Earth Day Plus 40 here were you forty years ago? Many of our readers were not even born at the time of the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970. If you were too young to remember it, you missed quite a milestones the beginning of the modern environmental movement. The first Earth Day was the brainchild of Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson, who suggested the idea of a national “teach-in”. The notion spread like wildfire engendering massive public support from students, laborers, farmers, housewives, liberals, and conservatives alike. Twenty years later, Nelson said, “Earth Day worked because of the spontaneous response at the grassroots level. We had neither the time nor the resources to organize 20 million demonstrators and the thousands of schools and local communities that participated. That was the remarkable thing about Earth Day. It organized itself”. The environmental movement galvanized because people cared. Within that year, President Richard M. Nixon initiated the Environmental Protection Agency; and Congress passed the Clean Air Act and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which required Environmental Impact Statements for every federal project. Imagine, a conservative Republican president like Richard Milhous Nixon was front-andcenter on so many major environmental achievements. But mostly he was cajoled to take action by millions of voterssnone of it would have happened without the amazing support of the American people. William Ruckelshaus, twice Administrator of the EPA, reflected on those early days, “Public support only began to explode in the late 1960s. It led to the creation of EPA, which never would have been established had it not been for public demand. That I am absolutely certain of. Public opinion remains absolutely essential [sic] for anything to be done on behalf of the environment. Absent that, nothing will happen because the forces of the economy and the impact on people’s livelihood are so much more automatic and endemic.” (http://www. epa.gov/history/publications/ruck/05.htm). Earth Day changed my life forever. I was a naı¨ve 19 year-old sophomore questioning my major in chemical engineering at Iowa State University. For me, it was a coming-of-age tale when, for the first time, I saw that my academic training could prove useful in analyzing and solving environmental problems. It propelled me toward a career in teaching and research.
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10.1021/es100589t
2010 American Chemical Society
Published on Web 03/10/2010
Times were simpler back then. Environmental problems were mostly local and regional, whereas now they grow increasingly global. In 1970, we had only 3.7 billion people on earth, and now (in 2008) we are 6.7 billion. The world’s gross domestic product was ∼$3 trillion and now it is twenty times larger (in current USD). In the U.S., there were less than 100 million cars on highways, and now there are 2.5 times more; globally the current number exceeds 800 million cars and trucks and is accelerating. Today, we emit twice as many greenhouse gases as we did in 1970, and the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere has increased from 324 to 385 ppm. Our emissions grow greater with each year and our cause grows more urgent. There’s a lot at stake. Forty Earth Days from now in 2050, we face a significantly warmer planet, an ice-free Arctic, fewer wild fisheries, diminished coral reefs, a more acidic ocean, dwindling continental glaciers, tragic loss of species, widespread water scarcities, and greater floods and droughts. A thought occurred to me... According to Gaylord Nelson and William Ruckelshaus, the success of Earth Day and the ensuing movement was all about people believing in environmental conservation and self-organizing. It sounds like a perfect prescription for social networking. Just thinkson the first Earth Day there was no Internet, e-mail, cell phones, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, or Wikipedia. Today there are 210 billion e-mail messages sent each day (perhaps 70% spam), 4.3 billion cell phones, more than 400 million Facebook users, a billion YouTube views per day, and 50 million tweets per day. It is truly a global phenomenon. Why not use grassroots social networking to organize the survival of our planet on the next Earth Day? It is the tool of the young to preserve what is precious.
Jerald L. Schnoor Editor*
[email protected].
April 1, 2010 / ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY 9 2217
