Earth Day: Green Tsunami Rising

I'm a Pennsylvanian, living in the epicenter of American politics-- until next week. But in quite the confluence of events, Tuesday’s April 22 presidential primary is also Earth Day, the emerging environmental holiday.

Guess which gets more press coverage.

Not Earth Day. Coverage will be limited to the president half-heartedly standing in a remote national park quoting Teddy Roosevelt while announcing some cleverly named initiative. Find the photo op buried on page 17 of Wednesday’s paper. Page 1? Primarily the election.

But hang on. While the state of the environment is grim this Earth Day—the climate is changing, species vanishing, glaciers melting, sea levels rising, rainforests burning, coral reefs bleaching and dying, deserts spreading, population rising—if you place your finger on the pulse of popular culture, you can feel it: a green tsunami rising.

In fact, the word green is suddenly everywhere: green roofs on green buildings, green products on web sites, presidential candidates debating “green collar jobs,” a new phrase that entered the lexicon only this spring. In fashion, green is the new black, and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman reminds us that “green is the new red, white and blue.” A rainforest has been pulped to produce Vanity Fair’s annual green issue, featuring a half-naked Madonna, the green goddess undressing, and my Philadelphia Inquirer has just launched GreenSpace, a new column showcasing the explosion of green.

Kermit got it wrong: it’s easy being green. Or at least, in shallow America, it’s easy to market green. But dig deeper.

Al Gore, fresh off his Nobel Prize, has launched the $300 million We global warming campaign. Plug-in hybrid cars are coming on fast as the next generation of transport. Organic food options are exploding: Wal-Mart is the largest seller of organic food, Gallo Brothers the largest organic wine producer. Wind power is smokin’ hot, alternative energy is already hyped as the next bubble, the coal industry is pouring buckets of money into convincing us coal is clean, solar is back from the dead, and BP, the oil giant, touts its initials as meaning “Beyond Petroleum.”

Interest in the environment is resurgent. This Earth Day, we are witnessing the dawn of the third wave of environmental activism.

The first dates to the 1970 teach-in that was the first Earth Day, then the largest mass demonstration in history (in archival photo at right, this protester offered a comment prediction of the time). Lake Erie was dead, Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River caught fire, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring jumpstarted the pesticide debate, bald eagles were vanishing from eggshell thinning. Nixon became the First Environmentalist, reluctantly signing bills banning DDT, reauthorizing the Clean Air and Clean Water acts, and creating the EPA. Scratch any environmentalist of a certain age, and he’ll trace his interest in the environment to that Earth Day.

The second wave broke across pop cultural shores during the first Bush presidency. Medical waste washed up on beaches alongside dead dolphins; the garbage barge took its world tour hoping to unload its half-ashed cargo. One landfill closed every day. Yellowstone burned, drought gripped the South, the Exxon Valdez crudely vomited into Prince William Sound, and the ozone hole yawned wide.

The culture responded. In December 1988, Time magazine skipped its usual Person of the Year honor to anoint Earth as Planet of the Year. Curbside recycling took off, a global summit on CFCs produced a workable treaty, “50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth” embeds itself atop the bestseller list, and 120,000 Philadelphians—a record!—gathered in Fairmount Park for a monstrous EarthFest ‘90. The UN’s Earth Summit assembled the largest gathering of world leaders ever.

Fast forward to 2008: green is hot again. But Earth Day is not—not yet, anyway—and environmental issues will not decide Tuesday’s primary. Once again, a Clinton is telling us it’s the economy, stupid.

But Americans are counterpunchers—we respond best when smacked in the gut. If syringes and Flipper litter beaches, we suddenly invent plastic recycling and dolphin-safe tuna. If planes crash into the World Trade Center, we invade Iraq. The next—and final—wave of environmental activism begins when some big mediagenic event occurs, like the last mountain gorilla being hacked to death, or a monstrous iceberg calving off Antarctica, or polar bears vanishing under an ice-free Arctic Ocean. We’re waiting for the punch, and when it comes, the counterpunch will be huge.

For as I take our collective pulse, a groundswell of support for environmental issues is forming. And just in time, for the four horsemen of a global apocalypse—global warming, species loss, water shortages, and overpopulation—are galloping swiftly toward us.

The green tsunami will rise, and the next president will have to react. By the 2012 election, green issues will be transcendent, the global environment standing alongside Islamo-fascism as the Twin Towers through which we navigate the 21st century.

In 2012, it will be the ecology, stupid, and we’ll be locked in a race to rescue the planet. As Pennsylvanians head into the election booth on Tuesday, I hope we consider which candidate can lead us into that environmental future, which can help us win that race, which can best surf the green tsunami rising.

