This is a vertical place, stretching from one of the highest inhabited spots in Jordan to within a short hike of the earth’s lowest point on land. Europe, Asia, and Africa mix it up here, and thousands of birds—from the enormous imperial eagle to the tiny mourning wheatear—funnel through this area while migrating as far as South Africa and Siberia. “This is one of the most important bird sites in the Middle East,” says Mohammad Al-Qawabah, Dana’s former manager, as we sip tea in his office perched on the cliff edge overlooking the dramatic canyon that defines the 250-square miles of reserve.

If Dana were in the American West, Theodore Roosevelt would have championed its cause, and an act of Congress, uniformed rangers, and an annual budget would have followed. But in the volatile Middle East, with its wars, population growth, and poverty, environmental protection is typically on the low end of national priorities; Dana itself was created in 1989. Making the park succeed in a poor country with little experience in environmental awareness required a bold, and sometimes gutsy, new approach. “This is a place where you interact with people who have machine guns and M-16s,” says Al-Qawabah, a trim young man who grew up nearby and knows the complexities of Bedouin politics.

Now, thanks to local initiative, outside expertise, and Western money, Dana is on its way to becoming a self-sustaining park that protects wildlife and draws thousands of tourists from Europe, America, and Jordan itself. On top of that, it has the strong support of the armed pastoralists who live nearby. That would be an amazing accomplishment in the United States. But in a region that combines a fierce tradition of tribal independence with top-down and inefficient bureaucracies, the Dana experiment, though still unfolding, is little short of a miracle. It offers an intriguing model for Jordan’s growing park system, and for struggling nature reserves throughout the developing world.

A measure of Dana’s success can be found by climbing the steep stairs to the local Bedouin cooperative, which rents rooms to tourists. “The concept of nature conservation is very new to us,” explains its director, Amer Khawaldeh, a thin and quiet man in stylish boots sporting a NASA patch on his jacket, as we huddle near the stove in the spring chill. Khawaldeh’s people have long grazed their sheep and goats here, moving from the foothills and plains in the winter to the high plateau in the summer, living in black goat-haired tents or simple stone houses. By the 1980s, Khawaldeh says, it was clear that hunting and overgrazing were damaging not just wild species but also the Bedouin’s way of life. The once-plentiful chukar, for example, a Eurasian game bird in the pheasant family that was a favorite dish of locals, became rare. “Now you see them crossing the street,” he says through a local interpreter. “People are starting to see the benefits.”

That positive view of the park formed after a long struggle that often edged toward violence. When Jordan’s Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature (RSCN) first created the reserve, Bedouin tribes regularly brandished rifles to get a point across. “At the beginning there were conflicts,” acknowledges Khawaldeh with a wave of his hand. The men around him, with their heads swaddled in kaffiyehs against the cold, smile knowingly at one another. “We were afraid, and RSCN in the beginning didn’t explain why the park would benefit the people,” he adds. “At first we thought the RSCN had come to stop our grazing and wood cutting. But now we are working together.” Khawaldeh’s move from independent pastoralist to savvy conservationist came only after the RSCN backed away from its original plan to close most of the reserve to grazing.

Instead, they worked out a compromise that opens large chunks of land to livestock, although only during certain seasons. When it became clear that people were using one sensitive forest area because they lacked shelter for their flocks, the RCSN provided materials for Bedouin to build shelters elsewhere. Now that portion of the reserve, about one-fifth, is off-limits to flocks. Since 1995, park personnel say, two dozen of the rare cypress seedlings that grow in the wooded areas, previously a favorite sheep snack, successfully germinated, though they did not thrive.

Today conflicts involve interminable meetings over tea, without firearms. The latest dispute is over adding rooms to the cooperative’s guesthouse. “It requires a lot of energy to succeed at this,” Al-Qawabah says with a sigh. He trained as an engineer but now has to think like a diplomat. “Whenever you do something wrong here, it is hard to overcome it.”

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Hail, lightning, and gale-force winds had pounded southern Louisiana just hours before in some of the worst weather here since Hurricane Katrina. Untold thousands of birds caught migrating from Central America and Mexico had surely perished in the stormy Gulf of Mexico. But on this spring morning, the Owens yard, just north of New Orleans, is a peaceful and busy haven for the lucky survivors. As a half-dozen humans cradle their coffee cups, a parade of ruby-throated hummingbirds sip sugar water from three feeders set inside cages. Their throats sparkle like Dorothy’s slippers in the clean air. The only sound is the crack of a cage door clanging shut on each unsuspecting captive.

Nancy L. Newfield clutches a modified electronic car key, which triggers the doors by remote control, as she keeps a sharp eye out from her vantage point on a damp picnic bench. She is clearly more Glinda than Wicked Witch of the West, wearing both a white sweatshirt covered in hummingbirds and a satisfied expression. A helper retrieves the hummers she traps; Newfield efficiently bands, measures, and weighs each bird, then promptly sets it free to continue its migration. “Hummingbirds are not particularly delicate—they are easy to handle,” she says casually, pulling an impossibly minuscule band off a diaper pin to prepare for the next bird.

The next hummer, however, evades her experienced grasp, darting in and out of the cage before the door can close. It is a rufous hummingbird, a feisty species long considered unique to areas west of the Great Plains. People long scoffed at the idea that rufouses are showing up more frequently in this warm and wet region. But thanks to decades of work by Newfield and her many protégés, it now seems likely that the species is dramatically expanding its winter range.

