you get and the more you want to make a change from who you’ve been to who you want to be, the riskier it gets. But the riskiest strategy of all is to just get in a line with a whole bunch of other people.”

So maybe there’s a green future in (recycled) pencil pushing after all. And maybe there’s one in landscaping and green finance and, yes, wind. I’ve been thinking a lot about Rascoe’s students, fanning out into the wind farms of America. They’ll be out there in their hardhats, climbing the towers, checking the circuits, and watching the big blades fill their wallets—ching, ching, ching!

The Big Picture: The federal government’s Career Voyages site offers the most comprehensive statistics about “in-demand” occupations, employment resources, and info about training programs (). Also check out the Green Careers Center for job boards and conferences ().

Energy Efficiency: Weatherization is the fastest-growing field among enviro jobs. Certification from the Building Performance Institute () or LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design; ). Also check out trade associations like the American Solar Energy Society (ases.org) and the American Wind Energy Association ().

Training Programs: Keep track of what’s offered through the Interstate Renewable Energy Council () and the DOE’s adult-education Web site ().

The post Earth Is Hiring appeared first on ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Online.

“My idea is a simple one,” Nocera has said. “If I take that sunlight and I take water, I can solve the entire energy problem.”

That’s pretty much what Nocera opened the door for last July, when he and postdoc fellow Matthew Kanan announced a cheap, practical solution to one of solar power’s main hurdles: energy storage. They’ve come up with a system that can use the sun’s oomph to split water molecules into their constituent elements, hydrogen and oxygen. The idea is that those elements could then be recombined in a fuel cell, releasing energy to run a household on cloudy days and at night, when ordinary solar systems stop producing.

Using electric current to break down H2O—a process called electrolysis—is nothing new; high-school teachers have been demonstrating it for decades. But the classroom trick requires huge amounts of electricity. While commercial electrolysis is a much more efficient process, it’s a wildly expensive way to produce hydrogen.

Nocera’s setup, inspired by nature’s own energy-creation process, photosynthesis, could cost tens instead of thousands of dollars, and it can work at room temperature, using ordinary materials, in a home. By adding a chemical catalyst (cobalt and potassium phosphate) to plain water, his technique splits the molecules using just a volt or so of electricity. Coming up with a scheme like this has been a holy grail of chemistry, which is why biochemistry pioneer James Barber, of London’s Imperial College, called it “a major discovery with enormous implications for the future prosperity of mankind.”

If Nocera’s method proves scalable, it will be the first affordable, nonpolluting means of producing that clean fuel of the future, hydrogen, which in nature is almost always found in compounds with other elements. By laying the groundwork for cheap solar-energy storage, it could also pave the way for decentralized solar power on a massive scale.

“Cracking the storage nut would be huge,” says Peter Rive, co-founder of SolarCity, the country’s largest residential solar-panel-installation company. “In fact, it’s required for us to be able to get completely off of fossil fuels.” Using current lead-acid battery storage, Rive calculates, you’d need about 2,000 pounds of batteries to store enough energy to power an average house at night or during a period of extended cloud cover. Nocera thinks he can do it with about a gallon of water.

Here’s how it would work. During the day, photovoltaic panels would power your house and send the excess energy to your basement or garage, where it would split a small container of water into oxygen and hydrogen. After sundown, the hydrogen and oxygen would be recombined in a fuel cell, creating electricity to run your house (and charge your electric car) and restoring the water to its original state. “All of a sudden,” Nocera says, “your house has become a power station.” The system would be cheap and endlessly renewable, and it would work as well in rural Africa as in urban America. This is the key: For the 3 billion people who livein the developing world, Nocera’s system could be a cheap, self-contained ticket to energy independence.

Of course, all this is still a ways down the road. “I’m giving it five years,” says Nocera, “but much of that is beyond my control.” He’s working with other innovators and entrepreneurs to overcome the obstacles that remain: developing a better way to compress hydrogen for storage and building a more efficient and inexpensive fuel cell. Meanwhile, wannabe funders and entrepreneurs hoping to develop the first commercial applications parade through Nocera’s lab, vying to partner with him and MIT, which holds the patent on his discovery.

