Various Authors Compare Earth Days on The 25th Anniversary

September 18, 2012 by admin

On April 22, 1970, leaders addressed millions of people across the country as they celebrated the nation’s first Earth Day. “We are building a movement, a movement with a broad base, a movement which transcends traditional political boundaries… Earth Day is the beginning,” Denis Hayes, Environmental Action’s first director, told the crowd gathered at the Washington Monument. And Earth Day was the beginning – both for the environmental movement as we know it today and for Environmental Action, which was organized by the founders of Earth Day.

Here, speakers from the first Earth Day reminisce, assess today’s environmental issues and look toward the future.

Gaylord Nelson

Back in the early 1960s, when Gaylord Nelson was a freshman Democrat senator from Wisconsin, he says he could count the environmentalists in the Senate on one hand. But within a few years, the Cuyahoga River caught fire, beaches were closed because of pollution and “you could see industrial cities like Pittsburgh from miles away, they looked like they had a yellowish atomic cloud surrounding them, the air was so bad.” By 1969, Nelson decided to launch a nationwide teach-in modeled after those held on the Vietnam War. When word of what soon would be known as Earth Day got out, it became front-page news across the country. On April 22, Congress adjourned, something unprecedented except for official holidays, and members went to speak in their home districts. Since that first Earth Day, Nelson has spoken at dozens of colleges across the country to commemorate Earth Day. After leaving Congress in 1980, he joined the Wilderness Society as its counselor. He is chairman of Earth Day XXV. In 1970, he spoke at a number of colleges, including the University of Wisconsin.

1970

Earth Day is dramatic evidence of a broad new American concern that cuts across generations and ideologies. At last count, programs are planned at 2,000 colleges, 10,000 schools and additional thousands of communities involving young and old, liberal and conservative.

The fact that so many Americans can agree on a problem could be the best news in decades. Earth Day may be symbolic of new national perspectives on the still pressing problems of the last decade…

Our goal is an environment of decency, quality and mutual respect for all other human creatures and for all other living creatures. An environment without ugliness, without ghettos, without discrimination, without hunger, without poverty, without war.

1995

Earth Day achieved what I had hoped for. The objective was to get a nationwide demonstration of concern for the environment so large that it would shake the political establishment out of its lethargy and finally force this issue permanently into the political arena. It was a gamble, but it worked. An estimated 20 million people participated in demonstrations all across the country.

We are talking about a time when I got 60 or 70 phone calls from members of Congress asking for copies of my environmental speeches. They had never given one; they didn’t know what to say. Well, today everyone in Congress is an environmentalist – or at least they say they are. They think it’s a politically helpful thing to say, because 80 percent of Americans claim they’re environmentalists.

But you think back to 1970 when there weren’t any real environmental magazines, just hunting and fishing ones. There was only one environmental institute at a university, and now there are environmental departments at all the schools. There was not a single law school with environmental law courses. No grade schools taught environmental education. Today we’ve got environmental education to beat the band; in Wisconsin, for example, teachers need to take environmental courses just to get their teaching certificates.

So we’ve seen a change in the understanding and whole culture of the country since 1970. Some people look at Congress today and see a regression. There are senators who are saying, “I’m an environmentalist, but I’m not a crazy environmentalist. You’ve got to have clean air, but… You’ve got to have clean water, but…” All that stuff is just episodic. The public still wants environmental protection. The whole country has moved dramatically in 25 years, and there’s a huge public voice now.

Charles A. Hayes

A union official from the 1940s until he was elected to Congress in 1983, Charles A. Hayes has long spoken out for the rights of workers and people of color communities. In 1970, he was vice president of the Amalgamated Meatcutters and Butcher Workmen of North America, which later merged with the United Food and Commercial Workers Union. As a member of the House of Representatives, in which he represented Chicago’s South Side for four terms, he was author of successful legislation aimed at preventing high school drop outs and consistently voted for worker protection and affirmative action measures. At the first Earth Day, he spoke at the Civic Center Plaza in Chicago.

