Presuming he does not become too distracted bailing out incompetent companies, our new president seems poised to engage the nation in work we should have undertaken long ago: responsible stewardship of our environment.

Although the Bush/Cheney administration has been notoriously dismissive of initiatives addressing climate change, air and water pollution, energy conservation, alternative fuels, and any number of environmental issues, previous administrations showed little enthusiasm for bold action in these arenas also, despite more friendly rhetoric.

If you wonder why environmentalism has failed to gain political clout for so long, I think it's because environmentalists made themselves easy to dismiss. Johann Hari referred to this weakness in his Slate.com review of Bill McKibben's American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau. According to Hari, the environmental movement, although as old as America itself, diffuses its impact through an internal schism, "...a showdown between romantics and rationalists." The romantics, from Thoreau himself to Alice Walker, view the environment in moral absolutes, and make it harder for rationalists to gain serious consideration from eye-rolling cynics in business, government, and the media.

The romantics aid and abet the cynics by framing every environmental issue as a battle between earth-loving environmentalists and soulless, exploitative commercial interests. But Obama is a rationalist, and understands that the battles on the ground are really between competing commercial interests.

By framing our environmental challenges in practical terms, Obama makes a case for stewardship that appeals to stakeholders on multiple sides of each issue.  Hari notes:

"The rational environmentalists stand at the midpoint between the utopian delusions of the global-warming deniers-something will come along to save us! - and the utopian fantasies of the romantics. They believe our crisis is not spiritual at all, but physical. Human beings didn't unleash warming gases into the atmosphere out of malice or stupidity or spiritual defect: They did it because they wanted their children to be less cold and less hungry and less prone to disease. The moral failing comes only very late in the story-when we chose to ignore the scientific evidence of where wanton fossil-fuel burning would take us. This failing must be put right by changing our fuel sources, not altering our souls."

Obama's selection of Steven Chu as Energy Secretary hints at the future of collaborative capitalist environmental stewardship: As director of the department of energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Chu helped win $500 million in renewable energy research support from British Petroleum, according to The Guardian.

Obama has been talking about his environmental agenda in economic AND romantic terms. And he has tied energy independence to environmentalism. During a debate with John McCain, Obama said, "...if we create a new energy economy, we can create five million new jobs, easily. It can be the engine that drives us into the future the same way the computer was the engine for economic growth over the last couple of decades."

Last April, he told an audience at Messiah College:

"One of the things I draw from the Genesis story is the importance of us being good stewards of the land, of this incredible gift. And I think there have been times where we haven't been [good stewards], and this is one of those times where we've got to take the warning seriously [about climate change]. And part of what my religious faith teaches me is to take an intergenerational view, to recognize that we are borrowing this planet from our children and our grandchildren. And this is where religious faith and the science of global warming converge: We have to find resources in ourselves to make sacrifices so we don't leave it to the next generation. We've got to be less wasteful, both as a society and in our own individual lives. I think religion can actually bolster our desire to make those sacrifices now. As president, I hope to rally the entire world around the importance of us being good stewards of the land."

A leader who can reconcile the romantic and rationalist schools of environmental thought is exactly what we need to make up for lost time addressing our environmental challenges. I have no doubt President Obama will be attacked savagely for every step he takes, since not all of them will directly benefit Halliburton and similar entrenched interests. But even staunch conservatives should applaud initiatives that reduce our dependency on foreign oil. I have no doubt there will be missteps and pain along the way - all change, even positive change, causes some regression. But we now have a chance to show some real character and leadership on issues affecting the entire world, and I hope we seize the opportunity.