Family values. That’s what pollsters and pundits say will govern the hearts, minds and votes of Americans in the November election. Throughout Kansas and the nation, candidates are accusing their opponents of not hewing to real family values. Terrific! Family values should determine America’s social and economic future.

What are the REAL family values? With all due respect to the candidates, they’re not about same-sex unions or the Ten Commandments displayed on government property. Real family values are more basic. They’re the bread and butter issues for parents, children and grandchildren: our physical health, our economic well-being, our educational excellence, the quality of life in our surroundings.

A constitutional amendment prohibiting same-sex unions won’t make the mercury-laden fish in Lone Star Lake safer for children or pregnant women in Douglas County. Kansas has some of the dirtiest rivers in the nation. Shouldn’t clean water, free of carcinogens, pesticides and animal waste, in every urban and rural community be a core family value?

Hanging the Ten Commandments in city halls in Kansas, Georgia or any other state won’t clean the smokestack smog and acid rain that contaminate our health and pollute our cities, lakes and forests. Smog levels in Maine’s Acadia National Park, exceeded EPA’s health standards last year, courtesy of smoke from far-off coal-fired plants. When Ohio belches, Maine coughs. Shouldn’t breathing clean air in a city, town or national park be a core family value for all America?

Healthy oceans should also be a core family value. They provide the fish and other seafood much of America and the rest of the world depend on for their protein. But the news here is grim. We know our oceans are polluted, just not how much. All Pacific whales tested in the past four years are highly contaminated with toxic chemical waste and pesticides from the seafood they eat, mostly fish and squid. Lawrence families eat the same fish and squid.

Global warming is a family value if there ever was one. And the scientific jury is in, whether we acknowledge it or not. Global warming is our doing, courtesy of burning fossil fuels and pumping massive amounts of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere, a whopping 35 percent increase since the Industrial Revolution. These hothouse gases envelop the Earth, trap the infrared light trying to escape, and heat the atmosphere.

The evidence is all around us, especially in Arctic, temperate and mountain areas, where the changes wrought by global warming hit first and hit hardest. Arctic glaciers are shrinking at a frightening pace. The famous white snows of Mount Kilimanjaro will be gone in 14 years. Because of glacial melt, sea levels are up one-quarter to one-half foot in the past 100 years and rising. The melt is also releasing chemical contaminants and pesticides that had evaporated from industrial sites, been trapped in the ice, and, as reported in Science Magazine, are now “poisoning human breast milk in the Arctic.”

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Studies by atmospheric scientists and the Department of Defense say that, unless checked, global warming can wreak havoc on national economies, national security, agribusiness and human health. Human society now depends on a stable and predictable environment. But climate change will disrupt that delicate stability, from land use and agriculture to the availability of water, energy, natural resources and food supplies, to the emergence, invasion and spread of virulent pest and disease organisms from different regions of the world.

What’s to be done? Let’s start with energy, one of the most critical family values for the 21st century. Oil, coal and other fossil fuels — at least the way they are burned now — have had their day. It’s time they went the way of the dinosaur, along with the dirty air, toxic lands, contaminated waters, greenhouse gases and the foreign dependence they generate each day. Shouldn’t the development of clean, domestic, efficient, renewable and reliable energy sources be a real family value for every family in America? Do the candidates have a bold plan for mobilizing our nation’s scientists and engineers to the frontier of energy research, much as when we put a man on the moon in the 1960s, and decoded the Human Genome in the 1990s?

Finally, let’s make our natural environment a top family value. Just the wild European honeybee, which pollinates crops, is worth $14 billion a year to U.S. agriculture. Together, the Earth’s plants, animals and ecosystems provide “free” services estimated to be about $33 trillion annually in scrubbing our air, water and soil and providing food, fiber, fuel and pharmaceuticals. Beyond dollars, America the beautiful is our most bountiful family value — the grassland, desert, tundra, river, lake and ocean that color the planet blue for every man, woman and child, looking up from Earth or down from space.

Leonard Krishtalka is director of the Natural History Museum & Biodiversity Research Center at Kansas University.