1970

Working people, black people and poor people have known about pollution long before it became so fashionable to talk about it. The steelworkers have been living under the belching smokestacks of the steel mills for the past 50 years or more. The packinghouse workers have been breathing in the stench of rendering plants both at home and at work since the turn of the century. The workers in the grain mills have been developing lung ailments for many decades from the fine dust in the air, both inside and outside the plant walls…

A better environment for us all will not come easy. What we have to recognize is that there are deeply rooted economic interests that will oppose us tooth and nail, but whose public relations departments will continue to issue fine statements about how dedicated they are to the search for a better environment. Nor will a better environment come from community anti-litter drives, desirable as these may be. The environment in which hundreds of thousands of families exist in inner cities across the country includes the rats that attack their children, the lead in the peeling paints that poison their babies, the decrepit housing conditions, the inadequate nutrition and the lack of green space.

We are told by Senator McGovern’s study of the hunger problems that 15 million people in America cannot afford an adequate daily diet. it is small comfort to breathe clean air while you slowly starve to death.

The black people and the poor of this country can understand and join in the fight for a better environment, so long as that fight recognizes the need for joint action on all the basic evils of our environment.

1995

There has been quite a bit of change between 1970 and 1995. The steel mills of Chicago are almost gone. The packinghouse workers no longer exist. There is far less pollution running into our rivers and lakes. I think Earth Day brought about a change for the better.

At the same time, though, unemployment has risen to particularly gruesome levels among African Americans. I’m not saying my being in Congress solved any great society problems, but I was always an advocate for education and training programs to prepare people for jobs that are available. As a member of the Education and Labor Committee, I traveled throughout the country to see what Congress could do to improve quality of life, particularly in urban areas.

After I graduated from high school in the 1930s, I went to work for the Civilian Conservation Corps planting trees to stop erosion. It was a program that protected our rivers and environment and at the same time created jobs. I think something like that could be helpful now in rebuilding our deteriorating infrastructure.

I grew up in a family of 12 kids. We were very poor, and I’ll never forget my roots. I think we have responsibility to do something about poverty and to make life better for people instead of worse instead of sitting back and watching the rich grow richer.

Eugene P. Odum

Eugene P. Odum, widely acknowledged as the father of modern ecology, has been a professor of biology and ecology at the University of Georgia since 1940, where he founded the university’s Institute of Ecology. Author of numerous textbooks on ecology, Odum has also won awards for his pioneering work in ecology and conservation, including the Theodore Roosevelt Distinguished Service Medal and the Tyler Ecology Award, recognized as the most prestigious environmental prize in the world. In 1970, he spoke at the University of Georgia.

1970

It is important to realize that the optimum population density for a highly technical and affluent society is very much lower than for a subsistence society because the individual’s use of resources and his production of wastes is so much great- er. Thus, the U.S. is now in as much danger of overpopulation at its level of living as is India at its level of living standards. We cannot just sit back and let the food supply determine how many people the Earth can support, because it will support more “warm bodies” than quality human beings.

To maintain an American diet and an American style of life, each person may need as man as five acres. Only a very small part of this five acres is needed to supply food, clothing and shelter, if we would be satisfied merely with getting enough calories, having one suit per year and living in a one-room apartment. But to support us in the good life to which we are accustomed, a lot of space is needed to take care of resource demands, domestic animals and recreation and to cope with air, water, noise and other pollution.

1995

I think when astronauts first took pictures from the moon, we realized what a small, remote planet we’re living on. At the first Earth Day, people were at last becoming aware of population pressure. But the enthusiasms of the young people weren’t sustained. The environment went on the political backburner as short-term economics and the Cold War became chief issues.

