Old voices are singing out against global warming
It would seem that among the things the United States will be recycling with the start of the Barack Obama administration are our idealists and long time environmentalists. Long before Mr. Gore was walking about with his tin cup, another fellow was plucking a five-string banjo and asking both figuratively and literally “Where have all the flowers gone?” We refer to of course legendary political and environmental activist Pete Seeger. Mr. Seeger has been relaunched with his performance at the President Obama’s inaugural concert. So it would seem that one of the things the new administration will be recycling is intelligent voices.
Pete Seeger will be celebrating his 90 birthday in this year 2009. That would mean he has spent at least 75 year speaking out on all kinds of issues those ranging from antiwar to civil rights to early concern for the environment. Another milestone for Mr. Seeger and perhaps all of us is the 40th anniversary of the launching of the Hudson River Sloop. For those not aware in the mid 1960s Pete Seeger set about to raise funds for and build the 106 foot long sailing sloop “Clearwater”, which when set to sea in 1969 cruised up and down New York’s incredibly polluted Hudson River to draw attention to both the river’s and the world’s environmental plight. During the 1970s Seeger and the Clearwater group were quickly successful in pressuring General Electric to clean up PCB contamination of the river. The group and the sloop continue sailing today. Seeger and the Clearwater organization were instrumental in the passage of the United States Clean Water and Water Quality Acts.
Mr. Seeger’s thoughts and comments on global warming tend to run to a more general Save the Planet context. When asked, what do you think of global warming and all the environmental crises we see today? He is quoted as saying, “They’re very, very serious. If a chunk of the Greenland ice cap crashes in the ocean a few weeks later, the oceans all around the world could go up by five feet. You never can tell. Nobody knows for sure. It is a real crisis.”
Pete Seeger has carried forth a motto for well over 40 years as a statement of environmental activism that seems well adapted to global warming. that motto is, ” Think globally, act locally.” It would seem a very logical approach. Each of us must express our displeasure and concern with the political and corporate aspects of global warming. We can make very clear though our choice of elected officials where our values lay. Obviously the solution to global warming must be enacted upon on a planetwide basis. In acting locally each of us bands together to effect environmental improvement that does not have to wait for any government passage of law. Acting locally so as to curtail global warming is as simple as not buying products made in factories located in countries where release of unbridled greenhouse emissions is heartily approved. Simple in home conservation to reduce our personal carbon footprint when multiplied by several billion members will see a fast direct resultant decrease in the rate of global warming’s ascent. But, perhaps the greatest means of acting locally is to simply acknowledge our individual and coalesced responsibility for the healthy future of the Earth.
