These days, you could almost be forgiven for thinking that Al Gore was the only environmentalist who ever graduated from Harvard. Gore, who wrote for the inaugural issue of the Harvard Political Review, has been widely honored for his efforts to raise awareness about climate change. One hundred forty-eight years before Gore received his diploma, however, Harvard graduated another major environmental thinker. He never held public office or won an international prize, but his naturalist writings remain influential to this day.

Ralph Waldo Emerson is well known as a leader of the Transcendentalist movement, but at our present moment it might also be useful to think of him as the original “ozone man.” In his essay “Nature,” Emerson points to the environment as a source of intellectual inspiration. “Why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe?” he wrote. “The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts.” In his poignant, simple statement, “The sun shines to-day also,” Emerson evokes a world of perpetual self-renewal, where every generation is free to experience nature anew. His lack of doubt about the environment’s permanence underscores just how different our world is today.

It would be hyperbole to say that climate change threatens to snuff out the sun. Increasingly, though, it is difficult to ignore the consequences that could result from ignoring this trend. Critics of Al Gore, and of environmentalism more generally, have quibbled over minor points of Gore’s presentation in An Inconvenient Truth. But with the stability of the planet’s climate in ever-greater doubt, more and more people are choosing to see the proverbial forest for the trees.

It is this trend that we attempt to describe in this issue of the HPR. From the world of business to the halls of Congress, from individual living rooms to the Olympic stadiums of Beijing, a sharper sensitivity to the environment is taking hold. Whether it will last, and whether it will ultimately spur large-scale political change, remains to be seen. Regardless of its future, this environmentalist realignment represents one of the more phenomenal political developments of our time.

A generation ago, it was another Harvard graduate who may have best articulated the philosophy that is driving this new consensus. In his 1963 speech at American University, President Kennedy issued a call for arms reduction and articulated his understanding of the globe as an interdependent human society. “Our most basic common link,” he said, “is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.” As humans come face to face not only with their own mortality, but also with the mortality of their planet, Al Gore’s words are not the only ones that ought to echo in our minds. They may just be the crucial ones that rouse us into action. -- ALEXANDER BURNS