Gwyneth Cravens
CravensPowertoSavetheWorld.com

The first Earth Day was proclaimed in 1970, and where I was living, in New York City on the Upper West Side, it was the first warm, sunny day in weeks. My neighbors and I and our children rather spontaneously crept out of our brownstone apartments, actually exchanged pleasantries, and swept the sidewalks and picked up litter. We felt better about ourselves and our neighborhood—and about the earth. Something momentous was occurring that fit right in with the optimistic social revolution that was underway. I’d read in the Village Voice about ecologist Stewart Brand’s insistent question: “Why haven’t we seen a picture of the whole earth?” Thanks to his campaign and his inspirational writings, we now have that beautiful icon to remind us to think globally while acting locally.
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I was thus motivated to adopt practices that benefitted the environment. For example, when I moved out of the city I started an organic garden and a compost heap. I recycled. I protested the opening of the Shoreham nuclear plant in Long Island. I sent donations to Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth.

Fast forward to the late 1990s, and an encounter with a scientist, Dr. D. (Rip) Richard Anderson, who patiently led me to understand that it was only by looking at the whole picture regarding energy and the environment that we could begin to understand what’s at stake and what actions are needed to protect the only home in the universe that we have. Rip is an oceanographer, a chemist, and an expert in probabilistic risk assessment who has led several big projects for Sandia National Laboratories, and he’s also an organic gardener, a beekeeper, and an environmental activist alongside his wife, Marcia Fernández. They campaign on behalf of clean air, clean water, and open land in New Mexico, where they reside. Rip began to explain to me the alarming consequences of the human race’s transfer of vast quantities of carbon from underground into the atmosphere. Drawing on a paper napkin, he connected accelerated global warming and ocean acidification, which he considers the greater threat, to the choices we’ve made about the energy we use to run our world civilization.

“What should we do?” I asked. “Keep extracting oil and gas and coal and burning them until the planet becomes a living hell? Build a lot of wind turbines and solar arrays?”

“As soon as people’s beer gets warm,” he replied, “I expect they’ll choose nuclear power.”

I tried to mask my surprise and annoyance. No way could nuclear power be good for the environment. Having grown up during the cold war in New Mexico, where bomb scientists and engineers worked around the clock to win the arms race, I’d developed an aversion to anything nuclear and while in college there and in grad school in New York had participated in ban-the-bomb and Mothers for Peace events.

Here’s what my environmentally inclined, anti-nuclear, us-versus-them friends and I thought we knew about nuclear energy:

• Manmade radiation is far more dangerous than natural radiation—cosmic radiation, for instance.
• Even a tiny speck of manmade radioactive material can kill you.
• Radiation from a nuclear plant can travel hundreds of miles and kill you.
• Nuclear plants are just ticking atomic time bombs. Without warning they can explode and kill millions and cause cancer, and mutations. The Chernobyl accident killed tens of thousands of people.
• Nuclear plants could easily be taken over by a few gunmen and the fuel in the reactor stolen and turned into an atomic bomb.
• The people who work in the nuclear field are indifferent to humanity and to the environment.
• A coal-fired plant is safer than a nuclear plant any day.
• Nobody knows what to do with nuclear waste. Mountains of it are piling up everywhere. It lasts forever and will turn huge tracts into radioactive wastelands.

To be continued . . . .

Gwyneth Cravens is the author of “Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy” and has written articles on science and other topics for The New Yorker, Harper’s, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other publications.

Columnist John Tierney of the New York Times offers some valuable insights on how to be green and a shade blue as Earth Day approaches. He asks:

On the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, is the middle-aged green movement ready to be revived by some iconoclastic young Turqs?

The term Turqs, as in turquoise, to describe people who are both green and an open-minded type of blue – a term coined by environmentalist Stewart Brand, author of “Whole Earth Discipline.” An interesting facet of this piece is Tierney’s take on nuclear energy’s role:

Mr. Brand has also renounced his opposition to nuclear power and now promotes it as green energy because of its low-carbon emissions and its small footprint on the landscape. He wants to see the development of small modular reactors, and he quotes a warning from the climate scientist James Hansen, “One of the greatest dangers the world faces is the possibility that a vocal minority of antinuclear activists could prevent phase-out of coal emissions.”

Over the last 40 years, Stewart Brand has emerged as one of the leading environmental voices and one who now strongly supports the use of nuclear and other clean energy sources as a method of combating greenhouse gases effect on global warming.

