After 40 years of organized rallies and events raising awareness and promoting environmental advocacy, I think it is fair to ask the question "to what end?" Where are we now compared to the first passionate rallies shook the nation? As Senator John Kerry prepares to unveil a new bi-partisan direction for US energy legislation, and the United States jockeys to control international climate negotiations, where exactly are we headed?

In this great interview of ecologist David Orr, he speaks about some of the lost thunder from those inspired days:

The one thing that was missing in that dialogue in the Seventies and Eighties was that nobody was really talking about strategy. How do we convey this as a message? We made the assumption, at least I sure did, that all people needed were the facts, data and logic. That meant more articles, more books, and then pretty soon they’ll see what’s at stake. I think we missed the whole issue of how you motivate people and how you actually move the dialogue. I don’t know that even if we had tried to do that, I don’t know that we could have done. I know that I went to meetings in the Seventies and Eighties, talking about the politics of these things and I don’t think people got how important the political dimension was, even at the local scale, the national or global scale, I don’t think people were understanding it.

I think the past 40 years have proven the inability of the environmental movement to gain traction on protecting planet Earth and her inhabitants. And I think that in order to make a serious dent in staving off the worst of the environmental crises that we now confront, we need to start a new conversation. Let us not make the same strategic failures of the past 4 decades. Let's learn from our mistakes and figure out what it takes to build an effective movement to reverse course before it's too late.

Please join the conversation by entertaining some of the following questions. What is your sense of the successes and failures of environmental advocacy of the past 40 years? What's been missing from the strategy and how do we best change course? How do we reframe the conversation and shift the debate so that it is grounded in reality and possibility? How do we organize ourselves in our communities and across the Commonwealth, the nation, and the globe, to have a voice in the debate about the survival of our species? How do we bridge the gaps that keep us divided? What are realistic goals for US climate legislation and the UN climate negotiations in Cancun this December? What are realistic goals 3-5 years out? 10 years out? How do we change the political realities so that they are up to the task of confronting the daunting ecological realities of our time?