That could make the rufous a kind of canary in the coal mine in the controversy over how humans affect the environment. There’s no doubt the Gulf Coast region has changed dramatically in recent years to become far more hummer-friendly. The climate since the 1970s has been generally warmer than in previous decades; hard freezes are fewer and shorter. “I hardly wear winter gear anymore,” says Newfield. At the same time, the sudden and dramatic growth of Southern suburbs—and interest in hummingbirds—has led to a proliferation of feeders and yards filled with plants and flowers, some of which bloom through the milder winters. “We’ve set the table for them,” says Van Remsen, an ornithologist at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. That means the hummingbirds that stay through the season have a better chance for survival—and to return.

Last winter, for example, Newfield banded 26 buff-bellied hummingbirds, six of which were returnees. And these birds were long thought to only rarely stray very far north of the Rio Grande. The implications extend far beyond the small circle of hummingbird experts and the devoted ranks of hummer lovers, who prize this tiny creature for its magical combination of beauty, toughness, and intelligence. The rufous in the Owens yard may be a sign that migrating birds are more flexible than scientists have realized, and that hardier species may be able to adapt successfully to changing climate and habitat.

Newfield is not a trained scientist, but she has spent more than three decades observing hummingbirds, collecting data, and inspiring and training a whole generation to follow suit. That makes her a revered figure in the field, among academics and amateurs alike. “She’s the queen of winter hummingbirds,” says Remsen.

The wife of a Navy man, Newfield left her native Louisiana for a series of posts in other bird-rich areas, from Key West to coastal Virginia. She was already hooked on birds. “I saw a hummingbird when I was nine or 10, and I was fascinated,” she says, without taking her eyes off the cages. “I didn’t know how to identify different ones—and I wanted to know what kind of creature this is.” That curiosity led Newfield to be a central player in what she calls “one of the most exciting discoveries in the state’s ornithological history.”

At first the idea that significant numbers of western hummingbird species could bypass Mexico to spend winter along the distant Gulf Coast was dismissed as nonsense. Such sightings were rejected as false identifications or as occasional anomalies—a bird blown off course or with faulty instincts. “The old-school view was that there might be a few passing through, but that except for a few, they didn’t stay,” says Remsen, who recalls that the Audubon Christmas Bird Counts in the area prior to the 1970s might log two or three individual western species.

At the time Newfield was a college dropout with two young kids and a husband who was frequently away on business. But as she learned about hummingbirds, she was surprised to find that even the experts had a hard time distinguishing among the many varieties. “Field guides told us it was impossible to separate female ruby-throated from female black-chinned in the field,” she notes. Such confusion called into question the accuracy of the counts. And those experts also admonished people not to leave feeders out beyond the fall, lest they lure birds to their death by tempting them to postpone migration. Newfield began to have her doubts that feeders would confuse her visitors. “None of us wanted to be responsible for killing hummingbirds,” she says. But her suspicions grew that there was a vast gulf of ignorance concerning the birds’ numbers, their habits, and their winter whereabouts.

So in 1979, after returning to Louisiana, Newfield obtained a banding permit and launched what she planned to be a five-year study. There was only one other hummingbird bander within a thousand miles. With the help of ornithologists like Remsen, Newfield learned anatomical terminology and measuring methods. And she experimented with nets and cages to capture the birds. That first winter, working in her own yard after the October departure of the ruby-throated for warmer climes, she banded 10 rufous and nine black-chinned hummingbirds. Since then she has banded thousands more. Over the years many of the banded birds returned. By the mid-1980s Newfield and others had extensive data to show beyond a doubt that several western species were finding good winter homes far from the Mexican hills where they were presumed to stay.

Were there simply more observers like Newfield to see birds that had been there all along? Or was there something new in the wind? “Clearly there’s an increase,” Remsen says. “I’d bet everything on it.” Others, however, are not persuaded. Bob Sargent, a respected hummingbird bander in Alabama who learned his craft from Newfield, thinks that the birds simply went undetected for decades.

The trajectory of western birds like the rufous that show up in winter on the Gulf Coast is still a mystery. Some contend that they work their way east and then south along the Atlantic Seaboard as the push broom of winter sweeps down. Others believe they come down from the Great Lakes and the Midwest. Remsen poses what he calls the “wacko theory,” that the birds follow their normal route from the Pacific Northwest to Mexico, then turn left to drift north and east to states like Louisiana. Reports of western species as far north as Massachusetts in the winter only muddy the picture. There’s just not enough hard data to prove anyone right—yet.

Made up of some 350 species, the hummingbird family is one of the most diverse groups of birds in the New World. Their colors can dazzle, from the ruby-slipper red of the ruby-throated to the blue-and-green iridescence of the broad-billed. They can be as small as a bee or as large as a mockingbird. But their reputation as ethereal and gentle creatures is at odds with reality, if you listen to the humans who watch them.

“A whole subset of people see hummingbirds in the same category as fairies and angels and other mystical creatures,” says Fred Bassett, a burly former fighter pilot who spends much of his time touring the country to band birds. He’s particularly drawn to the varieties that summer in the West—especially the rufous, black-chinned, and calliope (only about 20 species traditionally venture north of Mexico). “But they are tough as nails. I’ve seen them chase people, dogs, and cats.” Put out just one feeder in your yard, and a single hummingbird is likely to dominate, aggressively protecting the turf. Some species, like the buff-bellied, seem far from angelic. Says Remsen: “These are not tropical wimps.”

