By cutting critical domestic programs such as education health environmental protection and veterans' services this budget reveals misplaced priorities.

Environmental concern is now firmly embedded in public life: in education medicine and law in journalism literature and art.

Environmental concern is a little like dieting or paying off credit-card debt - an episodically terrific idea that burns brightly and then seems to fade when we realize there's a reason we need to diet or pay down our debt. The reason is that it's really really hard and too many of us in too many spheres of life choose the easy over the hard.

But my point is that you design something in the end that precludes any unhealthy trading practices that are not going to serve your environmental or your economic objectives but now is not the time to do it.

Complexity is one of the great problems in environmental design.

I am a fashion designer. I'm not an environmentalist. When I get up in the morning number one I'm a mother and a wife and number two I design clothes. So the main thing I need to do is create hopefully exquisitely beautiful desirable objects for my customer.

To be clear climate change is a true 800 pound gorilla in the room. The effects of global warming threaten global environmental upheaval over the coming century. But for South Florida and the Everglades it could be our death knell if urgent action is not taken.

From year to year environmental changes are incremental and often barely register in our lives but from evolutionary or geological perspectives what is happening is explosive change.

I believe we should reframe our response to climate change as an imperative for growth rather than merely being a way of being green or meeting environmental commitments.

When people align around shared political social economic or environmental values and take collective action thinking and behavior that compromises the lives of millions of people around the world can truly change.