One of America's best known environmental historians is an old friend from my home town of Pittsburgh.  Dr. Sam Hays is the former Dean of History at Pitt University and author of several books on the history of conservation in America.

I mention Sam because he wrote this thoughtful observation in his book Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency, "The conservation movement has contributed more than its share to the political drama of the twentieth century" Sam lists various historic moments and provides great insight, "cast in the framework of a moral struggle between the 'virtuous people' and the evil 'interests,' these events have provided issues tailor-made to arouse the public to a fighting pitch, and they continue to inspire the historian to recount a tale of noble and stirring enterprise. This crusading quality of the conservation movement has given it an enviable reputation as a defender of spiritual values and national character."

We need to get back to "the crusading quality of the conservation movement," that Sam wrote about if we want to "arouse the public to a fighting pitch" on global warming. Skyscrapers are not built from the sky down, neither can the conservation movement be renewed from Washington. After twenty-five years of top-down advocacy with critical decisions being prescribed in various staff gatherings, the greatest challenge the environmental cause now faces is the prospect of giving the movement back the grassroots volunteers while we reach out with open arms to new constituencies and new voices.

Conservation leaders must empower and assist "virtuous people" all across America to get the facts and to act boldly while we leaders learn to let go and allow the movement to grow organically across America. Ironically, a true movement does not happen until we completely lose control. By definition any political or social movement is an up-welling of voices so large and diverse that it threatens and eventually overthrows status quo and the keepers of status quo.

Letting go is difficult thing to do because it forces us all to be more "enablers of others."  To do that, we need to think of ourselves as "servants of the cause" not as "command and control" leaders. While the risks are many, the rewards can be great. Unleashing the true power of our base, we might enable Americans from every sector to step up, demand that we stop global warming and save the planet for our children.

The world is in too much trouble for incrementalism of the past. Until common people take uncommon steps to demand dramatic energy policy changes, the world much like Greenland's glaciers will continue to slide toward a tipping point. National Wildlife Federation's strategic plan commits to this institution to serving as a movement-building organization to reconnect people to nature and to each other to protect wildlife and their fragile habitats and most immediately to stop global warming.

Please take a leadership role in your community!  The world can not wait.

Liberals and conservatives in Los Angeles have been burning under intense record-setting heat as triple-digit temperatures covered much of the Southwest for several days. (Woodland Hills had a record-setting 119 degrees last Saturday.) LA is not alone, nine of eleven San Francisco Bay Area cities broke heat records last week.  Nationwide, the first six months of 2006 were the warmest in the US since records were first kept in 1895.

Even the  conservatives are now wondering if former Vice President AL Gore could possibly be right, are we frying our future? 

One LA conservative blogger who operates under the name "citizen conservative," posted this about recent weather, "2006 is different. We have already been through more than a week of hot, humid weather. And it does not cool off at night. Our natural ‘air conditioning’----that famous San Francisco fog---is missing.  Which would be OK if the heat zapped only liberals.  Unfortunately, conservatives suffer as much as liberals."

People of all political persuasion need to get ready for the heat.  Global warming respects no political orientation.  It's not a liberal nor conservative matter even though conservatives have become tone deaf as a result of a lot of Exxon/Mobile funded spin doctors and becasue they have misplaced trust in right-wing critics like Senator Inhof and James Dobson.  Global warming is not about left or right, its about right or wrong.  It's morally wrong to wreck a planet and harm billions of people.

To the conservative blogger, the loss of fog is just the beginning.  You are watching a non-linear change on the planet.  Much like a branch that bends so far and then snaps, unchecked global warming will to break out big time. So expect much more heat and more intense coastal storms with landslides. Forest fires have already increased fourfold in the dry regions and droughts are just beginning in many agricultural regions.  Stay tuned, much much more will come unless our political leaders on both sides of the isle hear the inconvenient truth.  They will not speak until they hear from voters who have largely ignored the science to date.

If you look at what's going on around the world, the Russians are fighting a fire that has already burned an area as large as Pennsylvania.  Twenty-eight million acres have burned up this summer because of drought and heat caused in large part by global warming.  The forest was once an important carbon sink now it's a carbon source.

The Amazon jungle is about to turn into the Amazon desert.  Suffering its second year of extreme drought, scientists are predicting an enormous ecosystem collapse and a mega-fires unless the drought breaks.  If the Amazon goes, all bets are off for stopping global warming.

I hope our children are not watching our stupidity because they surely will pay the price.  As the fog has lifted in LA, I hope the fog lifts in America.