The hummingbirds’ small size—they typically weigh between three and six grams—is not to be confused with fragility. They flourish in the chilly highlands of the Andes, the tropical lowlands of Central America, the deserts of the American southwest, and the damp chill of the Alaskan coast. Some stay put; others migrate. Some, like the rufous, when they do migrate, fly as far as 5,000 miles from their winter homes to their nesting grounds. Their famously fast metabolism—the fastest of any animal in nature—makes for a constant and voracious appetite that puts a premium on moving. They are expert at snatching flies from spider webs, gorging on swarms of gnats, and, of course, sticking their specialized beaks into flowers to suck nectar. One species in the Andes has a beak longer than its body. They have record hovering capabilities, and they can fly forward, backward, sideways, up, down—even upside down.

A day after the fierce storms have moved out of the Gulf Coast, Bassett is carefully untangling birds from nets on an Alabama barrier island a couple hundred miles east of the Owens yard. It is spring migration, and in the aftermath of the storm the nets are filled with an array of colorful bird species—including the occasional ruby-throated—exhausted from their 12- to 20-hour nonstop flight across the Gulf. He insists—and other hummingbird aficionados agree—that the creatures are not just aggressive; they are also smart. Bassett says that if he has let the feeder in his yard go dry, there are some hummers that will knock angrily against his kitchen window, trying to catch his eye as he gets his morning coffee. “They know who filled it,” he says. “And they are as curious about us as we are about them.”

But are they smart enough to outwit the potential disruptions posed by human development and a warming climate, threats that range from more ferocious hurricanes to dwindling habitat?

As with most topics concerning hummingbirds, there’s more heat than light, in part because each species has its own special relationship to the environment. Rufous populations have fallen by more than half in the past 40 years, from 12 million to 5 million birds, according to Audubon’s Common Birds in Decline report, largely as a result of logging and development of their breeding areas in the Pacific Northwest and their wintering grounds in Mexico. But if there is an increase among western species in the eastern United States, as Newfield and Remsen believe, it could be a sign that they are finding alternative migration paths and habitats. Whether that change might be due to more food or a temporary variation in the Gulf Coast climate is unclear.

A quantifiable shift in migration offers an exciting opportunity, says Scott Weidensaul. The boyish-faced bird bander and author is taking a break at the same Alabama site where Bassett is gathering spring migrants. Crouching on the sandy ground, Weidensaul says the potential shift of the rufous and others “shows the surprising degree of plasticity in bird migration—that’s a hopeful thing given the decades ahead of us.”

Weidensaul notes that the blackcap warbler traditionally migrated from central Europe to the Iberian peninsula, then south across Gibraltar to Africa. But since the 1950s British birdwatchers have observed an increase in blackcaps wintering in the British Isles—something rarely observed before. Today an estimated 10,000 blackcaps swarm to Britain rather than Africa. For years researchers wondered whether this shift was due to chance, environmental changes, or an alteration in the birds’ genetic code itself. German and U.K. scientists finally resolved the issue when they caught 40 “British” birds and bred them with one another, while doing the same for birds that wintered in Africa. When given the chance to fly, the “British” blackcaps headed for London, while the others went in the direction of Madrid. Today Britain’s milder climate, increased food sources, and lack of competition make it a smart destination for blackcaps, which passed on that information encoded in their genes.

Weidensaul suspects something similar may be taking place with western hummingbirds. Several centuries ago any that strayed too far east in the winter encountered dense forest cover and colder winter temperatures. But those conditions have been superseded by a plethora of gardens and feeders that increase the probability that errant birds will survive. “Once a death trap for hummingbirds, the suburban Southeast is now a land of milk and honey,” he writes in his 1999 book Living on the Wind. That’s true, however, only for the tougher western species, like the rufous, which can put on a gram of fat in a day. Before migrating, from 25 percent to 40 percent of their body weight is typically fat, which they will burn over the vast distances they cover. They can survive temperatures below zero degrees Fahrenheit by dramatically slowing down their metabolism. Such freezing temperatures, however, are likely to kill off any ruby-throated hummingbirds, which don’t have to live through extreme temperature as consistently as some of the western hummingbirds do.

Back in the Owens yard, Newfield files down a band that is too large for her latest captive, as it lets out a plaintive cry from a cloth bag. “This is really all bookkeeping,” she says, gesturing at her data notebook. “It’s important that I like to catch them—but not worth a damn if you don’t do something with it.”

Despite decades of meticulous data gathering, Newfield expresses some intrigue. “We are finding questions, not answers,” she says, slipping the custom-altered band on the tiny leg and frowning as she adjusts it. “It’s complicated.” Both Newfield and Remsen are skeptical of those who want to point the finger at human-induced climate change to account for the potential shift in hummingbird migration.

“Everyone wants to blame everything on global warming,” says Remsen later that day in his cluttered office at LSU behind the Museum of Natural History. “It is tempting to believe, but the link is tenuous.” He notes that in the past few years there has been a drop in counts among the more western species in the area, despite relatively mild winters. That may have to do with Katrina effects or specific conditions—drought, for instance—at a breeding ground thousands of miles away rather than a long-term global trend. And despite the increasing numbers of western species counted in the Southeast during winters in the 1980s and 1990s, the overwhelming majority of the birds remain true to their ancient migration path, which stretches from Mexico to Alaska. “It is 
really hard to make any inference in a population when you are focusing on a peripheral area like the Gulf,” he adds.

