Two recent op-eds by KFTC members
Author and KFTC member Erik Reece penned an op-ed for the Courier-Journal on December 30th looking at 2007 as the year we've come to acknowledge as a country the myriad of global environmental problems we face.
2007: year of recognition
By Erik Reece
Special to The Courier-Journal
I believe 2007 will be remembered as the year that brought the future into focus. It will be remembered as a moment of clarity when, as Americans, we finally realized we can no longer doubt or delay action on our global environmental crisis.
In 2007, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, along with Al Gore, won the Nobel Peace Prize. And to further settle the argument over global warming, researchers also learned last year that the Arctic ice cap is melting much faster than they had thought. Thirteen hundred scientists, working under the aegis of the U.N.'s Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, found that over half of the world's ecosystem services -- clean air, fresh water, disease resistance -- are not functioning at sustainable levels. And geologists concluded that last year the world hit the highest level of oil -- 87 million barrels a day -- that we will ever extract from the earth. From here, it is literally all down hill; there will always be less oil, and it will be much harder to reach. Finally, 2007 was the year that the phrase "ecological footprint" entered the popular lexicon. While the world's average ecological footprint stands at 5.5 acres of resources for each person on the planet, the average American's footprint has swelled to 23.5 acres, four times the sustainable level.
Thus it is my hope, far from an easy hope, that 2007 will be remembered as the year in which we finally came to realize that, as a country and as a species, we cannot remain on our current course of convenience, affluence and accumulation.
And today, KFTC member and co-chair of the Bluegrass Sierra Club conservation committee, Rick Clewett, wrote an op-ed in today's Lexington Herald-Leader looking at the challenges faced by many of those who live near large strip mining sites.
Coal mines' neighbors live, sleep in fear
E. Kentuckians have endured enough
By Rick Clewett
Many of us will go to bed tonight with every reason to think that we will have a good night's sleep and that the world we wake up to tomorrow will be substantially the same as the world as we experienced it today.
Sure, we may wake up in the night because of a stray pain or take a while to go to sleep because we have to let go of the stress of a hard day. But we do not expect to be awakened during the night by the sound of blasting or the noise of large, overloaded trucks barreling down the road in front of our houses.
We do not take into our dreams a huge, steeply angled valley fill looming over our houses. We are not endangered by a huge pile of dirt, rock and, too often, trees bulldozed off the mountain over the last three months so that coal could be removed in the cheapest, quickest way. Nothing will break loose and threaten to bury us while we sleep.
We do not stay awake fretting that the slurry pond at the bottom of the fill is leaking at a rate of 5 gallons a minute, and that its restraining wall may some day give way, flooding our narrow valley, as has happened in recent years in Martin County and elsewhere.
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