The Monday Morning Memo
The first inkling I had that somehow what humans discard, never really goes away, was watching my dad change and drain the oil from his car out on the street (he’d park it half up on the curb so it was high enough to crawl under) and catch all the used oil in an old cut out, 5 gallon gas can. When he finished, he would slap on a new oil filter, fill up the crankcase, then dump the oil in the street near the sewer and use a garden hose to wash it down.
In the winter, he would just let the oil sit under the front porch.
Somewhere around this time, the Cuyahoga River in Ohio, which had long been a pollution problem, caught on fire. Cleveland had been a major industrial city since the 1880's, and the mayor then called the river “an open sewer through the center of the city.” Since 1858, the river had “become ablaze” 13 times until the most famous fire of 1969.
I clearly remember seeing the images of the river burning, and thinking to myself… “How does a river catch fire?”
As it turned out, a massive oil slick was the culprit, as the river had been used as an industrial waste depository for so long, the crooked river was more oil than water.
I connected it right back to my dad, dumping oil in the sewer.
Huh.
The next time he went out to change the oil, I asked him about dumping the discarded oil into the sewer and he said “It’s just a little oil. Won’t hurt nothing.” Being 10 years old, I had serious respect for what my dad said to me, but I was also young enough to ask him a question that came from being an innocent age.
“What if there are 500 dads changing their oil and putting it in the sewer, would that make the Chicago River catch fire?”
My dad, to my knowledge, never again dumped his old oil in the sewer.
He did however have penchant for storing things, so he would collect the oil in those old gas cans, stack them under the front porch until my mom told him to get rid of them. Suddenly, “toxic waste” wasn’t something “over there” in Ohio, but “right here” literally in our own front yard, under our porch.
The Cuyahoga River Fire in 1969, was the lit fuse that got the environmental movement moving. Newly elected President Nixon, seized on the political opportunity to create a governmental agency to protect the environment- The EPA- and crack down on corporate polluters. There was a serious groundswell of concern for the earth, which for the most part was looked at as an exhaustible supply of whatever we wanted, with zero concern about returning back some of what we have taken out.
The list of human impact is too long to include here, but consider these events.
Love Canal in New York was discovered, (between 1942 and 1953, Hooker Chemical and Plastics Cooperation disposed its hazardous waste at Niagara Falls. It is estimated that about 21000 tons of waste were dumped.) Residents of the area became very ill, and it had to be evacuated.
Acid Rain decimated forests and bodies of water.
Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown pushed radioactive waste into the atmosphere.
Deforestation, and along with it, the eradication of species, to make room for cattle and “development.” Poaching has nearly wiped out rhinos, elephants and other animals for profit.
Back when my dad was doing oil changes, leaded gas was the norm. “Regular or Unleaded” was the most often asked question at the filling station. Leaded gas was banned after studies showed that lead from polluted air was absorbed into our bloodstreams, endangering brain development and risking consequences like permanent nerve damage, anemia, and mental retardation. So, EPA phased out leaded gas. Back in the late 1970's, 88 percent of American children had elevated levels of lead in their blood. By the mid-2000's, that number had dropped to less than 1 percent.
The bald eagle once faced extinction. The culprit was DDT, a powerful pesticide that made birds’ eggshells too weak for the chicks to survive, and also caused liver cancer and reproductive problems in humans. EPA banned the use of DDT in 1972, and since then, bald eagles have made a huge comeback — they were removed from the Endangered Species List in 2007.
The fact that the symbol of America was ever on the Endangered List at all, is shameful.
When a hole was found in the protective Ozone Layer of Earth in the mid 1970’s- it took nearly fourteen years for the nations of the world to act in banning CFC’s chemicals, the culprit that was found to be “eating away” the that layer that acts as the “sunscreen” of the planet. DuPont Chemical, that manufactured ? of all the CFC’s in the world, and made billions off the product, took out full page ads stating that the science was faulty, and “there is no hole in the Ozone Layer,” rather it was a “liberal agenda, aimed at destroying the American economy.”
It was finally Maggie Thatcher, who was a trained chemist, and read the research, agreed with the conclusions, and the staunch conservative leader of Britain, stood before the rest of the world at the UN and declared “ On the broader front of global warming, we have had the scientific report of the intergovernmental panel on climate change. This brought together the wisdom and scientific expertise of several hundred of the world's best scientists. They gave us an authoritative view of the implications for the world's climate of the enormous increases in carbon dioxide which are reaching the atmosphere year by year: From our cars, from our factories and our power stations, figures we cannot ignore…We will all sink or swim together.”
Not wanting to look bad on the political front, President Reagan got on board after Thatcher’s comments and joined in with 197 other nations that signed The Montreal Protocol in 1987 banning CFC’s.
President Jimmy Carter had 32 solar panels installed on the White House roof in the late 1970’s but when Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, one of his first moves as president was to have the panels, which his chief-of-staff allegedly said Reagan felt were “just a joke,” removed.
In 2017, the National Coal Museum in Kentucky, installed solar panels on the top of the building that celebrates the contributions of the coal industry.
As with most things having to do with environmental challenges we create, it’s a matter of unconscious behavior, from my dad who dumped oil on the street without any conscious thought of where it ended up, to using a river for a sewer, to clear cutting rain-forest for hamburgers, to wiping out a species for some sort of magical qualities to the simple act of making sure plastic goes into a recycling bin, not choking up the waterways of the world.
I have never felt that this 4.65-billion-year-old third rock from the sun needed to be saved. We are the ones digging shit creek, and the only species that directly threatens our life support systems for profit, and thus, not only affect current populations, but generations to follow.
We’ve made great strides on some fronts, however much remains to be accomplished. Just like when “there is no hole in the Ozone” despite the science, global warming is on the increase, and just like back then, humans argue over how much, what, when and where.
Climate change is a naturally occurring cycle on Earth. What isn’t natural, is the “rate” or “increase” in that cycle, speeding things up, stressing the systems of the planet, in turn pushing down on the all the species in this biosphere, including us. That rate of increase directly correlates to the Industrial Revolution beginning in the mid-20th century.
But just like when President Reagan’s Interior Secretary Donald Hodel, stated that the Ozone science “wasn’t convincing enough” and suggested that we’d be better off with an alternative program of "personal protection" against ultraviolet radiation, (including wider use of hats, sunglasses and sun-screening lotions, than regulations that would disrupt the world economy,) there are those who claim that the science on human induced climate change leaves room for doubt.
It was “The Iron Lady” Mrs. Thatcher who said “When we get to 100% consensus that human activity is the cause of climate change, it will be too late to do anything about it.”
The Ozone layer has been getting smaller since CFC's were banned and is expected to be fully closed between 2060 & 2080.
The Cuyahoga River?
EPA regulations implemented one half century ago, put Cleveland on a new path. They will celebrate the 50th anniversary of 1969 as "River of The Year" and fish caught in the mighty Cuyahoga, are now safe to eat, and the waterway has become a hub of entertainment and a shining example of change.
"Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it." ― Chief Seattle
Safe travels-
JSA