There also is a lack of hard data on the status of the Mexican wintering grounds. Though habitat destruction there is frequently cited, Remsen says it remains unclear whether that could be forcing some birds north and east. “You could go either way—there is a loss of habitat or they are doing so well they need to migrate to find greener pastures,” he says. And areas considered degraded by humans—that is, fallen trees and debris—can be rich habitats for many hummingbird species.

It may be surprising that despite the intense focus on hummingbirds in recent decades, there is not even a consensus on what they eat. Some argue that the bulk of their calories come from insects; others say from nectar. Such a prosaic detail matters if you want to pinpoint the role of feeders in hummingbird migration. “It’s not what we know that is so striking,” says Sargent, who is busy at work with Bassett and Weidensaul gathering and banding migrating birds in Alabama. “It is what we don’t know.”

That mystery continues to power this small group of hummer lovers. “None of us would have been doing this if it wasn’t for Nan Newfield,” says Weidensaul. Here in the Owens yard, the banding is done for the morning. Three decades after starting her five-year-project, Newfield is grayer and more solid but no less passionate. She recalls a recent trip to Cuba, where she spotted the rare bee hummingbird. “It was one of the high points of my life,” she says. Then, shyly, Newfield pulls out two pictures. The first is of her two-year-old grandson. And the second? A rare hybrid hummingbird.

Andrew Lawler, a staff writer for Science Magazine, also contributes to Smithsonian, National Geographic, Archaeology, Discover, and others.

Courtesy of Audubon website

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Within weeks of the election, a coalition of environmental groups presented a report to President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team, outlining specific steps the new administration should take to protect the nation’s air, water, land, plants, and animals, and to undo eight years of mostly harmful regulations and legislation. With public funding scarce and the stock market in free fall, this campaign may prove as long and difficult as the 2008 election races. But leading environmentalists are optimistic. “The economy is the biggest problem, and the main way to fix it is to create a new energy future,” says League of Conservation Voters (LCV) president Gene Karpinski, who is confident that Obama understands that global change, energy policy, and economic health are inextricably linked.

Obama pledged during the campaign to tackle global warming by instituting a cap-and-trade program designed to cut carbon emissions 80 percent by 2050. He also promised that a million new hybrid cars would hit the road by 2015 and that renewable sources would account for 10 percent of energy production by 2012. John Podesta, co-chief of Obama’s transition team (which includes Carol Browner, ex-chief of the Environmental Protection Agency and Audubon’s outgoing board chair), sought to reassure conservationists just days after the election that the economy won’t torpedo those plans completely. Podesta also sent an experienced and eco-conscious team, including environmental lobbyist and former EPA deputy director Robert Sussman, to review the EPA.

Friendlier faces will also dominate Pennsylvania Avenue’s other end. “Not only is there a president who is more pro-environment, there are House and Senate lawmakers who actually campaigned on these issues,” adds Karpinski. Two-thirds of the Dirty Dozen—congressional candidates who consistently vote against environmental issues like clean energy and conservation—failed to win the support of voters. Gone, for instance, is North Carolina Republican Senator Elizabeth Dole, a friend of oil and gas interests. Tom Udall, son of the former Interior Secretary and nephew of famed environmentalist Mo Udall, won a hotly contested New Mexico race to replace powerful Republican Senator Pete Domenici. His cousin Mark Udall, who also embraces the family conservation ethic, took a Colorado Senate seat. Across the aisle, Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins, whom the LCV backed over her Democratic opponent, was reelected.

But the jockeying for key committee posts among congressional Democrats is already proving contentious. For example, Representative John Dingle (D-MI), the longtime chair of the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee and a staunch defender of Detroit, lost his chairmanship to Henry Waxman (D-CA) by a 137–122 caucus vote in November. And Obama’s support for corn ethanol and “clean coal” is likely to rub some Democrats on Capitol Hill the wrong way.

What’s clear is that voters aren’t willing to sacrifice the environment for potential short-term gas savings. “This election replaces ‘drill, baby, drill’ with a new model of efficient and renewable energy,” says Betsy Loyless, Audubon’s senior vice president for policy. The challenge now is whether those swept into office in this decisive election can ensure that the three E’s—environment, energy, and the economy—work together in harmony.—Andrew Lawler

Courtesy of Audubon website

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John McCain is a maverick environmentalist, a longtime conservationist who revels in bucking the Republican tide and doffs his hat to Teddy Roosevelt. Barack Obama, meanwhile, is a slick politico in bed with ethanol producers.

Or, if you prefer, Obama is a green street fighter with an asthmatic child who can rescue the United States and maybe the world from the dual crises of energy and climate change. McCain, however, is a cynical opportunist who selectively uses a lackluster Senate record on the environment to bolster his standing among independents.

What’s a voter to think? In the 2008 campaign it’s no simple task to shed light on the subject of the candidates’ environmental views. Unlike previous elections, where the Republican and Democratic nominees were dramatically different, this year’s choice is anything but clear-cut. Both Obama and McCain are fighting for the title of Captain Earth, and partisans on both sides can marshal compelling arguments that their guy best fits that role.

