In 1962, when Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, the book that first raised the alarm about widespread toxic chemicals in our water, she unwittingly launched the American environmental movement on a dangerous course. There is no way she could have known what would happen, but people didn't like to be told that their country was threatened from within. Americans had won World War II, repelling a terrible threat from abroad, and were keeping the Soviets at bay. They liked the new industrial economy that was bringing rising affluence, suburbs, and cars, and many didn't like to hear it disparaged.

The chemical industry took quick advantage, vilifying Carson. A pattern was established, one that would increasingly brand those who issued environmental warnings as troublemakers or spoilsports--or as anti-American. Even as environmental decline accelerated, the industries whose products were contributing most heavily to the decline were booming, enriching their managers and shareholders.

So it was that American kids of the late 20th century, taught by a generation that had enjoyed unprecedented income growth and material wealth, never got a chance to learn an essential truth about life: that the environment is not just a world of remote rain forests or endangered species unrelated to their interests in the latest music or clothes, but rather is the basis of all the material well-being with which they were growing up. In high school, very few got to learn that the hydrological cycle and carbon cycle are global processes without which there could be no soccer, sex, or rock and roll . . . or great books, friendships, or plans. A survey taken at the end of the century found that the average American could identify more than 1,000 corporate logos or brands, but knew only 10 species of plants. Kids grew up in the 1980s and 90s far more knowledgeable about products than about life.

During those years, leading scientists tried to get the public's attention, but their message--that something had gone dangerously wrong with the American dream--went unheard. Like Rachel Carson before them, they grew increasingly concerned about what they perceived to be a massive denial.

In 1992, a gathering of 1,670 of the world's most accomplished scientists issued an extraordinary document, the World Scientists' Warning to Humanity. It summarized the ways in which the fast-growing human population and its expanding industries are destabilizing the Earth's life systems, and it concluded, 'Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course.' The warning was signed by 104 Nobel Prize winners in the sciences--a majority of all those living. Yet most Americans never heard about it.

Three years later, climate scientists from around the globe issued a warning that greenhouse gases generated by the growing number of cars, furnaces, forest fires, and coal-fired power plants appeared to be causing a rise in the Earth's temperature that could act like a planetary fever--melting polar ice, bringing more frequent and more destructive weather disasters, precipitating massive flooding of coastal cities, causing crop-killing droughts, and disrupting ecosystems everywhere. These warnings, too, were vilified by business and political leaders and largely ignored by the media, which, by then, were not only caught up in the economic euphoria of the time but were financially dependent on the commercial advertising of the very industries whose products the scientists implicated in global climate change.