When I visit Nocera in his office, the day after the grad students’ video show, he’s juggling a conference call, a class, and a meeting with scientists from the European oil company Eni, a major contributor to his annual $2.5 million in research funding. I haven’t been there long when his assistant, Allison Kelsey, pops her head in. “That guy from the Netherlands who’s been e-mailing you—the wind guy? Well, he’s right out here.”

“He’s here?!”

“Yes. And the American Chemical Society is on the phone. And who’s ordering the sandwiches for the Eni scientists? Oh, and I need a raise.”

Nocera reacts to this with the relaxed assuredness of a Deadhead, which is exactly what he is. His bookshelf is filled with bootleg CDs, and he’s wearing what looks like a Hawaiian shirt with a groovy ursine pattern. “See?” Nocera says. “Dancing bears!”

Another surprise is that the man who’s spent his career trying to replicate photosynthesis isn’t much of a tree hugger. “Actually, I hate nature,” he says. “I’m very fastidious. I love to look at it, but to go out there and, like, camp out?”

Yet nature is where he found his solace—and his career. His father, Daniel Sr., worked in retail as a women’s-clothing buyer for Sears and then J.C. Penney, and the family moved at least a dozen times in his grade-school years, from Massachusetts to Rhode Island to Manhattan and everywhere in between.

“So what you do,” Nocera tells me, “is you turn to something that’s constant. And that was science. I used to do this thing I called ‘going on a field trip.’ And the field trip was a one-meter-by-one-meter piece of earth, right? ‘Cause you could then get a microscope . . . and in just that little piece of land, you could keep going in the dirt and find a whole new world.”

“That’s what research is: You teach yourself stuff,” Nocera says. “The true, true discovery—you’ve got to just do it yourself. You can’t read about it.”

This seems like an important lesson to­day: the power of pure curiosity and focus, not just for today’s indoor video kids or those of us who watch nature mostly from our desks, but for poor broken-down America as it looks for new traction on the global economic road.

Moving forward, Nocera believes, is really a matter of commitment. If Americans would get serious about funding renewable energy—instead of “throwing money down the drain in stock markets”—the innovations would come. It’s like he told his graduate students, as they cranked up the fog machine and began the arduous task of disposing of the beer: “We went to the moon! Doesn’t it seem easier to do what I’m doing here?”

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The shorts, it turned out, are stiff seventies-style canvas hikers possessed of a certain heroic Dudley Do-Right practicality, much like Schendler himself. As the SkiCo’s executive director of environmental affairs since 2001, Schendler has emerged as the industry’s most visible environmental gadfly, and the man who’s led Aspen’s relentless push toward more forward-thinking projects. In 2004, the SkiCo became the first ski resort to gain ISO 14001 certification, meaning its operations meet green guidelines set by the International Organization for Standardization. It started the Save Snow campaign to encourage activism; created an Environment Foundation, through which its employees have donated more than $1 million to local projects; installed real-time energy-monitoring software; and stopped buying Kleenex for its four ski areas—Aspen Mountain, Aspen Highlands, Buttermilk, and Snowmass—because the brand refused to quit using virgin paper from endangered forests. As other resorts rush to follow Aspen’s lead, Schendler is, in effect, setting the environmental agenda for the entire industry.

Yet his mouth has gotten him into trouble, specifically when he has very publicly criticized his own company’s environmental progress, suggesting that all its efforts have basically been for naught. Schendler can be shockingly honest about the challenges green companies face, to a point that can confuse his co-workers and annoy his competitors. More than once, his bosses, who support his particularly rabid brand of corporate accountability, have fended off other resort managers asking someone to put a muzzle on the guy.