In 1990, I gave another Earth Day speech in which I predicted the environment would come back to stay on the forefront for three reasons. There were the increasingly global threats to environmental quality, recognized in both rich and poor countries; the super powers were turning from confrontation to cooperation; and economic development and environmental protection were beginning to be recognized as interdependent rather than separate issues. Well, now I’m pessimistic again. We’ve got a Congress that’s saying, “Do away with all regulations. Let the rich get richer.” I concur with ecological economist Herman Dailey’s answer when he was asked “Are you optimistic about the future?” He responded, “No, but I’m hopeful.”

It’s pretty crucial to see what will come out of all this turmoil. I think the nation is going through the growing pains from adolescence to maturity. Everybody is scared. People don’t understand this transition from a time when there seemed to be endless opportunity for development to a more conservation-focused period. The question is, when do we stop getting bigger and get better?

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The Elastomer Group Project And Its Benefits

September 15, 2012 by admin

The first phase of the Elastomer Group project involved collecting rubber at the dismantling stage. Parts were mostly hoses and weather stripping (no tires were used). When they got it all together, the members’ first thought, says Pett, was: “What in the world can we do with this stuff?”

They ground it up and then mixed it with 75 percent virgin material. Studies showed that such a mixture regained more than 90 percent of the properties of the virgin material.

The second phase was more challenging: collecting rubber after the vehicle goes to an automotive shredder, For years, the rule was: Once a vehicle had been shredded and the profitable materials, such as metals, were removed, what was left was shredder residue – plastics, mixed rubber, glass and some fluids (about 25 percent of what the shredder received) – and all of it was landfill fodder.

Rubber makes up about 11 percent of shredder residue. There was no market.

“The perception is that recycled rubber is nothing more than a filler,” says Robert Coffey, director of product development and specialty products for Hugo Neu Schnitzer East, a large automotive shredder based in Jersey City, N.J., and an Elastomer Group project partner. “But it ain’t necessarily so. We were trying to debunk a myth.”

Part of the challenge was getting the rubbers – used and virgin – to mix well together. Project partners Goldsmith and Eggleton Inc. of Wadsworth, Ohio, and Custom Cryogenic Grinding Corp. of Simcoe, Ontario, fixed that by coating the rubbers with agents that allowed them to interact.

LIKE NEW

Pett presented the results of the second study to the American Chemical Society’s Rubber Division last fall. The rubber retained 90 to 95 percent of its virgin tensile strength, and it had superior heat aging properties to virgin material. Pert says the new material could be used for much of the rubber’s virgin applications, such as hosing, tubing or weather-stripping.

Pett says use of postconsumer rubber potentially could keep more than 75 percent of waste rubber out of landfills. “Nobody’s proven that,” he says, “but once you get the rubber, you should be able to use it all.”

Improved collection is the next challenge. Developing a better method of separating the shredder residue to get “more refined streams” of each material, says Pett, will promote high-volume applications.

Pett says the type of rubber the Elastomer Group project created could be used on vehicles within five years, although that depends on commercial relationships now being developed. “It will only work if it makes economic sense,” he says.

At least two companies have developed prototypes using the material. AKRO Corp. of Canton, Ohio, used 15 percent of the recycled rubber to create a floor-mat backing. And Custom Cryogenic, using 25 percent of the recycled rubber, created a compound that meets specifications for molded automotive body plugs.

“I’m encouraged,” says John O’Neill, vice president of corporate development for Custom Cryogenic. He says his company is actively working with a Ford supplier on the project.

Meanwhile, the Elastomer Group is devising a generic projected price list. “Are the prices even in the ballpark?” Pett asks. “We think they would be. based on what we’ve been able to see, it would be a cost savings.”

VALUABLE RESOURCE

Not a starry-eyed idealist about being “green,” Pett has a more practical orientation.

“The original motivation,” he says, “was because of my interest in elastomers. It was very clear that (recycling) was going to be a very important issue, for Ford Motor Co. and for the world. It’s simply very foolish for us to throw away valuable resources.

“So in that sense I’m probably not coming from the viewpoint of an almost theological advocate of it. No, I’m coming from the viewpoint that it makes both technological and commercial sense.”

