Thursday, April 22, 2010

Earth Day-40 years later

In light of Earth Day, I decided to make my post about the changes that have been made since the first Earth Day in 1970. I read an article from Associated Press, http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_sci_earth_day_issues, that focused on this topic. Today, most of the issues we face with the environment are more blindsided than before. Back in 1970, the issues with the environment were actually visible to the people. This article talked about the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland. This river used to catch on fire because of the chemicals that were present; but now the water has been cleaned and stripped of all these chemicals so now children can actually swim in it. Another big visible problem was the Los Angeles air quality. People used to not even be able to see the mountains during the summer from all of the particulate matter in the air. Now, the mountains are mostly visible all year.
The visible problems have started to dissolve but it is only leading to more blindsided issues. These issues include the climate problem. People don't visibly seeing the increase of carbon content in the air, but since the first Earth Day in 1970, carbon levels have increased by 19%. Also, climate temperate has been increasing at a subtle rate that isn't visible to the general public but throws up red flags to scientists.
So, overall, there is still a large amount of work that needs to be done before there will be an affect on climate itself. But since the start of Earth Day 40 years ago, the environmental movement has grown to make large improvement visible to the every day person living in the United States.

9 comments:

  1. I think that Earth Day was started as a good thing, and for the main part it remains to be. While humans as a race have made great improvements in dealing with some environmental problems, our continued growth and expansion has added to the degree which anthropogenic effects influence our environments health. This being said, hopefully the proportion of people who truly care and wish to make a difference have also increased.

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  2. I first hand enjoyed the LA air quality while in CA for 3 years of schooling, I could view snow on mount baldy from my dorm in Azusa, whereas my parents said the could hardly see the mountains ever when they lived in Pasadena only 18 miles away in the late 70's. There have been five major ice ages, and up to twenty four smaller ones in our geological record, perhaps climate change is inevitable? Just a thought.
    Here are interesting links about temperature change and the earths history...
    http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/nerc130k.html
    http://unmaskingevolution.com/11-iceages.htm

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  3. Earth Day has clearly made a great impact on making changes about our environment. It is sadly true that these changes are mostly for problems that clearly affect us. Like acid rain, people saw how it was killing aquatic life and were able to fix the problem in a relatively short period of time. If only people could actually see the effects of climate change then more would get done.

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  4. I feel as though earth day is a good thing as anything done to help the environment is better than nothing. I do think however that the only people that earth day typically reaches, the ones who actually do something for it, are the ones who already were doing something. I read a poll on CNN that said that only something like 20% of it's readers were doing something for earth day. In order for the world to see a change, everybody needs to act and take climate change and environmental degradation seriously. On more than just one day a year. We need to reach the people who don't currently care, and show them what they can do to help.

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  5. Earth Day is a great awareness tool and allows more people to take part in creating a healthy environment. When Earth Day started, tackling smaller projects might have seemed more attainable, but times have changed. Earth Day now is larger scale and relies on more people regarding climate change as a serious issue.

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  6. Ice-ages have always been inevitable on earth. Plates shift, sea-currents change, and oceans drain and refill. As with climate change the CO2 emissions are definably increasing because of human impact. Core samples have proven that there has always been periods of increasing and decreasing CO2 levels. However, the spike we see today in such a short amount of time have never been recorded in ice/sediment core samples.

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  7. Earth Day has clearly been a beneficial tool for promoting the awareness of environmental issues. It would be cool to see the government take more of an initiative to make Earth Day an even bigger deal. Perhaps Obama could give a sort of "Environmental State of the Union Address" on Earth Day to touch on current environmental issues, and discuss what the government is doing to address these issues, and how we as individual citizens can do our part to help.

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  8. The neatest aspect of Earth Day, I feel, is that it is almost entirely organized at the local level. Sure, it's celebrated by people all over the U.S. (and even all over the world), but the efforts, such as planting trees, etc. on the day are all local. That's amazing, and probably for the best, since the locals know what their community needs better than someone at a national level would. It's a great day... but more still needs to be done. Just because our rivers don't catch fire anymore doesn't mean we have a clean environment. For instance, I heard that the number of lung cancer cases have gone up substantially because of the smog in cities. Like the author mentioned; its the problems that you can't visually see that need conquered now.

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  9. We need to recapture the spirit of the original Earth Day. It's tragic that that only seems possible when we are outraged by a glaring example of environmental injustice, like the burning of the Cuyahoga.

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