I get a sense of Schendler’s boundless enthusiasm as I follow him on his rounds. Tall, blond, and fit at 38, Schendler is both hyper-smart and hyperactive, showing off his projects like a ten-year-old with a science kit. I chase after him as he lopes from office to ski run to sports club in pursuit of eco-infractions and more caffeine.

“Oops! Look at this—60 watts,” Schendler says of a light fixture at the Snowmass Club. “Someone replaced the fluorescents. How do you keep that from happening?” On the new tennis-court lighting: “This is actually a failure that remains a failure.” On the ladies’ room at the bottom of Snowmass’s Elk Camp gondola: “See, she’s going to leave the light on, and it will be on all summer.” And on the micro-hydroelectric system he built on Snowmass’s Fanny Hill in 2004: “This is probably the coolest thing I’ve ever been involved with.”

The system funnels spring runoff down a snowmaking pipe, through a turbine, and back into the creek. It cost $150,000 and produces 150,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity annually, with $10,000 worth sold back to the grid—and its profitability paved the way for another, bigger hydro plant on Aspen Mountain and three possible wind turbines on Snowmass. It took years of technical disasters, budget overruns, and, as Schendler calls them, “Soviet-style” bureaucratic hoops to make it happen. In that sense, the project is a perfect example of a Schendler success: great once it’s done but such a massive headache in the making that few companies would’ve green-lighted it.

Part of Aspen’s willingness to take risks is cultural; in a building full of young sports nuts and creative types, employees like to say that “the inmates are running the asylum.” Schendler, a New Jersey native who graduated from Bowdoin College in 1992 with a degree in biology and environmental studies, is a kayaker who’s also summited Mount McKinley. He worked for Outward Bound, and as a researcher at the Rocky Mountain Institute, under green-business guru Amory Lovins, before starting at the SkiCo. CEO Kaplan was a ski instructor in Taos, New Mexico, until he got his M.B.A. from the University of Denver. Matt Jones, 39, the CFO whose acrobatic number crunching made the array possible, is a former backup singer who drinks bourbon with Schendler every Friday.It also helps to have billionaire backers who believe green innovation is good business. Aspen is owned by the Chicago-based investment firm Henry Crown and Company, whose president, Jim Crown, has long overseen the resort’s drive for sustainability. In 1994, Crown hired Kaplan’s predecessor, Pat O’Donnell, who’d worked at Patagonia. “I give Pat a lot of credit,” he says, “for saying ‘This has to be part of how we live our lives. Also, we need snow, and global warming is the enemy of, among other things, robust winters.’ “

To combat that enemy, they’ve unleashed Schendler, an energy vortex in his own right. “I tried decaf,” he tells me at one point. He was miserable. “So I asked myself, ‘Do I want to live a decaf life?’ “

The answer, clearly, was no.

BACK IN THE OFFICE, Schendler dives into the day’s challenge: biodiesel. The SkiCo got lots of attention in 2002 when it decided—at his urging—to run its Sno-Cats on B20. But now he wants to go back to using regular diesel. It’s become cleaner, and biofuels, because they rely on land that could be used to grow edible crops, may contribute to the global food crisis. Schendler and vice president of marketing Jeanne Mackowski are discussing ads to explain the change in policy.

“What do you do?” Schendler says. “For us to continue to use biodiesel when it doesn’t do environmental good, just because we have that message out there—3we can’t do that and stay true to any level of integrity.”

Even so, Udall thinks the drill-it-now mentality is misguided. By leasing western lands all at once, he argues, we’re burning the house down to stay warm for a night. If we auctioned off those leases at market rates over decades, we’d buy ourselves much more prosperity. And with the West as rich as it is in solar, wind, and geothermal potential, dialing back on leasing while we push hard on renewables makes better economic sense.