One of Pett’s prime objectives now is education. He sees his many activities as avenues to educate not only component and materials suppliers but Ford engineers as well.

“We have to educate along this whole chain,” he says. “Perhaps seven years ago, our engineers were specifying virgin only.” Now, using postconsumer-recycled materials, “it’s becoming the way of business, and that’s good.”

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Earth Day Is Always A Joy

September 13, 2012 by admin

Just before leaving La Guardia Airport, I had a brief exchange with our conference keynoter, former Brooklyn Congresswoman Bella Abzug (now co-chair of the Women’s Environmental and Development Organization). Welcome to the culture wars. Mrs. Abzug, wearing one of her signature floppy hats, let me know, as soon as I introduced myself, that she was not happy with Vatican diplomacy regarding next September’s U.N. Conference on Women in Beijing. In her speech later that evening, she repeatedly arraigned a certain minuscule, unnamed state, “with neither women nor children,” for blocking progress by reneging on the principles it had already agreed to at last fall’s U.N. Cairo Conference on Population and Development (Am., 8/27/94 and 10/l/94). The sarcastic reference to a childless Vatican drew big guffaws–and warned me that a clerical collar might be as welcome in this crowd as a furrier in mink.

Not one to pass up an opportunity for martyrdom, I wore my clerical collar the next morning–to an address by Barry Commoner, director of the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems at Queens College in New York City. Mr. Commoner took time out from his main theme–the necessity of breaking the link between production and pollution–to flail the Republican effort to bury environmental protection beneath a tangle of cost-benefit red tape. He also had harsh words for the “supposed scholarship” of Gregg Easterbrook’s new book, A Moment on the Earth, which alleges that environmentalists hide their own great success (the air is cleaner, water purer, etc.) lest good news dampen fund-raising efforts. The book, it was claimed, simply gives comfort to enemies like Speaker Gingrich.

Mr. Commoner is by no means an environmental doomsayer. He simply does not buy the way politicians–and many environmentalists, too–typically play off economic growth against environmental protection. The collision course metaphor, he claimed, is specious. The problem lies in what he called the “control strategy” the nation has adopted, for instance, to deal with the carbon dioxide emissions that trigger global warming. More and better catalytic converters on auto engines are not the answer; they have stabilized [CO.sub.2] emissions but have not come near the 90 percent reduction the Clean Air Act calls for. What we need–and have the technology for–is a “preventive strategy” that encourages production that does not pollute in the first place. (That’s what we did with unleaded gasoline or by stopping the production of DDT and phosphate detergents.) In a similar way, Mr. Commoner claimed, Government “industrial policy” (yes, he used that forbidden term) ought to promote organic farming and the development of electric motors. Detroit would leap at the chance, he suggested, if the Government created an instant market (and brought down the price) by ordering fleets of nonpolluting vehicles using (solar) photovoltaic batteries.

LESTER R. BROWN’S latest State of the World report offers a complementary suggestion: Instead of subsidizing virgin materials extraction as we do now (the obsolete General Mining Act of 1872 gives miners the right, to mineral-bearing public lands for $5 an acre or less and does not require reclamation or royalties on production), the idea is to align market forces for a more parsimonious use and recycling of materials like glass, tin and wood. Such capitalist solutions met with little but skepticism from many activists in the audience.

My panel–on the relation of population issues to the environment–followed next. While the panelists took it for granted that high birth rates were a factor in environmental damage, particularly in developing nations, some felt, as the Vatican does, that industrial waste and overconsumption in developed nations pose the greater threat. No one was about to “blame the victim” or defend the numbers-driven, often coercive birth control policies of the recent past. The international community has now reached consensus that the key to solving the population-environmental crisis lies in eradicating poverty (the first item on the 1992 Earth Summit’s Agenda 21) and improving the status of women worldwide. As a Catholic, I said, I could only be grateful that at least on paper the United Nations is now advocating a “people-centered” approach that recognizes that family planning programs are only effective (and moral) when placed within the larger context of primary health care, education and social justice. That did not get me off the hook, of course. Mrs. Abzug’s remarks about Vatican obstructionism still rang in many ears.

