A fascinating challenge facing today's environmental movement is how to best approach the reversal of past decisions that altered once-pristine environmental spaces for the sake of urgent man-made needs.

Some types of environmental restoration projects are well-known restored wetlands, for instance, or coal mine reclamation projects. Recently though, larger dam removal projects have started, a number of them in Washington state.

Unless action is taken soon - unless we can display the same vision of that earlier period - we will lose the treasure of California's open space and environmental beauty.

I thought I was gonna be an attorney, so I went to Dartmouth and I was a government major and I minored in environmental policy, and I didn't do anything academically around the arts.

And I know that the younger generation is doing things that are so ingenious. And for them it's not a matter of a political belief or an environmental stance. It's really just common sense.

On the environmental front there's concern about global warming and high levels of carbon dioxide, and trees take in CO2 and store carbon.

But, as environment minister, I am very interested in a thriving German automobile industry, because I can only pay for the rising costs of environmental protection at home and abroad if there are people in Germany with jobs and who pay taxes.

Global markets must be balanced by global values such as respect for human rights and international law, democracy, security and sustainable economic and environmental development.

So to hope to be able to have peace, to be able to have justice and environmental balance, are consequences of our behavior, not just our intentions.

I wanted to help raise awareness, so I created an environmental foundation called Just Within Reach.