Linking Science and Technology to Society's Environmental Goals (1996) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
David Garman, Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources
David Garman, Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources
Pages 423-430
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From page 423... ...
. and how to allocate rights and responsibilities to enhance overall quality of life, including environmental quality." My second core concept: • The "spaceship earth" paradigm that holds that we are rapidly running out of key natural resources -- conventional wisdom at the very foundation of the original Earth Day in 1970 -- is wrongheaded and detrimental to our efforts to achieve a cleaner, healthier environment for the majority of the planet's inhabitants.
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From page 424... ...
The air we breathe and our lakes and rivers are far cleaner than they were at the time of the first Earth Day in 1970. • This success has left us with a new and exciting fundamental choice: We can continue to allocate political and financial resources in the pursuit of marginally diminishing levels of "environmental success" here in the United States, or we can adopt a broader, more global view that achieves a greater good for the health and safety of a majority of the Earth's inhabitants.
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From page 425... ...
• Jane Shaw of the Political Economy Research Center claims that there "has never been a nonrenewable resource that has actually disappeared, because in a market system people start looking for substitutes when prices rise." • Gregg Easterbrook, in his recent book A Moment on the Earth, generally agrees. He writes that "wood, coal, rubber, oil, copper, tungsten, chromium and platinum have all been subject to pronouncements of eminent exhaustion during the industrial era .
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From page 426... ...
• After this conference, I'm off to Sandia National Laboratory to see what I'm told are some new technological breakthroughs in materials development that were achieved through private sector partnerships. • These materials technologies represent the frontier of our future environmental success, enabling us to enjoy economic growth and the creation of wealth without ever-increasing resource inputs.
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From page 427... ...
. the worst crisis our country has ever faced." • The former Senate Majority Leader, George Mitchell, declared that "we risk turning our world into a lifeless desert." • The "father" of Earth Day, Gaylord Nelson, said in 1990 that our current environmental problems "are a greater threat to Earth's life-sustaining systems than nuclear war." • According to Gregg Easterbrook, a self-described "liberal environmentalist," these statements are not only demonstrably wrong, they are fundamentally counterproductive to the environmental movement in the long term.
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From page 428... ...
To make Rio a fashionably correct event about Western guilt tripping, the hypothetical prospect of global warming -- a troubling but speculative concern that so far has harmed no one and may never harm anyone -- was put above palpable, urgent loss of lives from Third World water and smoke pollution. • Western, orthodox environmentalists oppose zero-emission hydropower in China and India, seemingly indifferent to the benefits to human health that would result if electricity replaced wood and dung fires for cooking.
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From page 429... ...
So it's easy to see where I'm headed: • The activists among us must endeavor to raise the public consciousness about the environmental problems that really matter to human health. And they ought to shed the doomsday pronouncements aimed at the proposition that consumption is evil.
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