Get Out! Kids Crave Nature

In the first days of spring, I’m thinking about kids. For me, growing up in postwar subdivision on the edge of a forest, spring meant time to head back out into the woods. But that’s an anomaly today, and there’s been a lot of attention paid to the state of childhood in postmodern America. Sadly, little of it is good.

Since we’re so busy making sure no child is left behind, our kids are over-tested, overstressed and over-programmed-- if this is Tuesday, it must be French lessons and a piano recital. Headlines pile up like snowdrifts noting increased rates of obesity, depression, asthma, autism, attention-deficit disorder, and worse; today’s parents have been nicknamed “helicopters” for how we hover around our children assisting them in every single decision they make.

Then there’s the whole technology piece: kids spend more time immersed in the iWorld of laptops, cable TV, IM, iPods, and more. The Kaiser Family Foundation noted that the average 10-year-old spends more than 45 hours a week—essentially a full-time job—consuming electronic media.

Visitation to national parks is declining. There’s been a 30 percent decrease in bicycle riding. Many schools have curtailed, even cut, free time, and school commitment to outdoor play has dwindled. The percentage of children who live within a mile of school and walk or bike there has declined nearly 25 percent in the past 30 years. In one survey, 71 percent of adults report that they walked or rode a bike to school when they were children, but only 22 percent of children do so today. Children predominantly play at home, with their activities monitored and controlled by adults; only 3 percent have a high degree of mobility and freedom in how and where they play.

From 1997 to 2003, there was a 50 percent decline in the proportion of children who spent time in such outside activities as hiking, walking, fishing, beach play, and gardening. Children’s free play declined more than seven hours a week from 1981 to 1997, and an additional two hours in the next decade—that’s a loss of nine hours a week over a 25-year period.

But a movement is slowly building momentum to combat these trends. Richard Louv, journalist and author of the much-discussed Last Child in the Woods, coined the phrase “nature-deficit disorder” to describe the growing disconnect between children and nature. And he’s been getting a lot of attention. A Children and Nature Network has been created to support his book’s work (www.cnaturenet.org), and disseminate research about this topic. Many states, including Pennsylvania, are considering No Child Left Inside legislation to encourage, even mandate outdoor education, the Forest Service launched a More Kids in the Woods initiative, and the Secretary of the Interior has challenged his national parks to reconnect children and nature.

It turns out that research is also revealing the importance of nature to children, and the restorative tonic that nature is. Kids who grow up immersed in nature have less issues with ADD and depression, and outdoor play reduces incidence of obesity, which is connected to heart disease and diabetes. “Children are smarter, more cooperative, happier and healthier when they have frequent and varied opportunities for free and unstructured play in the out-of-doors,” states the Children and Nature Network’s online research paper.

And check this out: students score higher on standardized tests when natural environments are integral to schools’ curricula. Leave no child behind? Fine. Get them outdoors.

In addition, studies indicate green plants and play yards reduce children’s stress. Free play in natural areas enhances children’s cognitive flexibility, problem-solving ability, creativity, self-esteem, even self-discipline. “Natural spaces and materials stimulate children’s limitless imaginations and serve as the medium of inventiveness and creativity,” says Robin Moore, an international authority on the design of environments for children’s play, learning, and education.

There’s even evidence that growing up in a neighborhood filled with trees leads to healthier, happier kids. Hospitals have long known that people recuperating in a room with a view of greenspace recover sooner, leave earlier, and return less frequently. In a British study, 71 percent of people with mental health disorders reported that taking a walk decreased their depression and tension. Wilderness therapy is catching on as new cure for mental illness.

The more we research the issue, the clearer the trend becomes: humans evolved in the natural world, and our growing disconnection to that world comes at the peril of both people and nature. We need this information now more than ever, as other lines of research continually indicate the extent of the decay within natural systems, with temperature and ocean levels rising, ice sheets melting, glaciers disappearing, rivers drying, deserts spreading, forests vanishing, coral reefs bleaching, and so on.

So get out! Grab the kids, head to a greenspace, put down a picnic blanket, and let the kids play. Let them get wet and muddy. Let them pull up a log and look for ants. Let them take time to smell the roses. Literally.

Just get out. There’s tonic in them there hills.

The Real March Madness

At 1:48 a.m. this Wednesday night, while you are tucked snugly in bed, it will happen: the sun will stand directly above the equator, a vertical shaft of sunlight striking the earth’s midpoint. Ding dong, the winter witch is dead, spring is here, and you know what that means:

March Madness.