ONE QUESTIONER from the audience (who identified herself as “raised Catholic”) asked me why the church denied her the right to control her own body. (And when, dear lady, did you stop beating your husband?) In private, I suspect, my questioner and I could probably have agreed that abortion is a tragic “choice” that most women are driven to out of desperation. Third-world women are driven to it because they don’t have social and economic choices; and many first-world women find themselves in a similar bind–abandoned by lovers, without adequate income, child-care services or social support. Without ever crediting each other, I am sure many pro-lifers and pro-choicers often work toward a common objective: to give girls and women the kind of social support that is required for a real choice. (I had neither the time nor the wit to give this speech at the conference, but wish I had.)

Saturday afternoon the conference moved on to the question of the Government’s role in assuring a healthy environment. We heard a stirring address from Lois Gibbs, the housewife from Niagara Falls, N.Y, who first alerted the nation to the Love Canal disaster (and is now executive director of the Citizens’ Clearinghouse for Hazardous Wastes). The message: Corporations don’t much care about public health (the “social costs” of producing toxic chemicals are “externalized,” that is, end up on your tax bill); and state officials and the Environmental Protection Agency, both accused of being in cahoots with industry, aren’t much better. Winona LaDuke, environmental program director for the Seventh Generation Fund, would echo this indictment in her major speech the following day. (Where were the C.E.O.’s of Dow Chemical, Chevron, Dupont and Volkswagen–all of whom had endorsed the Rio Earth Summit in 1992–when we needed them to respond?)

Mrs. Gibbs, who pursues a mischievous, Saul Alinsky-style of community organizing (e.g., having Love Canal complainants move into City Hall with their sleeping bags), provided a fitting introduction to the panels that followed, which increasingly consisted of populist, environmental justice activists like Luis Sepulveda of West Dallas’s Coalition for Environmental Justice (annual budget $1,300) and Vernice Miller, co-founder of West Harlem Environmental Action. The Hispanics and African Americans immediately understood the eloquent Native Americans–people like Thomas Goldtooth of the Indigenous Environmental Network and the Canadian Cree poet Margaret Sam-Cromarty–when they complained of toxic and nuclear dumping on Indian lands. The racial issue surfaced here, as the activists pointed to the coincidence that industrial and urban waste ends up, with disproportionate frequency, in African-American neighborhoods and on Indian reservations. Feelings ran strong, and on one of the panels an official from the E.P.A.’s Boston bureau had a very tough time of it, as did a woman economist who had the temerity (and believe me, it took some at this point) to argue that, when it came to spending public monies on waste cleanup, cost-benefit analysis was indispensable and useful.

One measure of this Earth Day gathering’s success, then, is that no one was killed. This was a multicultural assembly. Strains there were, and ruffled feathers (including my own). But the worst that happened was that one white male moderator left the podium in a huff when a woman in the audience wanted to hear more from the panelists and challenged his dogged timekeeping.

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Conservation Innovators At An Unlikely Time

September 4, 2012 by admin

They were very different both as men and in what they sought from nature, but they became giants in 20th-century conservation.

Of the many people who contributed to conservation in the 20th century, two stand out, not only for what they did but for how their achievements affected subsequent history. Aldo Leopold (1887-1948) and Sigurd Olson (1899-1982) grew up in the Midwest during an era of rapid population growth and environmental change. The last virgin prairies were put to the plow, and the remaining old-growth timber was logged to fuel industrial and urban expansion. One of the few elements of continuity in the boys’ lives was provided by hunting.

Leopold acquired his lifelong passion for upland bird hunting from his father and grandfather, while Olson developed his obsession with waterfowling pretty much on his own. Years later Olson wrote Leopold that “ducks have become more or less of a religion with me.” This “more or less of a religious feeling” for game and the hunting experience was central to the achievements of both men, for it motivated them to seek ways of perpetuating wildlife and wild places.

