This is the earth day speech I gave on campus today. Since I’m leaving for UT soon, I actually got to say what I thought for a change.
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Good Morning, and Happy Earth Day! It’s a lovely day. You know, it’s not often that we have the opportunity in our busy lives to set aside some time to reflect upon our impact on the planet. Today is a day for that, a moment for everyone to reflect on where we are and were we’re going. The first Earth Day was only a little more than 35 years ago. The terrible issues of the day, then, were pollution, loss of wild space, extinction and sprawl. What we wouldn’t give today for the simplicity of those worries. I’ve taught a lot of you, students, about the environmental issues we face. You’ve told me why you care. But I’m going to tell you a little bit today about why I care, and I’m going to tell you what I’ve learned in the last six years about you and about this area. I’ll tell you a little bit about the problems we face, but I want to talk more about solutions. We are at an amazingly hopeful time in our state, I promise you. You might not believe me, but it’s true.
My name is Thais Perkins, and I’m a teacher and science communications specialist here at Southeastern. I grew up on the northshore in Washington Parish on the first organic farm in the area, among the cypress tupelo swamps and pinelands that grow so green and beautiful in our subtropical climate. After my education and some traveling time, I came back to Louisiana about 6 years ago to work on coastal issues. As I’m sure many of you are aware, coastal Louisiana loses about a football field of land every 30 minutes. It’s one of the worst ecological disasters in the world, and mostly nobody talks about it. They talk about it more after Hurricane Katrina, but it still isn’t really on the radar for most people.
As a scientist, it’s a fascinating problem to work with. As someone who grew up here, it’s a terrible tragedy. As a teacher, it’s the focus of many classes and a motivator for many students. I’ve spent years of my life waist-deep in mud, mosquitos and snakes, both literally and as a good metaphor for trying to punch through the layers of bureaucracy, history, and culture that makes our problems so difficult to deal with here in Louisiana. It’s made me something of an activist, which is what you get when you combine a teacher and a researcher that spends every day dealing with awful truths and trying to get people to listen, and getting either no response or active hostility in return. It builds up over time.
Everyone seems to think that people in Louisiana don’t care. I’m going to tell you why they’re wrong. But first, let’s talk about the problems we face and supposedly don’t care about.
Many of you already know that Louisiana loses a football field of land every 30 minutes. The entire coast looks like lace, and it sinks. Our levees protect us from storms and floods but also kill the swamps and marshes trapped behind them, which vanish into open water. We now know, also, about sea level rise due to global warming.
You’re familiar with the global warming CO2 graph now—how through all the ups and downs of climate cycles throughout earth’s history, the CO2 never rose above about 280 ppm. Now it is at 380 ppm and is projected to reach 600ppm in the next 45 years if we don’t change our energy use patterns. Basic bell jar physics tells us extra CO2 means extra heat in the atmosphere. If a 100 ppm difference in CO2 is the difference between a warm period and an ice age, what is a 300 ppm difference going to look like? The answer is, we have no idea. We do know that the waters will rise.
If you know a little bit about water, you know heated water expands. That gives us at least a little sea level rise. If you know a little more about the ice sheets over Antarctica and Greenland, you know they displace more water as they melt, which they are doing far, far faster than anyone though was possible. It looks like the Arctic ice cap will vanish in the summer by 2013, or five years from now.
We think there will be around a meter, or 3 feet, of sea level rise in the short term, meaning in the next century or two. It doesn’t stop there, but it’s enough, because coastal Louisiana is completely flat. So now we’re looking at losing the entire coast of Louisiana below Baton Rouge in the next 100 years just due to the oceans expanding as they warm.
That’s just sea level rise. Other effects of climate change are actually worse. It’s one thing to move out of the way of rising seas, but it is another thing to face food shortages due to drought and lack of fresh water due to saltwater intrusion into reservoirs. Humans may adapt quickly, but wildlife is slow to adapt, and a crash of the food chain thanks to the 6th great extinction in world history looms over us like the elephant in the room.
But this was supposed to be an optimistic talk.
As Michael Pollan recently said, anyone who has spent a lot of time thinking about climate change, or anyone who has seen “An Inconvenient Truth” knows that the scariest part is not when everything floods cataclysmically but is at the end, when the big life changing advice is to…. Change a lightbulb. I mean, come on. The world is about to end and all we’re supposed to do is go to the store? It’s like after the world trade center fell to the ground, and our biggest sacrifice, we were told, was to keep shopping. The United States is responsible for a third of all CO2 emissions. Louisiana is responsible for an entire percentage point. That’s right; 1% of all the world’s CO2 is produced right here. I believe that means we have a third of the responsibility to make things better.
For the last year and a half, I’ve been schlepping around Louisiana giving a talk on climate change. It’s the same one given by former vice president Al Gore. It’s called the Climate Project, and it’s a group of 1000 people reaching out to educate people about climate change. Like I told you before, I’m not trained as an activist, and it didn’t sit well with me to tell people how they ought to behave. Scientists don’t do that.
And even though I grew up here, I thought the same as everyone else, that Louisiana people wouldn’t care about this, or would see it as an affront to their way of life or their politics. That going to community groups to talk to them about climate change would at best be mildly tolerated and then easily dismissed.
I couldn’t have been more wrong.
I have at this point given around 20 climate change talks. Two of them were here at the university on a Monday night. Each of those drew more than 200 people. At the first one, we ran out of room. In every room I was in, the response was the same. While I overprepared to answer what I thought would be criticism, ready for those who might be ready to throw brickbats, the audience – you—asked amazingly well-informed questions about what to do. You wanted to know what action to take. How to make things better. Who could you talk to, what group could you join, what could you do??