Yup, hoopheads are pouring over their brackets, office pools are bursting with bets from some 3 million participants, ESPN is all roundball all the time, Internet chat rooms are on fire (“Tennessee was robbed!”) and today’s water cooler conversations revolve around fierce discussions over whether Coppin State cops a steal over Mt. St. Mary’s in tonight’s inaugural game to become the 64th team to make it into the tournament.

Who will be this year’s Cinderella team—Belmont, Austin Peay? Will Gonzaga be the next, well, Gonzaga? Can Cornell, this year’s Ivy League sacrificial lamb, advance past the first round? Who’s got the easier road to the Final Four, North Carolina or Memphis? Will Butler beat South Alabama, or Washington win over Winthrop—and what is a Winthrop anyway?

Meanwhile, that same vertical shaft of sunlight is shaking up the natural world. Already, the first crocuses have begun opening, the advance guard in an exquisitely timed march of flowers that unfolds all spring. In order, forsythia, daffodil, tulip, iris—each searching for its moment in the sun—pushes petals up to the sky.

In forests, a similar drama unfolds, as ephemeral spring wildflowers like trillium and trout lily, Quaker ladies and Dutchman’s breeches, Jack-in-the-pulpit and Solomon’s seal race to absorb the sun’s rays, seduce bees and get pollinated before trees leaf out and darken the forest floor, shading that precious sunlight.

While we got Cardinals, Jayhawks, Eagles and Owls flying through this year’s brackets, in nature, migrating birds are undergoing their own rite of spring, parading through in a progression of color, red-winged blackbirds now, ruby-throated hummingbirds later. Waves of woodland warblers—tiny but unbelievably beautiful creatures wearing the most extraordinary coats of many colors—pass through like clockwork, pine and prairie warblers soon, blackpolls bringing up the rear at season’s end. They’re all heading to nesting grounds north of here, only visiting the region for a few days on their journeys north and south. Blink, and they’re gone.

And butterflies will soon awaken and return: mourning cloaks first, painted ladies next, swallowtails after that, monarchs much later.

That’s the real March madness, that here we are, only moments into the nascent spring, having survived yet another (admittedly mild) winter, and instead of diving into the great outdoors to search for celandine poppy and scarlet tanagers, we’re glued to the tube hoping Western Kentucky upsets Drake. Seeds are sprouting all over outside, but we’re jammed into bars screaming at big screens over the seedings of our favorite teams: Texas should have been number 1! I mean, really?

That’s also part of our madness, that I can mention scarlet tanager, and likely as not no image comes to your mind—yet if you saw one, it would take your breath away. Smaller than a robin, with bright red body and jet black wings, the contrast makes your heart stop when you see it. We can analyze picks, posts and zone defenses, but when it comes to ecological knowledge—the stuff that really matters—we are clueless.

Sure, it would be amazing if a number 16 seed finally makes it to the Final Four. Sure, a three-point buzzer-beater is really cool, no matter what school does it. Sure, that Tyler Hansbrough from the Tar Heels is quite a player. But though Tyler bleeds Carolina blue, he ain’t no bleeding heart, a wildflower that blooms about the same time the finals will be held in San Antonio. You can watch Tyler on Tivo, but the bleeding heart doesn’t blossom long.

The real flower show starts this weekend at a forest near you. But we’re stuck inside filling out brackets.

Which is just madness.

Unless the final is Villanova-Temple. OK, that would be pure madness too, and then, even the flowers can wait.

Vampire Appliances: Draining Your Wallet, Warming the World

Everyone is concerned about global warming—but everyone tends to look elsewhere, outside their own home, to find the solutions to the looming crisis.

Trouble is, with global warming, Dorothy’s right, there’s no place like home—like searching your own house to rid it of energy-sucking vampire appliances.

A recent study by Cornell University discovered that the average home contains at least 20 appliances that suck power all day and all night, even when they’re “off.” These appliances drain our pockets of $3 billion annually, averaging 200 bucks per household. In fact, seven power plants alone are dedicated to producing power for America’s vampires, spewing greenhouse gases all the while.

Your TV set continues pulling power even when it’s off, so it can await a signal from the remote. Microwaves and ovens stay on forever, powering the clock; in fact, microwaves can use more juice running the clock than actually warming food. Alarm systems, clock radios, answering machines, stereos, computer monitors, even garage door openers—all these stay on 24/7.

New houses are designed with special counters lined with plugs so the family can recharge its fleet of cell phones. The rechargers often stay plugged in all day, adding to your bill.

California—of course, who else?—is considering legislation requiring more efficient appliances. That’s critical—these appliances just use too much.

But there are a million ways you can personally lessen your carbon footprint. And while there is no silver bullet, pulling the plug on your own house’s vampires is a good beginning. Stake out your position on global warming. Zap a vampire today.

