It’s been forty years since the first Earth Day. 40 years since I was on my knees Picking up over 1300 cigarette butts from the lawn of my high school, which has forever made me irritable about smokers using the ground as their ashtray. Hey, people, those filters don’t break down very easily.
The Environmental Protection Agency was formed in 1970, under a Republican President, Richard Nixon, with William Ruckelshaus as its first head. In a recent wall Street Journal piece, Rucklehaus discusses what should happen next here.
(Nixon wasn’t that bad a President, except for, you know, the war and Watergate. Ruckelshaus, BTW, was fired as Deputy Attorney General a result of the Watergate “Saturday Night Massacre”; here is his recent account of that event.)
But there continues to be a debate green or growth, as though one could not have both, that \environmentalism is somehow anathema to capitalism. As a business librarian, I just don’t believe that is the case.
Much has been made of all the “green” jobs the Obama administration has promised that have not yet come to fruition. Thinking back to the Industrial Revolution, in some ways, it was more evolutionary in that the old ways didn’t disappear overnight. Patience is required.
Meanwhile, we need to respect those canaries in the coal mine, those polar bears drifting on ice floes, those penguins that have to travel 25% further for food, the potential loss of species, not from natural selection, but rather from human activity.
Yet there are people who not only think that the earth’s temperature rise is a naturally occurring phenomenon – I don’t believe that, but people are allowed to disagree – but that the earth isn’t warming at all. They take examples such as the especially snowy winter in parts of the United States as “proof”. MY proof is this chart from NASA: No, not every year is warmer than the last. But the trend line is clear. We ignore it, literally at our peril.
I’m old enough to have participated in the very first Earth Day, April 22, 1970. For that occasion, I joined some of my fellow students in picking up the trash around my high school. For whatever reason – perhaps because my father was a smoker – I decided to concentrate on one of the smaller, but more annoying pieces of litter, the cigarette butt. I recall picking up 1300 of them before I lost count. And I thought I was really doing something.
Today, I recognize that saving the nature of our earth involves a lot more than picking up litter. Not that I’ve stopped; my daughter plays at the local elementary school playground, and I’ve picked up the trash three days in a row, knowing that the garbage I picked up on the third day was not there on the first. I’m pretty much an obsessive on recycling. I’ve discovered that, e.g., another unit on my floor will have ordered a large deli plate. In these parts, the base is flat and black, while the top is clear and a hemisphere. Both parts are recyclable, with a 1 or 2 in a triangle. Yet someone has often thrown them in the trash. Well, not IN the trash; they are so large that they’ve been placed NEAR the trash. I pick them up, wash them off and take them home.
I often read newspapers on long trips or even taking the bus to work; instead of trashing that read paper, I’ll bring it back home. Recently, we’ve acquired some large canvas shopping bags from our local public radio/television station, WMHT; unfortunately, we’ve lost one. However, I was carrying the other one around when shopping at the local CVS pharmacy. The clerk commended me, “I wish more people would do that.” On the same shopping trip, I stopped at the nearby Price Chopper supermarket, and the clerk there gave me three cents off my purchase; all the stuff fit in the same bag, BTW.
At my office in the past three years, we’ve sent out our research on links to PDFs rather than printing and mailing them. Not only have we saved whole forests of trees, we’ve saved a bunch of money on paper and postage. Generally speaking, we have – as most UAlbany e-mails suggest – think before we print.
The state of New York has recently passed a better bottle bill. Starting in about six weeks, it won’t be just cans and bottles of beer and soda that will have a redeemable five cent deposit, it’ll also be on water bottles. Knowing full well that this will be a pain for retailers and distributors, because neighboring states haven’t enacted a similar law, I think it’s on the whole a good thing. However, I expect an uptick in the number of bottle entrepreneurs rummaging through my recyclables bin on trash night looking for the returnables that I never put there but that other neighbors inexplicably do.
But all of this seems like small potatoes. We’ve recently got a better front door and better windows, but should we get a solar paneled roof? Can we AFFORD a solar paneled roof in the short term, even if it pays off the long run? I get peevish about some neighborhoods’ behavior in limiting environmental consciousness. Some in the United States actually ban people from hanging clothes outside on a clothesline, saying that it will reduce property values, as though the current recession hasn’t already done that. Similar bans exist on the aforementioned solar panels for the same reason.
Here are some links that deal with some of the more substantial issues of Earth Day: What to Do to Celebrate Earth Day? How To Teach Your Preschooler to “Go Green” My college’s current sustainability bulletin -PDF My college is also participate in the ongoing IBM Smarter Planet University Jam, April 21-23: “Faculty and students from more than 170 academic institutions around the globe will be participating in the Jam. Beginning 12:00 AM EDT on April 21st and continuing for a 72-hour period, they will be coming together for an on-line conversation on important topics such as the vulnerability of global supply chains for food and medicine, the environmental and geopolitical issues surrounding energy, how to adapt our education system to help students acquire the skills to compete in an interconnected, intelligent and instrumented world, and more.” Green Tax Incentives in the US
And for a little whimsy, Welcome Back: The longer the winter, the sweeter the spring, and this winter seemed very long indeed. And if spring brings such pleasure to us now, I can only imagine the joy and relief it must have brought to man in ancient times, when winters were not so much endured but survived. (If you’re in the Southern Hemisphere, watch it in six months.) ROG
I’ve been struggling to figure out why some people are willing to believe in the possibly of global warming, while others seem to be so staunchly from Missouri. And it isn’t just a left-right, liberal-conservative, Democratic-Republican thing, though it does have aspects of it.
Well, here’s the (cheeky) theory; it’s all dependent on how they view the legal system.
Let’s take group A, which I’ll call Red. Red wants to make sure we lock up all the people who need locking up (not necessarily including their friends). Red is dependent, though often bends, the rule of criminal law which requires evidence beyond a reasonable doubt. Red has doubt, which Red finds reasonable. So, Red doesn’t seem to want to do anything until there’s total unanimity of opinion. Examples of this thinking: a recent Wall Street Journal op/ed piece, the current administration’s position that we can’t do anything until China does, the let’s sit on our hands position of the EPA that was vacated by the Supreme Court recently.
Then let’s take group B, which I’ll call Gray. Gray thinks we need sweeping changes, which can often be done with a class-action lawsuit. The rule of civil law requires that only a preponderence of evidence support the position, which is good enough for Gray. Thus, Gray finds the rising temperatures, stranded polar bears and hungry penguins, the increase in severe weather, the disappearing bees, the poor maple seasons to provide a preponderence of evidence of human-generated global warming. Well, maybe not the bees. A leading Republican on this side appeared on the cover of Newsweek recently; notably, he’s one of the few who isn’t running for President, because he’s ineligible.
Regardless, what I loved about this Earth Day/Month was the Step It Up protests all over the country last weekend. “We’re not going to join all together in a mass demonstration and waste all of that petrol!” they were saying. “Act locally.”
In New York, there’s conversation about expanding the bottle bill (five cent deposit on returned soda and beer cans and bottles) that was passed a couple decades ago, to water bottles, sports drinks, bottled iced tea and the like. I’m in favor. The growth of sports drinks and the like was not anticipated when the original law was passed. ROG