When we turn on the kitchen spigot to get a drink of water, we expect to find crystal-clear, cold, pure water. A recent decision by the Supreme Court could change that.

Water flows downhill. From the law of physics follows that anything dumped into water - including pollutants - will eventually wend its way downstream through the interconnectedness of wetlands, tributaries, streams, rivers, ponds and lakes.

For this reason, Congress passed the 1972 Clean Water Act, to set a national standard for protecting all the Nation's waters including wetlands. For more than three decades, the agencies charged with enforcing these legal safeguards have viewed the aquatic system as a whole, recognizing that the security of drinking water connects to the health and viability of remote wetlands. The benefits to every American from this far-sighted legislation are incalculable.

Since the early nineties, land developers and speculators have unsuccessfully urged Congress to gut the wetlands protections from the Clean Water Act so they could build on critical wetlands without restraint. Legislative fixes that were not achievable by special interest lobbyists in even a conservative Congress are now being achieved by wrong-headed court actions.

On June 19, the Supreme Court threw wetland protections into confusion.

In a contentiously split decision, the court mandated that, for now at least, questions of Clean Water Act jurisdiction over wetlands will have to be thrashed out on a case-by-case basis. One result is certain: The lawyers will have a field day.

This interpretation if left standing, would strip away protections for roughly half the nation's wetlands and intermittent streams, which either are more subtly connected to free-standing or -flowing waters or are not themselves wet or flowing all year round. The Upper Midwest's Prairie Potholes come to mind, the seasonally wet and annually vital nesting area for millions of migratory waterfowl.

Dry today, perhaps. But when the flash floods come - as they always do - whatever pollutants have been dumped into those dry channels flow downhill: ultimately into our drinking water and the rivulets that freshen life for an abundance of other living things. Many so-called isolated and temporary wetlands filter pollutants and recharge ground water for millions of household water supplies.

It is also likely that the chief enforcement agencies - the Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers - will try to write new wetlands-jurisdiction rules based on interpreting the tea leaves contained in the justices' voluminous opinions. That will mean more litigation.

The solution is obvious. Congress and the White House should reject this recent spat of judicial activism on behalf of developers and work together to pass legislation confirming that Congress meant what it said in 1972: The Clean Water Act applies to all the nation's waters, not just some. The protections must be a national standard, not a patchwork.

There is no reason why this cannot be done before Congress adjourns. The bill is already written: HR 1356, the Clean Water Authority Restoration Act. It has 158 bipartisan co-sponsors in the House. With leadership and a clear public demand for action, it should soon have a majority.

Passage of legislation to end the confusion caused by the court decision is the strongest available tool. Moreover, the Bush administration is fully aware that the president's commitment to a legacy of a net gain in wetlands can't be achieved if the scope of the Clean Water Act's safeguards is eroded. The administration's initial reaction to the Supreme Court's decision also holds promise. "We will explore next steps to further protection and conservation through all available tools," said Ben Grumbles, the EPA's top water administrator.

In the meantime, opinion on the Supreme Court is now precariously balanced:

Four justices sided with maintaining the law's comprehensive jurisdiction. Four justices, led by Antonin Scalia, sided for radically limiting jurisdiction - essentially to only permanently free-flowing or free-standing waters, and those wetlands immediately connected to them.

The ninth Supreme Court justice is the pivot. Moderate conservative Anthony Kennedy sided with the Scalia opinion in returning the cases at hand to the lower courts, for reconsideration, but he indicated that updated enforcement rules, based on a vague "significant-nexus" test, should still allow for broad application of Clean Water Act.

That's a mighty thin reed on which to place the burden of assuring that we do not return to letting toxins into our waters and licensing the degradation of wetlands simply because they're not permanently wet or don't flow directly into free-standing or free-flowing waters.

The threat behind Justice Scalia's opinion is enormous. It is encapsulated by his statement that jurisdiction is "beyond parody" when applied to "dry arroyos in the middle of the desert."

Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., an architect of the Clean Water Act, recognized the threat when he said that the Supreme Court decision displayed a "disdain for Congress" and for the intent that the law protect all America's waters.

The matter of safe, reliable water supply will become even more critical in a warming world where ground water will be in short supply in many dry regions of the country. The confusion about the National importance of wetland protection must be set aside.

Congress and the president should clearly restate the principle that the Clean Water Act applies to all U.S. waters - those great and those small - all of which together form the foundation of life for us all.

                                                   By: Larry J. Schweiger