Wheels off the Biodiesel Bandwagon

A couple of wheels feel off the biodiesel wagon recently—seems gas and alcohol manufactured from corn, soy and palm may not be the magic bullet we’re desperately seeking.

One study recently—widely reported in places like here—discovered something not very surprising: bulldozing the Amazon rainforest to grow soybeans is not, from a greenhouse gas or biodiversity point of view, ecologically smart.

Seems American farmers once grew corn and soy in rotation, the soybeans enriching soil with nitrogen. But with so much demand on corn for food, corn syrup, and ethanol, farmers have stopped growing soy, and must use more fertilizer to nourish the soil.

And we’ve farmed out soybean production to the Amazon rainforest—which must be clear-cut before being planted. But growing soybeans in the Amazon for soybean biodiesel creates a carbon debt through deforestation that sets us back more than 300 years—it will take us 300 years to earn back the carbon released in deforesting the rainforest.

And using Indonesian peatlands for palm oil plantations is worse, putting so much carbon into the atmosphere it will take us 400 years to repay the debt.

Converting natural habitats into monocultures for alternative fuels is not the direction we should be headed. Rather, we should be using plants like native, wild grasses on degraded agriculture land that can’t be used for anything else.

But, of course, that would be smart, and with energy policy, we’ve always taken the road most traveled—the wrong one. In our headlong rush to break our addiction to Big Oil, burning the Amazon basin to grow biodiesel is a massive mistake.

"Fierce Urgency of Now"

Political junkie that I am, glued to the primaries this compelling season (let’s face it, CNN boasts more drama these days than even Project Runaway), I rose off the couch the first time I heard Barack Obama—it may have been South Carolina—quote Martin Luther King’s “fierce urgency of now.”

Never heard it before. But now, the phrase won’t let me go. Bloggers too: a Google search pulls up thousands of blogs inspired by the turn of phrase.

King spoke these words in 1967 in a major speech given to a gathering of Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam at Riverside Church in New York. He presented in stunning detail the full spectrum of reasons he decided to come out against the war in Vietnam, a decision for which he was skewered by so many. (Read the full speech here, and you’ll have no doubts about how he would have felt about the current Iraq dilemma.)

When I heard Obama quote King, I had no idea it reflected the Vietnam situation-- for me, the phrase beautifully sums up in four words where we are now.

The fierce urgency of now: the world is warming, climate changing, species disappearing, water vanishing, crops failing.

“The oceans of history,” King noted in that same speech, “are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate.”

Like King connected Vietnam to the larger civil rights struggles of his day, today he would easily connect the dots between rising greenhouse gases, the rising tides of weather patterns, and the pummeling of New Orleans from Katrina, the coming crisis of millions of Bangladesh refugees when the warmed Indian Ocean rises, the devastating droughts in the South last year that crippled family farmers.

Global warming is not just an environmental issue: it is an economic issue. And a civil rights issue.

Just after offering the “fierce urgency phrase,” King added, “In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood—it ebbs. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, ‘Too late.’”

Obama is right. On just the environment alone, we are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. Like King and Vietnam, I pray it’s not too late, and I pray we elect the right president in November for these, the greenhouse times.

Holy Crow! Hope on a Morning’s Birdwalk

I’ve been thinking about global warming a lot these days, as I’ve started this blog and been asked to write an educational activity guide for middle schoolers on the subject. It’s a depressing topic—how do you unpack the science in a meaningful and hopeful way for young teenagers, giving them solid information while allowing for the possibility that life on Earth will continue?

To get my mind settled, I went birdwatching this morning in Saunders Woods, a nature preserve not far from my home. But even there, global warming was distressingly at the fore: the temperature was in the 50s, allowing me to go birding in February—the depth of winter, for God’s sake—without jacket or gloves. My mood was as dark as the rain clouds whipping across the dramatic sky.

But then it happened: a white-throated sparrow popped out of a rose tangle not far from me. A Carolina wren (in photo above) perched above it, and belted out a song. Titmice were suddenly singing on both sides of me, a pair of cardinals joined the fray, a mourning dove cooed, a robin flew overhead, and two chickadees alit on a branch above my head, one only two feet away from me. The latter stretched out its tail and wing feathers simultaneously, drying itself out from the wet night. I could see every feather in delightful detail.

I’ve birdwatched at this place many times over many years, and you don’t get many days like today. And I’m really not big on signs or omens. But, pardon the pun, holy crow, I felt like they had gathered around me to buoy me up—and it worked.

Surrounded by a dozen birds of many species, all arrayed around me in one rose bush, a multi-species cacophony of bird song, how could they not?

It’s like architect Frank Lloyd Wright once wrote, “Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.”

This morning, the birds did not fail me. I went home to start writing.