Leopold most enjoyed hunting in the company of family and friends. Discussions about the relationship of species to their environment or of the importance of ethics to hunting were integral to his sport. Leopold’s appreciation for the social side of hunting was reflected in his successful effort to establish a continental network of biologists–later called the Wildlife Society–dedicated to the scientific management of game and its ecosystems.

By contrast, Olson felt that solitude was hunting’s greatest satisfaction. His long-term campaign to save the nation’s wilderness areas stemmed from his self-reliance and a constant longing for open spaces.

Both men earned master of science degrees (Leopold in forestry; Olson in ecology) at a time when most people didn’t attend college. But whereas Leopold’s M.S. was a purposeful step toward a 20-year career in the U.S. Forest Service, followed by another 20-year career as a university lecturer in the field of game management that he’d created, Olson wasn’t sure what to do with his M.S. He ultimately took work at Minnesota’s Ely Junior College (where he later became dean) so he could be near his beloved canoe country, straddling the U.S.- Canadian border. There he guided anglers in the summer and hunted ducks in the fall.

Both men were masterful writers. Leopold’s book Game Management (1933) became the first and still defining text on the subject. Olson’s collection of contemplative essays–The Singing Wilderness (1956)–became the banner around which a growing army of wilderness supporters rallied. But whereas Leopold thought only of print as the best means to disseminate ideas, Olson also used motion pictures to reach the greatest number of people with a possible interest in saving the wilderness–a goal he finally achieved in 1964 when President Lyndon Johnson signed the Wilderness Act into law.

Why should we remember Leopold and Olson today? First of all, the best of their books–Leopold’s posthumously published A Sand County Almanac and Round River, as well as Olson’s later Reflections from the North Country and Listening Post–are, perhaps, our culture’s most logical (in the case of Leopold) and deeply felt (in the case of Olson) arguments on behalf of protecting biodiversity.

Olson biographer David Backes compares the two men’s writings to the pronouncements of Biblical prophets: “Where Leopold invokes the God of power and wrath, preaching proper ethical behavior toward the land and prophesying doom if society disobeys, Olson invites his readers to experience the God of love, as made manifest in nature.”

Another reason to remember Leopold and Olson is to rebut those who claim that hunting and conservation are incompatible activities–when just the opposite is true. Nearly all of conservation’s heroes in the past 100 years have been hunters. No other outdoor experience seems to affect its participants with a keener sense of responsibility toward wildlife and wildlife habitat than hunting.

The final and perhaps best reason for remembering Leopold and Olson is to thank them for providing opportunities for so many of our children to combine their love of the outdoors with the possibility of earning a living there. When the two men completed graduate school, farming, ranching, or serving one of the small (and chronically underfunded) governmental resource agencies was about the only chance a young person had to work outdoors.

Today, however, any one of our 50 states employs more biologists than the entire federal government did 75 years ago. Furthermore, jobs in forestry and wildlife management have opened up throughout the private sector. Jobs in the growing field of environmental consultancy may range from a research position with a major timber company to professional advice for small woodlot owners on how to selectively cut and market their trees.

The influence of Aldo Leopold is more obvious than that of Sigurd Olson, who’s best remembered as the poet laureate of the wilderness. Yet Olson’s poetry is as important as Leopold’s science, as can be seen in the fact that more Americans than ever respect the wilderness–and even plants and animals, which were once viewed as pests.

When, for example, the 3M Corporation decided to substitute wildflowers for the fescue lawn surrounding its Minnesota headquarters, it sought the services of a company specializing in prairie regeneration–an idea that didn’t even exist 40 years ago, when many native grasses and flowers were still regarded as weeds. Regardless of where or how a wildlife biologist makes his living today, he owes a tip of his hat to Aid, Leopold–and another to Sigurd Olson.

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