First, some sad news: a great hero (the founder, some say) of the modern environmentalist movement has died.
MILWAUKEE – Gaylord Nelson, the folksy Democratic senator from Wisconsin who helped start the modern environmental movement with the creation of Earth Day 35 years ago, died Sunday. He was 89.
For more, including the “bipartisan” part of this diary, join me below the fold:
Fifteen years after he left office, Nelson received a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1995 for his environmental efforts from then-President Clinton.
“As the father of Earth Day, he is the grandfather of all that grew out of that event: the Environmental Protection Act, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act,” read the proclamation from Clinton.
In 1958, Nelson became only the second Democrat during the 20th century to be elected governor of Wisconsin.
He used a penny-a-pack tax on cigarettes to allow the state to buy hundreds of thousands of acres of park land, wetlands and other open space to protect it; an idea that became a model for other states.
[…]
In the Senate, Nelson championed conservation policies, including legislation to preserve the 2,100-mile Appalachian Trail and create a national hiking system.
[…]
“It suddenly occurred to me, why not have a nationwide teach-in on the environment,” Nelson said. He announced his idea at a speech in Seattle in September 1969, and it “took off like gangbusters.”For the first Earth Day in 1970, tens of thousands of people filled New York’s Fifth Avenue, Congress adjourned so members could speak across the nation, and at least 2,000 colleges marked the occasion.
“I wanted a demonstration by so many people that politicians would say, ‘Holy cow, people care about this,'” Nelson once said. “That’s just what Earth Day did.”
Growing up in the northern Wisconsin town of Clear Lake, Nelson said he learned to love the outdoors “by osmosis” and learned frugality from his father, a country doctor who conserved paper by writing on the back of drug advertisements.
What a great man.
Now, as I was flipping through the Yahoo headlines, I also came across a story about the 2008 presidential field. It’s mostly a rehash, and the author seems not to be familiar with the citisenship requirements for president, since Arnold Schwarzenegger is named as a contender without any mention of a constitutional amendment. But I did find this part pretty interesting:
Another Republican contender, Senator Chuck Hagel is one of the administration’s most ardent critics on the subject of Iraq, saying in a recent magazine interview that George W. Bush’s White House “is completely disconnected from reality,” in its Iraq policy and offering the blunt assessment that Washington is “losing” in its effort to stem the insurgency there.
Hagel is also out of step with his party in his zealous support for strong environmental policy, and was a leading figure in a recently-adopted Senate measure to help bring about a reduction in green house gases.
I had already noted many times that I just find it hard to dislike Hagel. He comes across in interviews as a genuinely decent man who has no truck with Rove/Bush style politics. And that was before I had any inkling about his environmental record! This may make me a traitor in the eyes of some, but at this point, I’d have to say that if Hagel managed to win the GOP nomination, I’d breathe easy from that point on. I’d feel confident that whatever the result of the general election, our nation–and our world–would be guaranteed to be in better hands than they are currently.
Bob Hunter, one of the founders of Greenpeace died early in May.
And last month seemed to be a time for ‘Is Environmentalism Dead?’ stories – I had a hard time convincing myself that wasn’t the case.
I must have missed those. In a nutshell, what is the thesis or theses there? I know I was alarmed to hear RFK Jr. report on Bill Maher’s show a few months ago that for the first time ever, polls were now showing that people were not willing to pay higher taxes or higher prices for products (something like that) in exchange for a cleaner environment. That definitely supports the idea that the movement is flagging, at least in public perception…sigh
-Alan
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You! It’s rather early for me to try to make sense of my comments, you know?
Here’s my breakdown –
Last fall Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus published the kinda’ disturbing paper The Death of Environmentalism. Details about the s!*tstorm they caused can be found at Grist.
The sarcasm, rebuttals, commentary and motive questioning went on for months – and the phrase stuck.
The New York Times did an interesting article in February – Paper Sets Off a Debate on Environmentalism’s Future.
