A little more than five years ago, Robert Lane, then an 89-year-old retired political scientist, got some of his neighbors together at the Whitney Center retirement home in Hamden, Connecticut, to watch An Inconvenient Truth. Afterward, Lane remembers thinking, "We overcame the Depression, defeated the Nazis, won the cold war -- and we still made a mess of the world." So he got to work, circulating literature to his 200 neighbors and inviting environmental experts to speak at the center. He named his effort "Gray Is Green."

Lane reached out to other communities, expanding Gray Is Green into a national program to make retirement centers more eco-friendly, whether by switching to LED lights or installing green roofs. In partnership with NRDC, Gray Is Green has since evolved into a clearinghouse for information on effecting environmental change.

Kath Schomaker, a graduate of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, started out as a speaker at the Whitney and became the program's outreach coordinator. Schomaker focuses on "the intersection of several aging population groups," from the silent generation (born from 1925 to 1945) to the baby boomers. These generations constitute one of the nation's largest voting blocks, and Gray Is Green plans to mobilize their political muscle.

One example: the Clean Air Promise, whose aim is to protect the Clean Air Act from congressional attacks and to maintain the law's safeguards, which protect both the young and old from air pollutants. Visit grayisgreen.org.