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are large enough to sustain natural processes, that they are connected to allow for the migration of plant species in response to climate change, and that climate change itself is addressed so it does not breach ecological thresholds beyond which recovery is impossible. This challenge is an order of magnitude more complex than the challenge of sparing the tree in the first place, but the same principles apply: that people will be inspired to save what they love; that meeting this challenge will require individual leadership, community organizing, and a broad public effort organized through our governments; and that this effort must be sustained over many lifetimes to be successful.

While not everyone has a strong connection to the redwoods, people have a love of natural places that is deeply ingrained into their very being. The love of these places and the deep desire to protect them lifts the looming environmental catastrophe from an abstract fear to something that we can act upon. Simple actions can sustain and protect these places: being mindful of our use of scarce resources; participating in groups working to save land; and supporting government actions to protect these places. When multiplied around the globe, these individual and collective actions to save natural places will protect the green infrastructure that sustains life on earth. But perhaps as importantly, these actions will create a network of places that continue to inspire people and give them a personal reason to act mindfully. This brings me back to the redwoods. I know that however I live my life right now, an 1,800-year-old tree nestled in the heart of Humboldt Redwoods State Park is quietly recording the impact my decisions have on the atmosphere that sustains us both.

Ruskin K. Hartley is the Executive Director and Secretary of Save the Redwoods League, a nonprofit organization that protects and restores redwood forests and connects people with their peace and beauty so these wonders of the natural world flourish. Hartley, who has served in his current position since December 2006, is the sixth leader in the organization’s ninety-one-year history. In his previous role as Director of Conservation and Education, he developed the plan for the League’s conservation efforts. Visit www.savetheredwoods.org.

CHAPTER THREE

Taking Single Steps

Dusting Off the Energy Solution in the Basement

DANA GOLDMAN

It’s cheap to maintain, highly energy efficient, and is probably in your basement, collecting dust. Until a few years ago, that’s where my clunky Schwinn knock-off had been since high school, mounted up on a wall since I’d discovered, at age fourteen, that bikes are only for the very young, people who wear Spandex, and all of Holland.

Of course, that was before gas prices went through the roof and then doubled; before my first car became the high-maintenance automobile equivalent of Zsa Zsa Gabor; before theories about an end to oil started circulating more than the wine and cheese at a cocktail party.

This before-time now feels further away than the manmade end-times that now seem inevitable. There’s the important question of which scenario will win (Will it be the scarcity of gasoline? Global warming? Food insecurity?), but an answer is a moot, if interesting, point: any one of them has better odds than the continuation of our same-old existence.

And so, broke from my lemon of a car and scared of the small talk centering on oil, I returned, humbly, back to the basement to wipe down that two-wheeler I so recently scorned. Neither very young, nor Spandexclad, nor European, I began to ride.

“An experiment,” I told my dad, who loves bicycles as long as the people who ride them in traffic and rain and in the dark are not his daughter. “If it doesn’t work, I’ll buy another car.”

But, a year and a half into this experiment, there’s no incentive for me to stop. Living almost all by bike, I’ve come to take on the U.S. Postal Service’s motto, if not its vehicles or rates, as my own: neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays this