For anyone who has ever dismissed environmentalists as "out-of-touch elitists," it's time to meet the "new environmentalists" - starting with Helen Reddout, a sixteenth-generation farmer who has lived in Yakima County for 53 years. Helen's environmental activism was unexpected. She wasn't a card carrying member of the Sierra Club. At first, her only worry was the flies and oppressive odor from nearby industrial dairy plants. She worried about the danger they posed to her livelihood. But as she began to investigate, she said "it was like a dropping a pebble into a still pond. The ripple just kept getting bigger and bigger." First, she found that her well water was polluted with nitrates—which can lead to miscarriages and potentially deadly ailments such as "blue baby syndrome." That's when Helen discovered the Clean Water Act. "In the beginning, I'd see mention of the Clean Water Act, but I didn't really pay it much attention. But then... everything became clear to me, because it was right there in black and white: Dairies cannot discharge their waste into the water." But nobody was holding the dairy industry accountable. The water near one scofflaw plant contained levels of fecal coliform bacteria—a dangerous pathogen found in cows' intestines—that were 240 times higher than the legal limit. So Helen and others hit the phones, and called the Washington Department of Ecology. With help from the Columbia Basin institute, they took photos of waste spilling into drainage canals, dead cows piled in a ditch, and dairies polluting on areas designated as wetlands on a county map. When they were ignored early on, Helen and her friends refused to give up—and formed the Community Association for Restoration of the Environment, or CARE. In the next few years, CARE forced local dairies to stop their illegal dumping, convicted the most egregious offender of sixteen violations of the Clean Water Act, was awarded $171,000 in civil penalties and $428,000 for CARE's legal fees, and won a landmark ruling that extended the protections of the Clean Water Act further than they had ever gone before. Like Helen, more Americans than ever before are getting involved locally -- standing up and forcing our leaders to acknowledge that we face a crisis that links ranchers and biologists, mothers and chemists, city planners and cherry farmers. Across the country, individuals are reclaiming the American environment. And they're changing the face of the environmental movement in the process. "I would never strap myself to a tree, or go to extremes to save something," Helen says. "All I know is that we are lucky to live on this Earth, and we have a responsibility to take care of it." This is the face of the new environmentalism: it's ranchers out West tired of watching their cows die; it's CEOs urging mandatory carbon emissions caps because they're good for the bottom line; it's evangelicals who call it "creation care"— and it's concerned parents worried about the water their kids drink. They understand that, in the long run, we all face a common bottom line: Either we get this right together or we all suffer. No doubt, we in politics must work to solve these problems from 30,000 feet with bold national solutions. But this movement will only succeed if Americans continue to take the lead in protecting the ground beneath their own two feet. Helen's story is a terrific lesson for Americans everywhere struggling for a cleaner, greener future. We believe America is listening - it's time for our leaders to listen too.