After all, the two candidates support legislation to regulate the carbon emissions that are driving global climate change. Both want to decrease our dependence on oil through a combination of renewable energy, incentives, and conservation measures. Both say they back a toothier Endangered Species Act than President Bush does, plan to restore the scientific integrity of U.S. government agencies, and intend to protect—for now at least—the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from oil drilling. That’s a far cry from Gore versus Bush 2000; this time it is the Republican candidate who has had a hand in protecting some national wilderness. “It is confusing,” says Jamie Clark, who directed the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service under President Bill Clinton and now is executive vice president of Defenders of Wildlife in Washington. “At 30,000 feet the senators’ environmental records do look similar.”

To get to the truth, Audubon’s editors posed the same 10 questions to both candidates at the end of the primary season as they prepared to ramp up for the general election. Their answers offer revealing glimpses into how they would tackle everything from Alaska wilderness to the controversial border fence with Mexico. While Obama pledges to designate Teshekpuk Lake in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska as a national monument—bypassing Congress completely—McCain fudges on whether or not the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge should remain forever protected. The Republican does promise that “sound science” will be at the core of his administration’s environmental policies, an implicit criticism of the Bush administration. And he says he supports clean water regulations, rebuilding the decaying national park system, and improving wetlands and fisheries management.

The least obvious differences are on global matters like climate change, where McCain and Obama alike want the United States to regain its international lead in that area and impose a cap-and-trade system to regulate carbon emissions. “It is hard to draw a distinction between the two,” says Ray Kopp, a senior fellow with Resources for the Future in Washington. He says that while McCain backs a 60 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2050 compared with Obama’s more ambitious 80 percent, the Democrat’s figure is more political posturing than sign of a real difference. And both McCain and Obama are proposing to auction carbon emission permits.

Even Democrats acknowledge that McCain has taken the lead among Republicans in addressing global warming. He has dragged skeptical colleagues from Greenland to Norway to Antarctica to win them over, and he cosponsored a landmark bill to propose serious carbon reductions to reduce greenhouse gases, a measure he has introduced with Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT) every two years since 2003. He is a hiker who was personally close to Arizona lawmaker and conservationist Morris Udall; together they protected 3.5 million acres as wilderness in their home state. He publicly lambasted the right in a 1996 essay for The New York Times—famously entitled “Nature Is Not a Liberal Plot”—for attempts to dismantle clean air and water regulations.

Yet despite his leadership in global warming and his affection for Teddy Roosevelt, McCain’s record is a political Rubik’s Cube. The League of Conservation Voters (LCV) gives McCain just a 24 percent lifetime rating. He has rejected efforts to tighten environmental and energy regulations affecting issues ranging from clean air to fuel efficiency—anything, his critics contend, that stood in the way of industry profit. And the senator has not been a strong supporter of using presidential power to dictate land use; he harshly criticized the Clinton administration for using an executive order to ban roads in 50 million acres of nationally protected forests.

The depth of his commitment remains open to question. “Whether his views come out of genuine and sincere concern for the environment, or are part of a more cynical way to distinguish himself is hard to know,” says Kenneth Green, a scholar with the conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in Washington. If you talk to Republican conservationists who know McCain, they express as much concern as optimism about the Arizona senator. Phoenix environmentalist Robert Witzeman, a Republican who has river-rafted with McCain and his wife, has found him alternatively helpful and hostile to environmental issues. For example, in the 1990s McCain fought attempts by the Sierra Club and others to halt construction of a telescope on an Arizona peak, and he pushed through an exemption to the Endangered Species Act to ensure the facility was built. Yet he also was instrumental in cleaning up the dirty and noisy skies above such important sites as the Grand Canyon.

“He’s a man of mixed signals,” Witzeman notes. Although McCain has consistently voted to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, he implied that position could change, telling Audubon he doesn’t support oil drilling there “at this time.” He also backs “multiple use” in America’s wilderness areas, a loaded term in many green circles. What happens if gas reaches $7 a gallon? His full-throated reversal on offshore oil drilling (see “Squeeze Play,” Field Notes) has also earned conservationists’ displeasure.

As a freshman senator, Obama can’t match McCain’s quarter-century of national votes on major environmental issues that provide clear evidence of the Republican’s leanings. During the past four years Obama scores a top-of-the-class 96 percent rating by the LCV on issues ranging from fuel-efficiency standards to global warming. But as a first-term senator often on the campaign trail, Obama has not led as many high-profile environmental charges on Capitol Hill. A better measure may be his past as a community organizer and later as an Illinois legislator, which provide intriguing evidence of his likely approach if he reaches the White House. Raised in a time when the environment was already a hot political issue, he took part in an effort while still an undergraduate to encourage minorities in New York City to recycle. But his focus became economic opportunities for the inner city. In Chicago he worked at Altgeld Gardens, a public housing settlement also known as the Toxic Doughnut because it was surrounded by steel mills, slag heaps, and waste dumps. Jack Darin, director of Illinois’ Sierra Club chapter, who has worked closely with Obama, says it was that experience that opened the senator’s eyes to the impact of the environment on the poor. “He saw that it was environmental problems holding them back—asthma, lead poisoning, and the impossibility of attracting new business.”

When Obama arrived in Springfield to represent part of the South Side of Chicago, he called Darin and said that he could connect a minority constituency to the environmental community and get behind a clean air and water agenda. The state senate at the time was dominated by Republicans who favored the coal and nuclear industries, which wield enormous influence in Springfield. “I’ve seen him work in a legislature where the leadership was hostile,” Darin adds. “But doing the right thing is a core value for him. He gets it.” Some bills he strongly backed failed, such as one for wetlands protection. “But he was one of the more reliable legislators for standing up for a clean environment that we’ve seen in our state capital in a long time—and we miss him,” says Darin.