All of this doesn’t mean the new president won’t have options. He will, and by using them aggressively, he can make a huge difference. Opposition to drilling has been growing in surprising quarters—from local governments to traditionally conservative groups like ranchers and hunters. That broad-based resistance can provide political leeway. Just as Bush issued an executive order in 2001 telling federal land managers to expedite applications for “energy-related projects,” the new prez can tell the Bureau of Land Management to stop issuing new drilling permits until we get a handle on what’s been leased so far. He can direct land managers to enforce regulations often waived under Bush and Cheney—like man­datory directional drilling, which uses far fewer wells, and drilling bans in wildlife breeding grounds and winter ranges. And he can work to pass a carbon cap, making carbon-heavy resources like oil shale compete on a level field with renewables like wind.

Meanwhile, he can attack from the demand side. “The case that we need more and more natural gas is based on our supply-side mentality,” says Ned Farquhar, an energy analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council. “If we did efficiency halfway intelligently, we could eliminate 20 to 30 percent of our demand for natural gas in the next 15 years.” As slackened demand lowers gas prices, he argues, it can also make Rocky Mountain drilling, which can be expensive and infrastructure-heavy, a much less attractive proposition financially.

That efficiency push includes enlisting regular citizens as well, says Gloria Flora, the former U.S. Forest Service supervisor who famously halted new drilling in 356,000 acres of Montana’s Rocky Mountain Front and who now directs the public-lands nonprofit Sustainable Obtainable Solutions. “People get it. They want to do something, and they don’t know what to do. Imagine if we had an administration that could actively engage the population and say, ‘Look, this is what we’re going to do.’ Instead of saying after 9/11, ‘Go shopping,’ what if, after the 2008 energy spike, they said, ‘Let’s go conserving’?”

But we’ll also have to swallow hard and compromise. Even as it works on a “western energy greenprint” to phase out fossil fuels by 2050, for example, the NRDC is supporting a natural-gas pipeline from Alaska, where more gas than the U.S.’s proven reserves of 211 trillion cubic feet may lie underneath lands that have already been drilled for oil.

“You have to pair the big no with the big yes,” says Udall. “To get 20 percent of our electricity from wind would be a wonderful thing, but you’ll have to build 19,000 miles of transmission lines. To get a bunch of electricity from the sun, you’ve got to cover thousands of square miles of desert with solar panels. We’re gonna lose some desert tortoise, and we’re gonna piss some people off building those transmission lines.”

As for the West, it had better hold on tight. Places like the tiny windswept crossroads of Pinedale, Wyoming, have been experiencing ozone-alert days, thanks in part to the diesel compressors from 700 gas wells in the area—and in June, the BLM announced plans for 3,700 more. This would mean a well every 2.5 acres in some places. And keep in mind that a well pad—the bulldozed patch that the drill rig sits on—can cover an acre or more.

“We’ve got to restore some balance so it’s not just ‘Katie, bar the door,’ “says Wilderness Society senior policy adviser Dave Albers­werth. “I went out there and it’s like a scene from There Will Be Blood, only without the flaming gusher.” Expect that scene to replay all over the West: According to a Wilderness Society count of BLM permits under review, we could see 126,381 new oil and gas wells over the next 15 to 20 years—in the Rocky Mountain states alone.

“The danger for the Rockies is that we become sort of roadkill in a Mad Max movie,” says Udall. “Put it this way: In a ham-and-egg breakfast, the chicken is involved, but the pig is committed. Well, the Rockies are the pig.”

I got a hint of this in July, when I flew over Colorado’s Roan Plateau—73,600 acres of elk habitat, 3,000 feet above the natural-gas boomtown of Rifle—with EcoFlight founder Bruce Gordon, who’s spent 9,500 hours flying politicians and reporters over western lands. When the BLM announced plans to put 55,000 acres here up for commercial leasing this summer, it mowed over 75,000 public comments (98 percent in support of greater protection for the Roan), a lawsuit from ten conservation and hunting groups, and more moderate plans from Colorado senator Ken Salazar and governor Bill Ritter.

We took off from Aspen, taxiing our way past dozens of private jets. West of Rifle, we banked north. To our right lay the undeveloped public lands of the Roan, unexpectedly lush, a green ocean rolling with aspens and conifers. To our left was private land: rigs, pumps, trailers, and barracks, with gas flares torching beside magenta evaporation ponds.

