Voices of the Valley: Environmental challenges
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EDITOR'S NOTE: Some scientists call climate change the greatest challenge humanity has faced. And then there are the threats to clean drinking water and a food system that depends on diminishing fossil fuels.
Valley Voices videographer Dylan Klempner visited Amherst's first Annual Sustainability Festival to speak with community members concerned about the environment. He asked them to name our biggest environmental challenges - and point to ways to address them.
In addition to excerpts presented here, this feature offers full video interviews available without subscription on GazetteNET. We welcome your comments on this regular feature, as well as suggestions for topics and locations.
Alan Eccleston, Hadley
What are today's most important environmental issues?
The way of life that we've adjusted to is threatened. We're looking at changes that will change the climate beyond what was experienced for the last thousand years.
Maple syrup for instance: In this area, many, many farmers depend on maple syrup for income that helps them sustain their farms. This last year was the worst syrup year that they've ever had. The climate warmed up too fast. The sap stopped running. They had a production that was about 40 percent of their normal, or less.
M. A. Swedlund, Deerfield
What are today's most important environmental issues?
The carbon that's in the atmosphere right now is upwards of 387 parts per million. And if you've ever seen the graphs that Al Gore puts out -- the amount of carbon in the atmosphere and the temperature rise parallel each other across the centuries.
So we put a little carbon in, things melt and that creates more problems, which create more problems. So there's a lot of feedback systems happening and the Earth is warming up faster and faster. So to get back to 350 parts per million is what the current science is saying is where we need to hold the line on carbon in the atmosphere.
What can be done?
The world is pretty much depending on the altruistic behavior of individuals, and governments are taking a back seat role. And that needs to reverse. The U.S. Congress really needs to take a leadership role. And they can do that by creating a variety of incentives for people to change their behaviors. And we're not talking about behaviors like having oil lamps and living in caves, which sometimes people talk about. Europeans use half the energy that we use right now and their lifestyle is just fine. They really are not suffering greatly because they're using half of what the average U.S. citizen does.
It means really good public transportation, the way they do in Europe. They have great trains. They have good buses. People don't need to drive their cars everywhere. We could do that, easily. The government can make that happen.
Leila Quinn, South Hadley
What are today's most important environmental issues?
As the atmosphere warms, there's thermal expansion in the ocean, so the water rises and literally these people's islands are going underwater as we speak. There was somebody who was supposed to speak at Smith a couple weeks ago from the Cook Islands and these other island nations and she could not come because she had to stay and help the relocation of her people from her country.
Ellie Kurth, Sunderland
What are today's most important environmental issues?
Probably a big thing is water because I work in the water industry, my educational background is in water and protecting and keeping drinking water safe and clean.
I think, especially in the Northeast, we have a lot of water but we don't have a lot of clean water because we're so densely populated. I think people tend to relax about it and not really realize how important it is to protect clean water because we have so much. But we also have a lot of people and a lot of contaminated water.
Shel Horowitz, Hadley
What can be done?
I think the biggest challenge facing the environmental movement right now is no longer penetrating the consciousness. Everybody knows now about global warming and climate change and all of the other issues. And the Earth is reinforcing that message with alarming regularity through various natural calamities lately. I think the challenge is for people to realize that they can change their behavior without necessarily having to give up a lot of the things that they've become used to. But that they can make a lot of little, minor lifestyle adjustments that really add up to significant change.
It often costs no more to make a really big, deep, green change than it does to make an incremental change. I'm a big fan of the - I guess I'll call him an enviro-economist- Amory Lovins from the Rocky Mountain Institute in Colorado. Instead of tweaking this and tweaking that to make a little tiny improvement, you kind of start from scratch about thinking about what the end goal that you want is. And you design a system that gets you to the end goal, much faster, much cleaner, much greener, and with less waste or with waste that can be harnessed for inputs in some other process.
Marga Hutcheson, Carol Lewis and Roger Conant helped produce today's installment of Valley Voices.