And in the last couple of months the phrase – the suggestion has found it’s way around. “Whether or not environmentalism is dead,..”, “Environmentalism is dead, now what?”, “Is environmentalism really dead?”, etc, etc…
Frankly, it’s driving me nuts…
Wow, I was oblivious to all this (except for the RFK Jr. thing). Thanks for digging up those links. (How the hell did Adam Werbach get to be president of the Sierra Club–which I’m proud to say, my grandfather joined at its inception many decades ago–in his early twenties?!?)
-Alan
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The League of Conservation Voters gives Hagel a big fat goose-egg rating, so there’s a problem in there somewhere. As well, the Christian Coalition gives him 100%, so to my mind, that’s indicative of further trouble.
NARAL goose-eggs him, too, which is a big problem for me although I think you’re pro-life so that may not turn you off, but Hagel also has a crappy record on queer equality, labor, public education, and public health.
Short of electing Cthulhu, it’d be hard to do worse than BushCo, but still, Hagel’s no friend to progressives.
Sorry to go off on a comedy tangent, but thank you for the Cthulhu reference – I just found the Cthulhu for President site, and really needed the laugh.
Why vote for a lesser evil? That’s funny.
Groovy. I’m all about entertaining the smart chicks.
Thanks for the info. Not too promising, you are right there. Ah well, I wasn’t going to vote for him or anything…and I still feel that he’d be an improvement over the current prez.
Oh, and just for the record (no, zander, not trying to argue this subject again–I swear! just not wanting an inaccurate label to snowball, kwim?): I’ve never been opposed to first trimester abortion.
-Alan
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http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0131-01.htm
“If You Want To Win An Election, Just Control The Voting Machines”
by Thom Hartmann
Maybe Nebraska Republican Chuck Hagel honestly won two US Senate elections. Maybe it’s true that the citizens of Georgia simply decided that incumbent Democratic Senator Max Cleland, a wildly popular war veteran who lost three limbs in Vietnam, was, as his successful Republican challenger suggested in his campaign ads, too unpatriotic to remain in the Senate. Maybe George W. Bush, Alabama’s new Republican governor Bob Riley, and a small but congressionally decisive handful of other long-shot Republican candidates really did win those states where conventional wisdom and straw polls showed them losing in the last few election cycles.
Perhaps, after a half-century of fine-tuning exit polling to such a science that it’s now sometimes used to verify how clean elections are in Third World countries, it really did suddenly become inaccurate in the United States in the past six years and just won’t work here anymore. Perhaps it’s just a coincidence that the sudden rise of inaccurate exit polls happened around the same time corporate-programmed, computer-controlled, modem-capable voting machines began recording and tabulating ballots.
But if any of this is true, there’s not much of a paper trail from the voters’ hand to prove it.
You’d think in an open democracy that the government – answerable to all its citizens rather than a handful of corporate officers and stockholders – would program, repair, and control the voting machines. You’d think the computers that handle our cherished ballots would be open and their software and programming available for public scrutiny. You’d think there would be a paper trail of the vote, which could be followed and audited if a there was evidence of voting fraud or if exit polls disagreed with computerized vote counts.
You’d be wrong.
The respected Washington, DC publication The Hill (www.thehill.com/news/012903/hagel.aspx) has confirmed that former conservative radio talk-show host and now Republican U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel was the head of, and continues to own part interest in, the company that owns the company that installed, programmed, and largely ran the voting machines that were used by most of the citizens of Nebraska.
(…more…. see above link)
That’s right, I had forgotten about that connection. Though this is not proof, of course, that he was involved with the shady stuff (it’s a big company with lots of products, and he no longer runs it). I guess technically there’s no proof of the “shady stuff” itself–but I tend to be on your side there.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll keep saying it: the Democrats in the Senate should filibuster everything until verified voting is passed–otherwise they may find themselves “Diebolded” down to 39 votes and complete impotency.
-Alan
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