“None of this was here six years ago,” Gordon hollered over the headset. “Now you fly in here at night and it’s lit up like a coliseum. And you should expect this to triple.” In my head I tripled the hives I saw below me; the scale made me dizzy—subdivision after subdivision of industrial cul-de-sacs that, without some swift action and smart national thinking, could have no end in sight.

“We have no conception, no word, no image, for what’s coming,” Udall had told me. “Neither McCain nor Obama have come to grips with the scale of what we face. Nor has the environmental community. Everybody’s living in a fairy tale.”

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When I heard about NoPoPo rechargeable batteries, I was stoked. On the outside, these Japanese wonders look like regular AAs; on the inside, magnesium and carbon are supposed to react with any old liquid—water, milk, even, as bloggers gleefully pointed out, urine—to recharge. Perfect, I thought. I’ll take them camping, and when my headlamp runs out I’ll holler, “Ooohhh, honey, would you mind?” I mentioned the idea to my boyfriend, Win, delicately—after all, he’d be the one providing the manwater to run the things. He perked right up. “Do they run on blood?”

The NoPoPos look a lot like a Hello Kitty science kit. Sky, a friend of a friend living in Tokyo, had gotten me the goods—bright blue AAs and AAAs, packaged with a tiny plastic eyedropper for refueling. The instructions, which Sky had helpfully started to translate, were intimidating: BE CAREFUL! USE THE PROVIDED DROPPER AT ALL TIMES! But Sky abandoned the script fairly quickly. “Actually, it doesn’t matter,” he wrote, disgusted with the NoPoPo’s anemic voltage. “These are only for your shitty LED light and pocket radio in a postapocalyptic world where the dead are the lucky ones and you wander in search of something to drink just so you can piss into your batteries one last time . . . ”

Sky was right. Water, beer, bourbon—none of it worked. The NoPoPos did manage to illuminate (dimly) the little LED light in a headlamp for more than a month. But then I realized that I’d put an Energizer in there with them. The Bunny was doing most of the work.

I thought about going the DIY route. There’s a Web site, HouseholdHacker.com, that says you can power your laptop with half an onion soaking in Gatorade—something about the electrolytes—but after a week of soaking, I couldn’t get the onion to absorb even an ounce of Mountain Blast Powerade, and my dogs were looking at the blue potion suspiciously.

So much for the gimmicky home science. I was going high-tech. In the past couple of years, portable power devices for emergencies and travel have caught on—from tiny wind turbines to solar-paneled messenger bags, backpacks, and even a solar bikini (alas, just a prototype). On a spring camping trip on the San Juan River in Bluff, Utah, I loaded the car with all the alt-power devices and small appliances I could carry. Win and I would play Scrabble under the table lamp, I figured, fix margaritas in the blender, and, in the morning, fire up the Mr. Coffee. I’d wash my hair in the river … and blow-dry it right in camp!

Strewn around our plot at the Sand Island campground were a solar backpack from Voltaic; a compact Solio charger that unfurled like a flower into three little photovoltaic panels; a tiny HYmini wind turbine that could attach to a bike or car; and two folding Brunton solar panels that connected to sturdy metal batteries. One, about the size of a deck of cards, could charge an audio player or phone. The second, a dictionary-size, 14.6-volt Portable Power Plant capable of running your laptop on Everest, was strong enough that it came with a set of wee jumper cables.

Excitedly, I plugged the hair dryer into the big Brunton. Nothing. Lamp, coffeemaker, toaster oven: No dice. But when I fired up the blender, the blades began to turn slowly. And stop. Whirr. Silence. Whirr. Silence.

“Babe,” said Win, “I think what you’ve got there is an alternating current.” It was true; the AC coming from the battery’s inverter was so weak that it ran the appliance in fits. Win, who is a river guide, was philosophical. “The only thing we learned is that blenders don’t belong in the wilderness.” He looked around at the next campsite, where a church bus was discharging 30 teenagers. “Then again, this isn’t really the wilderness.”