Obama won an award from the Illinois Environmental Council and another from the Sierra Club while working in Springfield, and he has trumpeted an environmental theme since before he began campaigning for the presidency. Last October Obama warned that “we are not acting as good stewards of God’s earth when our bottom line puts the size of our profits before the future of our planet.”

But is there a gap between the rhetoric and the reality? For example, the senator backs ethanol subsidies and a crippling tariff on more efficient Brazilian-made fuel from sugarcane, and his support for nuclear power discomfits some environmentalists. Obama voted in favor of the porked-up 2005 energy bill—which McCain rejected—that supported liquid coal research (Illinois is a big coal state), and he opposed a bill to reform the 1872 mining law. Says David Roberts of the liberal Huffington Post, “He’s given us both hope and reason to pause.”

The political stakes are high. Though polls show that the environment does not always rank near the top of citizens’ concerns, it could prove critical to swing voters across the country. “Both of these candidates really need the environmental vote to get over the finish line,” says Jamie Clark. And whoever wins the White House, the next president will almost surely face a Congress far more sympathetic to environmental concerns than the one McCain railed against more than a decade ago. Says the AEI’s Green: “It won’t be like the Bush days.” And that’s one analysis both sides can agree on.

Courtesy of Audubon website

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Scientists say Greenland’s glaciers are melting twice as fast as they were even five years ago, and that the amount of fresh water running into the ocean has tripled in a decade. Photos by Nick Cobbing | Still Pictures/Peter Arnold Inc. Courtesy Greenpeace International

Tourists frequently visit this glacier near Narsaq. The underlying ice core is visible in the bright blue patches, which are exposed as chunks calve from the glacier, forming icebergs when they hit the fjord. Photos by Nick Cobbing | Still Pictures/Peter Arnold Inc. Courtesy Greenpeace International

Although melt lakes have long been common on Greenland’s ice cap, their size and frequency show signs of increasing. Only now are scientists closely monitoring this development. Photos by Nick Cobbing | Still Pictures/Peter Arnold Inc. Courtesy Greenpeace International

Focusing on Narsaq, Greenland, where global warming is an everday affair. Photos by Nick Cobbing | Still Pictures/Peter Arnold Inc. Courtesy Greenpeace International

Let’s face it. Look on any world map and Greenland is pretty nondescript, a featureless white plain neatly bordered by a rocky fringe. Although scientific papers may dutifully warn us that Greenland’s ice sheet is melting, for most of us the enormous island remains distant and abstract. But while leaning out of a small helicopter, photographer Nick Cobbing encountered a landscape that was more visceral, beautiful—and terrifying. In this Greenland, the surface is anything but featureless. It cracks, bows, and trembles.

A glacial pace becomes a trot, then a torrent. Huge unnamed lakes emerge silently in a thaw that is remaking the landscape.

Today researchers are closely monitoring Greenland’s harsh and uncharted environment, forming an astonishingly detailed view of this remote land that is an epicenter of global warming. Cobbing visited the island as part of a 2005 Greenpeace expedition to gather scientific data and the testimonies of local people on the changes now reshaping Greenland. His job was to document the melt lakes that increasingly dot the ice cap during the summer months. On its two-month cruise the Greenpeace icebreaker Arctic Sunrise worked its way deep into Greenland’s fjords, providing a launchpad for helicopter surveys far inland and good access to the remote interior. Still, the actual photography was, to say the least, physically challenging. Shooting from “a rattling, doorless 1970s helicopter about 2,000 feet above only broken ice and meltwater, days away from any possibility of rescue, is scary,” says Cobbing, who was strapped in and guided by a veteran pilot. “You knew if you pitched down, no one was going to get you.”

Such expeditions in the summer months are increasingly common, and automated American and Dutch research stations now dot the central plateau to gather data year-round. Next year Danish scientists will start constructing a similar automated network along the coasts. Combining data gleaned from expeditions, robotic stations, and orbiting satellites, they hope to judge precisely how quickly Greenland’s ice cap—an area almost as large as Mexico—is melting, and how it will shed its icy skin. Answering those questions is far from some abstract exercise. Were Greenland to lose its covering tomorrow, the world’s seas would jump about 20 feet, drowning nearly every major coastal city on earth.

Even if a disaster of this proportion is not in the cards, in the past decade melting began to accelerate ominously. The area now actively melting—approximately half of Greenland’s entire ice cap—is twice what it was in 1992. The amount of fresh water entering the ocean is triple what it was a decade ago. Last year Greenland lost 52 cubic miles of ice, according to NASA measurements, and though that is only a tiny fraction of the ice cap’s total of nearly 600,000 cubic miles, the rate is increasing. As the meltwater drips down to the bedrock, it lubricates the movement of ice sheets toward the sea. The Kangerdlugssuaq Glacier, on the island’s eastern coast, is now moving twice as fast as it was in 2002. To the south of Kangerdlugssuaq, the Helheim Glacier slides about 110 feet a day. Researchers reported this spring that the speed and intensity generates noticeable earthquakes, or “glacial quakes.” And some scientists quietly worry that a dramatic collapse of the ice cap could result in huge amounts of water draining into the ocean.

