Earth Day marks

Friday, April 22, 2005

By Steve Moyer

Nevada Daily Mail

People are ready to celebrate the 35 year anniversary of Earth Day. Started in 1970, Earth Day has been celebrated in many different ways in many different countries.

In the beginning the founder of Earth Day, Senator Gaylord Nelson persuaded President John Kennedy to take a national conservation tour to get environmental concerns to the public consciousness. The tour didn't bring the issue to the public's attention as Nelson hoped but it was the seed that became Earth Day.

"The first Earth Day, on April 22, 1970, brought together more than 20 million people," Kathleen Rogers, president of Earth Day Network said in a press release on the group's Web site. "People came together from all walks of life to demand a cleaner, healthier and safer world for themselves and their children. While progress has been made, many of those problems still exist, especially among children, the poor and other vulnerable populations. On this important anniversary we are bringing people together to focus on those environmental concerns that threaten the environment our children are growing up in."

Nelson said that the response to Earth Day was beyond all his expectations. On his Web site he said that once the idea took hold it ballooned to huge proportions. "Earth Day worked because of the spontaneous response at the grassroots level," Nelson said. "We had neither the time nor 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 focus of Earth Day this year is "Protect Our Children and Our Future." Mary Nemick, of Earth Day Network. said the theme was chosen because the group wanted to not forget the most vulnerable in the future. "The reason we selected that for this Earth Day is to look back on our successes and forward to the challenges of the future," Nemick said. "Second generation problems affect the most vulnerable communities."

For example, inner city kids have more asthma than average. Corporations look for low cost areas to build and poorer communities are where they locate. Air quality and ground water problems follow. Environmental neglect is the cause of many of these problems."

In response to what many see as the excesses of the environmentalists a science-based approach was launched to examine the facts behind the rhetoric of Earth Day. For 10 years the Index of Leading Environmental Indicators has shown that the environment is in good shape, and getting better. Steven F. Hayward is the F.K. Weyerhaeuser fellow in law and economics at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. He had been the principal author of the Index of Leading Environmental Indicators since its launch in 1994.

The introduction to the Index points out that air pollution is at the lowest level ever recorded and that bald eagles, whales, ocean fish stocks, forestlands, and wetlands all showed increases in numbers.

While environmental activists agree progress has been made they say that more needs to be done.

The present report takes a look back at it's start as well as giving the present condition of several environmental factors. Hayward points out the need for accurate information, and more of it, before government tries to tackle such a complex problem as the environment.

"When the Index was launched, there were few efforts to develop environmental indicators or report trends in a useful way for the media or the public," Hayward said.

"Now there are dozens of worthy efforts in the public and private sector, many of them highly detailed and most available on the Internet. As often as not, these efforts reveal how much we don't know about environmental conditions and trends, and point to the need to fill in the large gaps in our understanding," he said.

Hayward noted that one of the many items needing more monitoring was runoff from agricultural sources.

"There isn't any new information from federal sources for the last few years," Hayward said. "One of our real blind spots in our environmental monitoring is the impact on water quality agriculture has."

Among the ideas the Index brings forward is eliminating the base cause of pollution, which is most commonly found in economically depressed areas.

Another point is that control needs to be more local. "Economic growth is now widely, if sometimes grudgingly, seen as the cornerstone of environmental protection," a quote from the Index says. "And there is growing recognition of the need to decentralize environmental efforts to state and local government, and to grassroots, citizen-led programs."

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