I was undeterred. “We could at least stir drinks with this!” Of course, our tests had already sucked up half of the device’s 36-hour power supply.

For the rest of the weekend, we ran—rather fitfully—on nerd power. The HYmini needed wind speeds of nine miles per hour to generate electricity, so we attached it to the car window and drove off on our adventures, shouting over the whirring of the plastic propellers—never mind that it ran my cell phone for only 20 minutes. We geeked out over the solar backpack, which, with all its wires and batteries, seemed better suited for a space walk. “You can wear it hiking,” I chirped, filling it up with sandwiches. “Oh, my goodness,” Win said, taking one look at my cell phone nestled in the strap charger pocket. “You’ll be wearing it hiking.”

But if your wilderness needs don’t include 1800-watt hair styling, the solar stuff is bomber. Win snatched up the little Solio like it was his blankie and carried it on a two-week trip down the Grand Canyon—for the first time, he could lie on his boat and listen to music for more than one night. I made off with the little Brunton, which seemed nearly indestructible.

Back home, I vowed to stop using the wall outlet. The HYmini was out; I drove around for days trying to recharge it before realizing that once you suck the device dry, you have to plug it in: It can’t recharge from scratch on wind.

So mostly I rolled on solar. Some days, when I’d been diligent with my outdoor charging chores—shifting the panels to face the sun, making sure they were slanted 45 degrees—living on sun juice was easy. Others, not so much. The little Brunton survived a dousing when I dumped a full water bottle in my purse, only to warp when I left it baking for six days on the griddle-hot dashboard of my car. (Note: Dashboard frying not recommended, nor are hot surfaces much above 120 degrees.) The big Brunton soldiered on doggedly. Still, after charging it for 36 light-filled hours, it ran my laptop for six, a sobering reminder of just how much electricity fire-hoses out of our outlets every time we plug something in.

In the end, I simply stopped using my gadgets so often. Now when my charge runs out, I’m done for the day. But whatever nano­wattage of self-reliance I can eke out feels like opening the window and letting in a little puff of freedom—just enough breeze to fruitlessly spin my teeny turbine and make me feel partially, crucially in control of my fate.

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Scientists like Berzin tend to get a little moony over algae: Its cells can divide every six hours and it thrives everywhere from the geysers of Yellowstone to the Arctic to the Dead Sea. “They’re very, very adaptive,” Berzin says. “And they’re kind of cute when you look in the microscope and see them swimming around with their little mustaches.” He sent me a video clip that showed algae cells “kissing,” and I had to admit they were adorable.

But what really makes biologists salivate is algae’s off-the-charts energy potential. If emissions could be pumped right from a power plant’s smokestack to an on-site “algae farm”—beds of microalgae suspended in water and exposed to the sun—the algae, with their scandalous replication rates, could turn every two tons of carbon dioxide into 1,500 pounds of protein and 500 pounds of oil.

“If you used algae to mitigate just 20 percent of the carbon dioxide emissions from U.S. power generation,” Berzin says, “you’d be producing 2.8 million barrels of biodiesel per day—that’s, like, 20 percent of our oil imports. How much do we buy from Saudi Arabia? Less than that.” Down the road, a coal plant could get carbon credits for reducing its emissions—the equivalent of, say, $30 per ton saved—while the farmer could sell the algae meal and oil for hundreds of dollars a ton. “That’s why the symbiosis is so wonderful,” Berzin says. “It’s perfect love.”

Perfect love, of course, is elusive: Attempts in the 1980s by government researchers mostly used open ponds that required tons of water and raised more questions than answers: What about evaporation? Can you just sieve out algae that’s suspended in water? How about flocculation (letting the algae clump and settle)? Most important, how can you bring down “farming” costs enough to deliver the algae oil for $1 to $2 a gallon? Some 200 startups are racing to answer these questions, running pilot projects, chasing investors, and chasing investors some more. To add incentive, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the research arm of the Pentagon, is seeking proposals for affordable ways to churn out thousands of gallons of a JP-8 jet fuel alternative from either algae or biomass.

