he beginning was full of promise. Six weeks after announcing his candidacy in a special election in 2003, Arnold Schwarzenegger released an "Action Plan for California's Environment" that startled Democrats and Republicans alike. It was a remarkable document by any measure; the final draft proposed to invest in clean energy and technology, including hybrid and hydrogen vehicles, to implement greenhouse gas emissions rules, and to resist the Bush administration's push to gut power-plant pollution controls and to lift a longstanding moratorium on offshore oil drilling. It also committed the state to some major, quantified goals, especially on air pollution and electricity: to cut power consumption by 20 percent by some undetermined date, to reduce air pollution by up to 50 percent by 2010, to see 50 percent of new housing developments install solar panels by 2005, and to generate 20 percent of public power from renewable sources, such as wind, solar, and geothermal, by 2010 (seven years in advance of the timetable established by the Democratic incumbent, Governor Gray Davis).

In addition to the pollution and energy provisions, his plan also contained a laundry list of other goals long sought by the state's environmental advocates: more mass transit, more green buildings, more inner-city parks. It could have been written by an enviro -- a liberal and visionary one. It was.

In the late morning of World Environment Day, before traveling to San Francisco for his global warming announcement, the governor briefed me on the genesis of his environmental platform. We sat outside, under a tent furnished with chairs, a low table, and an ashtray for his cigars, on the otherwise empty roof terrace of the Hyatt hotel in Sacramento, directly across the street from the Capitol. During the workweek, Schwarzenegger not only occupies a large suite in the hotel, which he pays for himself, but also works here to escape the Capitol, with its low ceilings and hallways densely packed with police officers, tourists, and schoolchildren on field trips. When he first took office, he had a tent put up in the courtyard of the Capitol so that he could enjoy his cigars. But Democratic legislators with office windows on the courtyard complained about the smoke and even threatened to pass a law extending the required smoking distance from the building -- which the governor threatened to veto in a move that reflected his deteriorating relationship with the Democratic-controlled legislature. His new tent atop the Hyatt looks at the Capitol dome, but mostly beyond it, into the milky summer haze of the Sacramento Valley.

Schwarzenegger has long been close to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a first cousin of the governor's wife, Maria Shriver. According to Schwarzenegger, soon after he announced his candidacy for governor, Bobby Kennedy called him and said, "Look, I think it would be good if you, as a Republican, would talk about the environment. You'd be much more effective than us Democrats" -- more effective, presumably, in reaching across traditional partisan lines and advancing environmental goals among the business community and other constituencies that are generally Republican allies. Besides, both men knew that any Republican hoping to win the governorship of California would have to reassure its heavily Democratic, proenvironment electorate of his bona fides. Kennedy suggested that Schwarzenegger call Terry Tamminen, then the director of the Santa Monica-based foundation Environment Now. "Call this guy," Kennedy told him. "He will come over and work with you."

Terry Tamminen boasts a very eclectic career: He has at various times been a ship captain, the manager of a sheep ranch and a real estate company, a recycling consultant for the government of Nigeria, and the owner of a pool maintenance company in Malibu. He's written The Ultimate Pool Maintenance Manual and, according to his official state bio, several theatrical works on the life of William Shakespeare. He flies planes and helicopters and speaks German, Dutch, and Spanish. In Malibu, he met some environmentally inclined people who helped him found the Santa Monica Baykeeper; he ran the organization for six years before taking the helm of Environment Now in 1999.

Tamminen and Schwarzenegger hit it off: "I loved working with this guy," the governor told me. "He explained everything in kind of simple terms." Tamminen spent part of a day at the Schwarzeneggers' house with the governor, his wife, and the couple's four children, all of whom weighed in on the issues. After their discussions, Schwarzenegger and Tamminen agreed that "the trick is, how do you encourage businesses to grow and at the same time take care of the environment," in Schwarzenegger's words. He asked Tamminen to fill in the details and write the "Action Plan," and gives him full credit for the vision it lays out: "This is really all Terry's thing. I'm there basically to say, 'Yes, these are great ideas,' and put my stamp of approval on it." The ideas Tamminen brought to him, Schwarzenegger admitted, "may have been things that I'd never even heard about. I was really never out there fighting for those causes until I started running for office."

It was a case of recognizing political expediency, certainly, although Schwarzenegger tried to persuade me that the roots of his environmentalism reach deep into his past. He was receptive to Tamminen's ideas, he told me, because of the connections he makes in his own mind between fitness and a healthy environment. To him, the constant quest for improvement that bodybuilding requires applies in some sense equally to the human body and the natural world. Such a notion doesn't seem too outlandish in Southern California.

He also pointed to his childhood in the picturesque village of Thal in the mountains of eastern Austria. To earn a living, many of his relatives worked in a steel mill in the nearby industrial city of Graz, "where every day when you wiped the windows your whole towel filled with a black substance on it because the factory was right in the middle of town." The river that runs through Graz, the Mur, he remembered, "was considered one of the dirtiest rivers in middle Europe." Gradually, over the past four decades, awareness of these issues became more acute in Austria, prompting people to work "very aggressively to clean up the environment," Schwarzenegger told me. "When I was a kid, you couldn't see the bottom of that river. Now you can."

In Austria these days, environmental protection is an issue of national pride, not of left or right, and all politicians are of necessity proenvironment. Schwarzenegger's views would make him a fairly typical right-of-center politician in Austria.

The governor spoke often about the need to govern from the center, about finding a balance between environmental protection and economic growth. When I asked him what he thought the most important factor was in advancing the environmental agenda, he answered in one word: "Redistricting." This is one of the core reform proposals he's placed on a special-election ballot slated for November 8, when he will put to direct vote his proposition for moving the power to redraw districts from the legislature to a panel of retired judges. "We have to blend the two parties together," he said. "That is, I think, the fundamental change that has to happen -- to bring people to the middle." Yet the election itself has become bitterly divisive and partisan.

In our conversation, he cited a credo that I would think about often in the coming days: "The trick with politics is that you walk the tightrope. If you step too far to the right you fall, if you step too far to the left you fall."