In 1960′s he founded, edited and wrote for the “Whole Earth Catalog” which was deeply influential in the US environmental movement. In 1966, he asked himself a basic question, which was how can we begin to see the earth as it is, as a finite resource?

“I herded my trembling thoughts together as the winds blew and time passed. And I figured a photograph—a color photograph—would help make that happen. There it would be for all to see, the earth complete, tiny, adrift, and no one would ever perceive things the same way. But how to accomplish this?”

He then began pushing an effort to press that the NASA help us produce that first image of the full, whole planet Earth seen from a distance, an image that up until then had never been taken.

Brand writes:

“It is no accident of history that the first Earth Day, in April 1970, came so soon after color photographs of the whole earth from space were made by homesick astronauts on the Apollo 8 mission to the moon in December 1968. Those riveting Earth photos reframed everything. For the first time humanity saw itself from outside. The visible features from space were living blue ocean, living green–brown continents, dazzling polar ice and a busy atmosphere, all set like a delicate jewel in vast immensities of hard–vacuum space. Humanity’s habitat looked tiny, fragile and rare. Suddenly humans had a planet to tend to. The photograph of the whole earth from space helped to generate a lot of behavior—the ecology movement, the sense of global politics, the rise of the global economy, and so on. I think all of those phenomena were, in some sense, given permission to occur by the photograph of the earth from space.”

From the State Department yesterday:

“Forty years ago, Earth Day began in the United States as a “teach-in” – a day to educate people about the environmental challenges facing our planet. Today, we know more than ever about the challenges of preserving our environment – from clean water to climate change – and Earth Day has evolved into a call for sustainable solutions and local action all over the world….

Today, environmental awareness and activism are on the rise across the world – proof that Earth Day’s teachings have begun to change all of us, and change the environment we share. We have come a long way these last 40 years, but we have so much more to do. And we need your help to do it.

So Happy Earth Day. Let’s make our country and our world as green as possible in the years ahead.”

From the First Earth Day celebration in 1970, 40 years ago this week:

Be sure to sign our Energizing Earth Day Pledge Here…

Thanks to the 64 people, organizations and companies that have taken the Clean Energy Pledge on the Energizing Earth Day site.

Especially as we approach Earth Day next week, we do appreciate everyone signing up, and linking to the site.

Thanks!

AREVA pledges to help Energize Earth Day on April 22, 2010.

You can show your support by joining the pledge today!

Some insightful words from Stephanie Gutmann, a piece that appeared last year on the Telegraph’s blog.

In honour of Earth Day: the elegance of nuclear

…In [Earth Day's] honour I propose that you stop thinking about compost pots and swapping out incandescent light-bulbs for a moment and devote a hour of the day to thinking about the concept of energy density.

It may be new to you (it was to me until I became engaged to a energy writer and got a crash course in this stuff) but once you understand energy density – how much space a medium, given its physical makeup, needs to generate a given amount of power – you’re well on your way to sorting out the relative merits of wind, solar, bio-fuels, tide-pools, hydro-electric dams, sea algae, and whatever else someone has been given a billion dollar government subsidy to call The Next Big Thing.

You’ll also see why a dogged little group of us keep supporting “dirty”, “dangerous” nuclear energy…As my S.O., energy writer William Tucker, explains… there is an elegance to nuclear. In terms of effluents released into the atmosphere and actual land footprint (the amount of space consumed to, say, light your house) it really should be the nature-lover’s choice. It all goes back to the atom…

By Katherine Berezowskyj

This year, environmental conservation and activism will celebrate a major land mark, the 40th anniversary of Earth Day. Developed and promoted by Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson, the first Earth Day held on April 22, 1970 marked an important turning point for the growing ecological crises.

As a grassroots effort, this was a movement to give more attention to the environment and what was taking place. It is estimated that nearly 20 million Americans joined in the first Earth Day, and now millions of people worldwide participate each year.

As Sen. Nelson said in his speech on the first Earth Day celebration in 1970, “Earth Day is dramatic evidence of a broad new national concern that cuts across generations and ideologies. It may be symbolic of a new communication between young and old about our values and priorities.”

Even with all of the environmental progress and awareness that has developed since this first call to action, his words are still relevant to the issues that we face today:

“Our goal is a new American ethic that sets new standards for progress, emphasizing human dignity and well being rather than an endless parade of technology that produces more gadgets, more waste, more pollution.

Are we able to meet the challenge? Yes. We have the technology and the resources.

Are we willing? That is the unanswered question.”

A complete history of the Earth Day and more information on Sen. Nelson are available here.