Researchers, of course, are closely guarding the innovations they’re hatching to make algae-based fuel a reality. But some may be closer than you think. Entrepreneurs at one California company, Solazyme, use genetically modified algae to turn switchgrass and woody debris into biofuel, which they’re testing in a Mercedes. Berzin’s GreenFuel Technologies used giant water-and-algae-filled plastic bags suspended from frames to test different algae species for local site conditions; he calculated yields of up to 1.7 million gallons of fuel a year for every 250 acres of land devoted to algae farming. (Soy, he says, yields 11,700 gallons in a similar space, and rapeseed, a European favorite, 42,800 gallons.) Berzin just signed a $92 million deal to install an algae farm at a cement plant in Europe, and expects to have a commercial contract with an American power plant this year.

Then there’s Jim Sears, a systems engineer whose Boulder, Colorado–based A2BE Carbon Capture startup is working with scientists from New Mexico’s Sandia and Los Alamos national labs, among others, on the DARPA solicitation. (Sears has worked with NASA and the National Institutes of Health, and he helped perfect the Hump-O-Meter, a device worn by cows that detects sexual activity, so that it would be strong enough to “withstand the rigor of the blissful moment.”) For full-scale algae-fuel production, Sears has designed closed systems of 50-by-450-foot clear plastic photobioreactors (think water-bed bladders full of algae). With 16 to 32 million acres of photobioreactors spread around the world, Sears believes, some 3.66 gigatons of CO₂ could be consumed each year. That’s one-seventh of the way toward halting the world’s emissions at 1990 levels by 2050. Sears’s project, like the others here, is planned largely for nonarable land using mostly brackish water.

I heard that. While I’ve been known to whine plenty at my parents about recycling (sorry, Mom!), I get a little tired of being preached at myself—and we certainly live in preachy times. Brought to you by hour ten of The 11th Hour and Jay Leno’s $500,000 solar garage, the result can be a bad case of green fatigue, a strange combination of eye rolling and despair. Sure, we’re fed up with the characters on Las Vegas doling out eco-tips, but what really wears us down is a deeper anxiety that comes from solutions that seem as overwhelming as the problem. Switch to biodiesel and you’re starving the world’s poor; run your house on wind power and you’re knocking little birds out of the sky. Meanwhile, the planet may be cooking faster than we thought—and we can’t afford that $182 pair of organic jeans to save it.

Was there anybody out there, I wondered, who wasn’t suffering from green fatigue? I decided to go look. What I discovered was that while many of us adults are feeling overwhelmed, the younger crowd is just getting started. More specifically, a motley crew of student leaders and urban activists aren’t just energizing the environmental movement; they’re hijacking it. While we fiddle with the radio, they’re driving away in the hybrid car. Using the war in Iraq, energy independence, Katrina, and the economic benefits of new technologies, they’re arguing for a clean-energy revolution that, as Jones put it, “lifts all boats.” Power Shift, billed as the largest single youth gathering on climate change in history, seemed like the perfect place to find out where this coalition was going—and if they’d get very far.

The first thing I’d noticed when I walked into rally HQ, at the University of Maryland’s Cole Field House, was the fresh scent of optimism in the air. Green fatigue? Brown University senior Nathan Wyeth, who at 22 has already served on the board of the Sierra Club, looked puzzled. “Nobody’s here to hear about doom and gloom,” he said.

Billy Parish, 26, cofounder of the Energy Action Coalition, which organized Power Shift, seconded that. “Unless we’re coming out with a positive agenda about what we want to do—not what we don’t want other people to do—we’re not going to build a grassroots movement,” he told me. “This issue is the defining challenge of our generation, and it creates an opportunity for solving a lot of other problems. Economically, our parents’ generation is leaving an incredible burden on us. Ecologically, that burden is even more devastating.”

