If we can spend $1 trillion on the Iraq war, then we can afford $1 trillion for a new American Dream.

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Think: Department of Homeland Vitality (and not just our homeland).

There’s nothing wrong with having a robust debate about whether these are precisely the ways to allocate The Next Trillion. (Although I would prefer to see the next president just push it through in a divine fit of Emergency Supplemental Can-Do-Itiveness.)

What seems beyond question, however, is that we must do something, something of sufficient scale and impact, to reestablish American leadership in the world and begin to face the social and environmental challenges of our time.

This is a wildly important moment.

It’s not just about extricating ourselves from a military quagmire. It’s not just about promoting an abstraction called sustainability. At one level, this is about survival. At another, it’s about the ability of Homo sapiens to rise to the occasion, to show that we can put our sapience to good use. For Americans, it’s about our ability to seize the opportunity that could be presented by a kind of virtuous perfect storm – political leadership, moral leadership and economic leadership coming together.

We in this country who have benefited so greatly over the past century from economics of the Take-Make-Waste kind, now have the opportunity to plant the seeds of a new economic order based on restoration and health.

In thinking about this opportunity, we might pause to consider the words of a farmer. Not just any farmer.

Eliot Coleman, a leader in sustainable agriculture on his 40-acre farm in Maine, is as much a purveyor of pioneering insight and entrepreneurial innovation as he is a purveyor of vegetal bounty. “Want high returns?” he asks. “At 1,000 to one in four months, a tomato seed makes even the highest fliers seem paltry.”

Everything, Coleman has come to learn, depends on soil fertility. Our survival depends upon our evolution from a society that feeds plants to a society that feeds the soil. “As others have pointed out,” Coleman observes, “the name ‘Adam’ derives from the Hebrew word for ‘soil,’ and the term ‘Homo’ in Homo sapiens comes from the same root as ‘humus.’ ”

In our race to maximize economic growth and create wealth, however, we have built an economy based on feeding the plant. (Interestingly, we even refer to our factories as “plants.”) We manufacture a dizzying array of products. We produce food that is plentiful, cheap, additive-laden and lasts for months on supermarket shelves. We have created enormous corporations and wealthy shareholders. At the same time, we deplete the soil, literally and figuratively – the soil of culture, the soil of healthy relationships and the soil of diverse opportunities are rapidly losing their fertility.

To feed the plant, we developed the industrial-strength finance of Wall Street, churning out ever-faster corporate growth, measured in quarterly reports and fed by day traders.

The frenzy of economic growth in turn enabled unprecedented levels of philanthropy. In 2006, Americans made $260 billion in charitable donations; half went to religious and educational institutions, while less than $9 billion went to environmental initiatives. Feeding the soil requires something more than Wealth Now, Philanthropy Later, and it requires something more than making as much money as possible so that we have more to give away.

The Wealth Now, Philanthropy Later model evolved in the world before there were 6.3 billion people and 380 parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere. Now we need a more integral approach. We need what Peter Barnes has called “Capitalism 3.0.” We need a new kind of corporate culture and a new kind of investing. We need a new kind of urgency and a new kind of patience. We need to recognize the wisdom of E.F. Schumacher’s observation that the wealthier a society, the more difficult it becomes to do things that do not offer an immediate payback. Feeding the soil requires a commitment not to financial quarters or even years but to generations.

Let The Next Trillion, then, be the most urgently deployed patient capital in history.