I was totally unprepared to handle this. I was armed to wrestle a critic to the ground, but I still don’t know how to harness this kind of energy. I’m still unsure about it, but I know that getting organized is the first step, and so I have an email list over there on the table for you to sign if you’d like to stay in touch about it. Getting back to the point, though, I couldn’t tell a room full of 200 people just to change to flourescent lightbulbs (although, in their defense, it’s a great idea and you should go home right now and do it if you haven’t already—if everyone in the US did that, it would save the same amount of CO2 as removing a million cars from the road).
So what can you do? There are easy first steps to take, like the lightbulb thing and removing the roof rack from your car and energy efficient appliances, sometimes called a clothesline, and turning things off when you don’t use them.
But we call this process of healing the earth, changing our mindsets, and changing the way we live the green revolution. And the green revolution may actually be, in the end, a real revolution. And real revolutions take work. And they are frequently dangerous. What would a real green revolution look like?
For one, you’d have to move close to work and school. No more long drives. You have to bike and you have to walk and a 20-minute drive to the lakefront would be a once-in-a-while occasion. On the bright side, everyone would weigh a little less. Communities would be more important to us, as we are well aware of every time a hurricane knocks out the power. We would be in touch in a more real way, face to face instead of inside hermetically sealed car interiors. This has all kinds of implications that are good for the human soul.
You’d have to be aware of your food and where it comes from and yes, you would have to eat less meat. You would have to buy food that came from local farms instead of food produced in Peru that used jet fuel to get here and you’d have to fork over the extra money for organic food because the fossil fuel make to produce toxic pesticides is its own environmental sin. You might have to actually do without certain foods when they are out of season. But Louisiana people are good cooks. We can hold our own.
More cheaply and more importantly, you might tear up your lawn and install a garden. During world war II, victory gardens produced more than 40% of all the produce consumed nationally. We need to do it again. As fossil fuels become more scarce, food is only getting more expensive, and a fuel crisis might make food hard to come by. In Louisiana, not limited by soil quality or water or hard freezes, we can do it very well. Most vegetables go ape in this climate. Your produce would be organic and carbon-emission-free for the price of some seeds and fertilizer. Of course, we wouldn’t buy fertilizer because we would be composting all of our kitchen scraps and using them in the garden.
Recycling is another thing; this is one of the areas where the government must step in for the better. It’s difficult to recycle goods when there is no pickup, so in addition to consuming less we must put the pressure on our city governments to provide recycling services. In other places, your city payment pays for a bag of trash and limitless recycling, while extra bags of trash are an extra charge. Some cities pay for their recycling programs by collecting yard and kitchen waste, composting it, and selling the compost. We could do that here, but it takes a larger effort.
Which brings me to my final point: to really cut our carbon emissions, to seriously make a dent in our global warming projections, it’s going to take a bigger effort than we can make individually. You must get involved. You must stay in touch with one another and when a city calls a meeting to discuss planning or recycling options, you must show up in force and demand real change. Elected officials will frequently choose the most conservative path for fear of offending the wrong parties. It is up to us to provide the pressure to be more brave. Again, as I said, we are starting a mailing list for the northshore greens, called northshore greens, over there on the table that I hope you will sign in order to stay informed of what is happening and share what you know.
It is a very exciting time for Louisiana. The first action that the new governor Bobby Jindal took when he stepped into office was to issue an executive order that all state government would be greened, meaning codes and buildings and behaviours of all branches of state government would have to from this point forward take energy efficiency and CO2 emissions seriously.
Southeastern Louisiana University is on the brink of hiring their first recycling coordinator and green campus coordinator and if you’re interested in the job, talk to me in a minute. Other green jobs are springing up. The mayors of Hammond and Ponchatoula are expressing interest in recycling and greening behaviour for the first time in a long while and if you’re interested in that, speak to me in a minute.
Yesterday the EPA announced that for the first time ever, the greenhouse gas emissions of the United States actually dropped by 1.1 percent. They said it was because gas prices are making people drive less, we use more renewables like wind and solar, and, very ironically, it was because the winters were warmer. But it is wonderful news, and we can see here that we can make a difference.
The last thing I want to say to you is that they seriously underestimate the people of Louisiana. The most avid conservationist I’ve ever met is an old Cajun who organizes people in the swamp to plant 20,000 cypress trees every spring, watches them die, and then does it again just in case the diversion goes in this year. He’s done it every year for the last 10 years. That’s hope. Hunters and fishermen are natural conservationists. They share the love of the land and care for it in a way nobody else can.
Growing up on the northshore set my palate for green and beautiful open spaces as a child, something that has been harder to fill as I’ve gotten older. It’s a taste I know many of the students here share, having grown up fishing and hunting in the swamps and forests around here. You’ve told me so in classes.
You are the last generation born on the northshore before the explosion of business and housing developments. You’ve seen the land cleared. You’ve seen green turned into cement and wetlands drained. You remember a time when nobody thought much about global warming because we didn’t yet feel its effects. You remember hunting grounds where now there is only open water. You’ve seen forests cut over that you played in as kids. You are the first generation witness to climate change. You are the last generation to know the planet as it was Before. None of this will be true for your children, they’ll grow up in a world that is already disrupted and they may not know the difference. But you: you remember. You remember and you will always remember and it is up to your generation and mine to sound the alarm and make it real.
Now I want you to, after you sign the northshore green mailing list, take the afternoon off if you can, go out to a park somewhere and take off your shoes and walk around in the grass. Feel the breeze, smell the air, get calm. And get ready.
Thank you, and happy earth day.