The Power Shift kids seemed bizarrely psyched to clean that mess up. Pouring into the gymnasium was a mix of dreadlocked white kids, African-Americans in shirts and ties, native Alaskans in baggy hoodies, green-necks in trucker hats, everybody stomping on the bleachers as the sound system bumped out Beck’s “E-Pro.” Onstage, the Reverend Lennox Yearwood, 38, president of the Hip Hop Caucus, issued the call. “The climate movement is changing!” he shouted. “It’s white, it’s black, it’s yellow, it’s male, it’s female, it’s deist, it’s atheist, it’s straight, it’s gay. It’s the most powerful movement the world has seen in the 21st century!”

By Monday, after two days of panel discussions, workshops, and speakers ranging from Sustainable South Bronx diva Majora Carter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (whose halting speech was the only one that bombed), the students had worked themselves into
a frenzy. They swarmed Capitol Hill to demand three specific goals: no new coal-powered electric plants, five million new green-collar jobs, and an 80 percent reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050.

Was anybody listening? In Washington, it can be hard to tell. Hundreds of students packed into a hearing room for a special
session of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming— the largest turnout, said committee chair Edward J. Markey, that he’d seen in 31 years as a legislator. Parish and four students sat rigid before the microphones, testifying, often tearfully, about hunters in coastal Alaskan villages falling through ice, about homes being swept away by Katrina, and about the need for a Clean Energy Corps based on the 1930s Civilian Conservation Corps.

Trouble was, they had an audience of one. Facing them on the dais, Markey listened intently, flanked by 14 empty seats. Since it was Monday morning, House staffers explained, the committee members were still traveling back from their districts. All 14 of them? The message seemed to be: Thanks, kids, we’ll catch your act on C-Span. And this made me wonder: Would the causes of this generation fade like the rainforest and baby seals did when I was in college? Back then, a green wave rolled across campuses and Hollywood, then fizzled out to the sounds of “We Are the World.”

If this movement were just 6,000 students urging Americans to live right, that might well be the end of it. But these protesters were the thin edge of a wedge. Their concerns are echoed by a chorus of big-city mayors, from New York’s Michael Bloomberg to San Francisco’s Gavin Newsom, by governors in states from Florida to California, by presidential candidates from Hillary to Huckabee—heck, by the entire UN. They’re part of a larger group that includes minorities and evangelicals, Iraq veterans, labor unions, and a host of environmental groups now working together under the umbrella coalition 1Sky, whose goals are the ones adopted by the students on the Hill.

Meanwhile, it helps that the Power Shifters are not easily cowed. “We’re like dogs,” model and organizer Summer Rayne Oakes told me she’d said after Pelosi’s speech. “We can smell fear and we have no patience for bullshit.” Soon the wave poured over to the West Lawn of the Capitol where thousands more were assembling, a sea of yellow Power Shift T-shirts bobbing under placards that read, 1SKY! 1FUTURE! 1CLIMATE! 1CHANCE! Van Jones was there, again igniting the crowd.

Earlier, I’d asked him, “Don’t you get worn out?” We were driving to the Lincoln Memorial; he was toting a cold burrito and preparing for his second speech today. Didn’t he ever get pessimistic?

He laughed. “See, you have to realize that I’m African-American,” he said. “This is not our first bad year. So welcome to our world.” Then he got serious.

“Look at Dr. King. There’s no reason in the world for him to have given any speech in 1963 except ‘I have a complaint! I have a long list of things about which I am thoroughly pissed off!’ But look at the speech. Look at the outcome: not perfect, but certainly a lot better than what we had.”

Now I felt bad. In the face of such resilience, in the face of the optimism put forth by Jones and the students and even the dancing polar bears, green fatigue suddenly felt silly—and kind of old. The playing field has changed, green has gone broader, and the environmental movement needs all the energy—and all the friends—it can get.

It’s not that green fatigue isn’t real. It’s just that it’s a luxury.

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