RBC I Twenty years ago, while I was teaching at Providence College, the college president asked me to organize activities for Earth Day. Hoping to generate enthusiasm for our events, I invited Senator Gaylord Nelson, the founder of Earth Day, to be our keynote speaker. I knew he would be in high demand so I was not too disappointed when his office, sure enough, informed me that the senator had already committed to another venue.
Then, about a week before the event, the senator’s office called to convey his itinerary, and would I please arrange to pick him up at the airport? He had decided to squeeze us in, if I promised to get him to the second event on time. (I didn’t realize how difficult that would prove.) My students and I scrambled to revise our plans and to notify the college and the community.
Senator Nelson’s message was energetic and compelling. Earth is finite. There’s only so much water and air and natural resources. The cumulative activities of (then) 5.5 billion people on the planet (now more than 7 billion) are pushing the limits of the earth system. We must change individual behavior to conserve those resources, and we must decide policies, as a community, to protect the environment.
Legislation sponsored by Senator Nelson and his colleagues, including the Wilderness Act, the Environmental Protection Act, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Safe Drinking Water Act, provide the basis for environmental protection. It is also worth noting that Senator Nelson represented an agricultural state (Wisconsin) and served as chairman of the Senate Small Business Development Committee. He encouraged incentives for small business, and he found no conflict between such incentives and environmental protection. As do farmers and ranchers everywhere, he recognized the importance of environmental services such as clean water and healthy soils for sustainable agriculture (Nelson, 2002).
The challenges on this Earth Day, 2012, are greater than ever. Global warming, caused by human activities that add greenhouse gases to earth’s atmosphere, are changing earth’s climate system (National Academies, 2011; IPCC, 2007). Among the worldwide consequences of climate change, ocean levels are rising, extreme weather events are becoming more frequent, and ecosystems are changing; threatening migratory patterns, phenology, habitat, agricultural production, and the survival of species. Among climate-related problems regionally, the central Rockies and American Southwest are experiencing increasing drought events and prolonged wildfire seasons (Westerling, 2006).
It is encouraging that in the past we have been able to prevent or reverse other environmental catastrophes. Witness, for example, the cleanup of Lake Erie by regional municipalities and the EPA (Time, 1979), and the success of international protocols to limit ozone destruction. It is also encouraging that significant progress has been made in developing sustainable energy sources such as wind, solar and biofuels; stimulating significant job growth, for example, in the wind turbine industry right here in Colorado. Coal-fired power plants and the natural gas industry, also, are developing processes for carbon sequestration (Szulczewski, 2012). And in a pinch, entire societies have adapted to environmental disaster: witness the heroic conservation effort in Japan since the loss of its nuclear power industry after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.
Much remains to be done. As individuals, we can reduce, re-use, and recycle. Is it really necessary to hop in the car to drive to the corner convenience store for a cup of coffee, return an hour later for a sandwich, return again in the evening for a tube of toothpaste? Can we carry groceries in re-usable bags? Can we turn down the thermostat a notch or two? Take shorter showers? Refill water bottles from the (perfectly potable) tap? Find a way to recycle all the old batteries and discarded cell phones and monitors and tablets?
Collective decision is required, also. Our county is a center of fossil fuel extraction. With effort, it could become a leader in sustainable energy development. What we do (or what is done to us by the energy corporations) will certainly impact our regional environment and also the global climate.
After his speech, Senator Nelson dove into the audience to shake hands and talk with students. It was hard to pry him away, to deliver him to his next stop on the Earth Day tour. I think he would encourage us, also, to dive in, discuss, debate, and continue the hard work to protect our environment and the ecosystems on which we all depend.
Submitted By Bob Dorsett
References:
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 2007. Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge, UK.
National Academy of Sciences. 2011. America’s Climate Choices. National Academies Press. Washington, D.C. http://nationalacademies.org/basc
Nelson, Gaylord. 2002. Beyond Earth Day. U. Wisconsin Press, Madison.
Szulczewski, Michael L. et al. 2012. Lifetime of carbon capture and storage as a climate-change mitigation technology. PNAS 109 : 5135.
Environment: Comeback for the Great Lakes. Time Magazine. Dec. 03, 1979. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,948661,00.html.
Westerling, A.L. 2006. Warming and earlier spring increase in western U.S. forest wildfire activity. Science 313:940.
The author would be glad to provide interested readers any other references to specific climate issues.