For the 38-year-old Cobbing, the chance to hover over Greenland’s interior offered an unusual, if harrowing, glimpse into both a climatic and a geographic unknown. “Flying with the doors off is bloody scary,” he says. “But it did give us 180-degree views.” These photos, culled from that trip, finally put Greenland on the map, in a fresh and chilling way. —Andrew Lawler

Courtesy of Audubon website

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Rush-hour Times Square is a mass of electronic billboards and idling cabs, the very essence of the fossil-fuel economy’s entrenched excess. High above the noise and traffic, in a small screening room, Al Gore is in an earnest blue suit, doing his best to convince a group of newspaper reporters, magazine commentators, and television anchors that the byproducts of our busy industrial lives pose the greatest threat ever faced by humanity. “I really do feel this is a planetary emergency,” he says fervently, just before rolling his new film, An Inconvenient Truth. The full-length documentary, directed by Davis Guggenheim—who has extensive film and TV credits—will be released this summer by Paramount Classics in thousands of theaters around the country. It will present the first serious look at the global climate crisis on the big screen. Says Gore, “We have to break through the Category 5 denial which is part of the U.S. political reality.”

Having been part and parcel of that political reality for 16 years in Congress and eight in the White House, Gore is the first to admit that he failed to energize the public during his time on the political stage. But thanks to Hollywood, the scientific community, and the climate itself, this journalist-turned-politician-turned-missionary believes he now has a second opportunity to win hearts and minds. A drumbeat of weather disasters, dramatized best in the catastrophic destruction wreaked by Hurricane Katrina, is bringing the reality home to Americans. Melting polar ice caps and drowning polar bears have become routine headlines. And the new movie will bring Gore’s slide show detailing the science behind global warming—which, by his own estimation, he has given more than a thousand times across the world in the past decade—to an audience that may reach in the millions. Gore is betting that this time the issue won’t slip off the public’s radar as it has in the past. “Unfortunately,” he told me, “Mother Nature is growing more insistent.”

Yet so are well-funded industry lobbyists and their allies, who increasingly acknowledge that global temperatures are rising but insist that the potential impact is wildly overstated. A National Review Online article on Gore’s film lambastes him as a “scaremonger,” arguing against what it calls “a half-baked environmental jihad that could waste possibly trillions of dollars.” These forces are working in lockstep with the White House, which shelved the Kyoto Treaty midwifed by Gore, deep-sixed recent legislation in the Senate designed to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, and has put pressure on government scientists to keep their opinions about the impact of global warming to themselves. Meanwhile, the United States continues to pump nearly 6 billion tons of carbon emissions into the atmosphere every year, as much as Russia and China combined. When the 163 countries that signed the Kyoto Protocol meet in Nairobi in November to hash out the next steps in controlling global warming when the agreement expires in 2012, the world’s largest polluter will be on the sidelines.

After six years spent wandering in the post-political wilderness, Gore may now be in the right place at the right time. “This hasn’t been on the front burner,” said retired NBC anchor Tom Brokaw after the New York screening. “But now there is an inevitability about it, with Katrina and western droughts, and each passing scientific report.” The issue, however, lacks a high-profile advocate who resonates with the media. No Carl Sagan or Martin Luther King of climate science has emerged to capture the public’s imagination.

That leaves the field open to Gore, who recently wrote that “this crisis is not really about politics at all. It is a moral and spiritual challenge.” It is hard to question the man’s sincerity. Gore is a former divinity school student apt to bring his palms together Buddhist-style in thanks, and he has clearly done his science homework. But can a former vice-president and loser in a divisive presidential race do more than preach to the converted? “That’s open to question,” says Martin Kaplan, associate dean at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. But he adds that Gore’s movie differs from films like Fahrenheit 911, since it is driven more by data than by rhetoric. “This is a dramatic presentation of scientific evidence in a particularly effective way. And it could appeal to neutral, undecided, and casual observers.”

Gore’s slide show was seen in 2004 in Los Angeles by Laurie David—an environmental activist, TV producer, and wife of Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Larry David—and Lawrence Bender, producer of the blockbusters Good Will Hunting and Pulp Fiction. The idea for a film version was thus born. Playing himself, Gore is a modern-day Don Quixote, trundling his carry-on bags through a series of generic airports to reach the next stage with klieg lights where he can prop his computer and plead his case. We are reminded of his long-standing ties to the earth, forged during summers spent on the family farm in Tennessee. It’s not a political advertisement, but it is a sympathetic documentary with little room for skeptics, much less critics.

His slide-show presentation takes an Environmental Science 101 approach, using simple graphs and a snappy Matt Groening cartoon (showing those bad greenhouse gases beating up on friendly sunbeams) to explain the nature of the climate crisis. Charting the increase in carbon dioxide brought on by industrialization, Gore shows the results: melting glaciers, the shrinking Arctic ice cap, and the disappearing snows of Kilimanjaro. He then presents stark images of the earth overlaid with a projected sea-level rise—Florida is much smaller, and lower Manhattan’s Ground Zero is flooded. The impact on low-lying countries, from the Netherlands to Bangladesh, he notes, would be catastrophic.

Like any 101 course, Gore’s science, by necessity, simplifies an enormously complex system, which makes some scientists squirm. And the prospect of millions of Americans paying to learn about topics such as soil evaporation and oceanic carbonic acid as told by a politician seems hard to imagine. Yet Gore believes the movie will reach an audience primed to receive his transmission. “I’ve felt before that we were on the verge of a tipping point, only to see the political attention of the country distracted,” he says. “I don’t think that is possible this time.” Gore’s message, of course, is not just gloom and doom. He’s an experienced enough politician to know that Americans respond best to challenges rather than problems, even if the consequences for not meeting them must be dire and immediate. In the film he quickly outlines a half-dozen strategies for reducing emissions to below 1970s levels. These tactics, what he calls low-hanging fruit, include conservation as well as new technologies like nanotechnology—the manipulation of individual atoms to build devices that would require minuscule amounts of energy to function—that will make the United States more competitive, he says. Gore seems a bit defensive, however, when asked to elaborate on solutions. “I will be increasingly shifting the emphasis towards that side of it,” he says. “But there is no point in going into a lot of detail until the country is convinced we have to bite the bullet.”

