Tuesday night we saw something amazing happen in America -- we saw hope triumph over fear, we saw the past give way to the future, we felt a change in the air from fragmentation to unity. We know that there will still be trouble ahead, there will be disappointments and setbacks, but for the first time in a long time, at least we feel that we can move forward, that we can prevail over the injustices and mistakes and evils of the past. Apathy at last has given way to engagement and action.

My friends and I spent the night at the Liberty Elm Diner, where we watched the electoral numbers gather, with agonizing slowness; then we drove to the Biltmore downtown, where we saw Senator McCain's gracious concession speech -- it was in the car in between that a phone call told us that we now had a new president-elect -- then a final stop at a friend's house, appropriately on Hope Street, where we toasted President Obama's first speech with a bottle of French champagne.

During the night we saw our friend John journey from tense and morose to joyous and exuberant. "My grandfather grew up in Selma, Alabama," he announced to the crowd on the Biltmore elevator, "and I wish he had lived to see this day. A black man elected president!" He heard the echoes of Martin Luther King and Abraham Lincoln in Mr. Obama's words, and saw faces in the crowd smiling and weeping and filled with hope. "I haven't seen faces like that since 1968," he said, awed somewhat, and we all had to agree.

Mr. Obama's environmental policies may not be all we could hope they would be -- we'd like to see a stronger position against nukes, for starters -- but we feel confident that he will invite smart people to give him good advice, and in the messy business of democracy, we will find ourselves moving forward, step by step, into a newer, greener, more hopeful world.

Click here to go to the Obama-Biden Web site and read more about their energy and environment policies.

-- NNN editor Mary Grady