Gore’s own conversion on the dangers of human-induced climate change came in a Harvard classroom back in the 1960s with Roger Revelle, an esteemed oceanographer and global warming pioneer who was tracking an increase in carbon dioxide and global temperatures. “I educated myself as thoroughly as I could, with an eye to translating this very large scientific problem into simple language,” Gore says. Shortly after the 28-year-old arrived in Congress in 1977—after stints as an Army reporter in Vietnam and an investigative journalist in Nashville—Gore invited Revelle to speak to his colleagues at a hearing before the House Science and Technology Committee. “I did actually and naively expect that this would be an epiphany for them as it was for me,” he recalls, laughing. It wasn’t. Still, Gore didn’t give up, and he went on to hold dozens of hearings on the subject in the House and then the Senate after 1986. Six years later he published Earth in the Balance, the first best-selling book on the threat, and was chosen to be Bill Clinton’s running mate.

Scientists and environmentalists welcomed Gore’s ascension to the White House. But he very quickly ran up against the limits of power—even during the brief honeymoon years of a Democratic House and Senate. An effort to impose a carbon tax proved a political debacle. When the Republicans took control of the House in 1994, Gore began to focus on the international scene instead. He saw the Montreal Protocol limiting chlorofluorocarbons to halt ozone depletion as the model for a worldwide agreement on reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. But unlike the Montreal agreement, Kyoto required a radical rethinking of nearly every industrial system. Shortly before the 1997 Kyoto meeting, the Senate resolved 95 to 0 that the United States would not sign a treaty that could harm the U.S. economy or let developing countries off the hook for the greenhouse gases they produce. Clinton and Gore, however, ignored the advice. “It was a fiasco,” says one former senior Clinton White House aide. The protocol signed by the United States and other countries called for industrialized nations to reduce global greenhouse-gas emissions to below 1990 levels by 2012. And it set aside the question of how accountable developing countries would be in controlling their emissions. Fearing a political rout, the White House never sent the Kyoto Protocol to the Senate for approval. The setback left Gore with little room to maneuver, and with only the questionable authority of a vice-presidential bully pulpit. “I went to every telegenic location I could find to promote the higher awareness of the crisis and what needs to be done,” he says. “I tried everything I knew to do.”

Nothing worked. Like President Wilson and his League of Nations, Gore helped birth an international vision—but one lacking its most important player, the United States. Yet he still sees Kyoto as a victory. “It is now binding law in most of the world, and multinationals that do business here as well as in the rest of the world have already begun to change,” he notes, citing General Electric’s new Ecoimagination program, which is designed to come up with new and cleaner technologies in lighting and appliances. But for nearly a decade in Washington, global warming has been at best ignored and at worst derided as a hoax perpetuated by doomsayers like Gore. “I told you earlier I felt I have failed in my mission so far,” he says. “But I’m not done yet.”

So is the 21st century Al Gore politician or prophet? “A messenger,” he says firmly. “A messenger of an inconvenient truth.” As for politics: “Been there and done that.” After running for national office four times, he says, “I think there are other ways to serve.” That may be simply the canned response of a career politician with an eye on his future. But Gore’s 30-year obsession with global warming has almost certainly been more political hindrance than help. And rather than campaigning during the past six years, he has been giving his free slide show not just to potential voters but to people around the world, from Beijing to Boston. “I gave it five times in Europe last week,” he says proudly.

The hard truth, according to Gore, is that the U.S. political system can only put forward “pitifully inadequate” solutions. “The first task must be to change the minds of the American people—not only about the reality of global warming but about the urgency with which we must begin to confront it,” Gore insists. Like the climate, he adds, the political system can appear moribund only to change rapidly. “I’ve seen it time and time again,” he says. “We saw it in the civil rights movement when it was redefined as a moral issue, and I think we’re about to see it on the climate crisis as it is redefined as a moral issue.”

Whether he can convince the public that acting on global warming is comparable to desegregating buses and schools remains to be seen. But Gore today is more outspoken, more passionate, and less wooden than he was on the campaign trail. He decries the “cynical disinformation campaign” by industry to undermine the science of global warming, and, like a good investigative reporter, he connects the dots among lobbyists, White House officials, and companies involved in the effort to discredit the research. He has made himself “carbon-neutral” by donating money to build solar cookers in India to offset his frequent auto and plane travels (the making, promotion, and distribution of the movie itself, he adds, are carbon-neutral). And he is organizing a training program so that a thousand people can fan out across the world to give his slide show.

Global warming may need Al Gore, and Al Gore may need global warming. “Imagine for just a moment that everything I’m saying about this is true—then nothing else matters very much,” he says, leaning close. “And if [NASA climate scientist] Jim Hansen is correct that we have less than 10 years before we cross the point of no return, then why would you spend your time on anything else?” If Hansen is right and Gore proves effective, the world may look back on the outcome of the 2000 election with gratitude.

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