Earth Day!!

In 1970, at the age of 14 or 15, I competed in a speech competition at my Junior High School. The impromptu category given us was ‘Earth Day.’ I won. The tiny $2 trophy cup still adorns one of my shelves somewhere in the house.

In 1978, faced with the urgent proposition that I may not make enough money to support my salmon fishing addiction, I entered college to study engineering. (I also had a wife and baby daughter who were expecting big things from me, and that factored in).

In 1982, faced with a diminished job market and zero interview skills (introverted fishermen have limited social skills, and that seriously affects their marketability), I entered the Air Force. The only things they cared about were my scores on the aptitude test and whether or not I was a druggie, and I aced both.

in 1991, as an Air Force officer, I stood among the oil well fires in Kuwait, and thought: ‘Wow–we’re REALLY screwing this up.’ I ultimately spent the last two years of my Air Force career processing environmental compliance documentation.

In 2005, after retirement, I found myself as a Red Cross volunteer Shelter Manager at Hurricane Katrina. That ignited my interest in Emergency and Disaster Management, and ultimately paved the path to the professorship that I have now.

So what does this all mean? Well, my overarching conclusion is that the need for emergency and disaster management is largely driven by the fact that we are ignoring the Earth that we depend on. Consider:

• In 1970, we were just beginning to understand that the Earth was not infinitely abusable. That when you throw trash in a river, it doesn’t go away. If you throw too much trash in a river, then the river might actually catch on fire–which happened a couple of times. These events contributed to passage of the Environmental Protection Act in 1970 and the Clean Water Act in 1972–arguably why we still have a livable habitat and drinking water today.
• In 1978, one of the prime motivations that sent me to college was the over-harvesting of fisheries and over-harvesting of timber, which shut down the access of entry-level workers into these industries in Oregon, my home state. Oregon has never recovered. Fisheries are now a distant memory. The state is now looking to sell off state forest resources because they’re no longer able to support public schools–which was the whole reason they were developed.
• By 1982, the primary job market in my state had already collapsed. But the military, in retrospect, was a false job market. We were hired to produce security–and produce security we did. But scant years later in 1990 & 1991, both sides came to the conclusion that the investments weren’t worth it–and the Berlin Wall collapsed, the Cold War was declared to be over, and we entered a ‘new world order’–which wasn’t really an order at all. But the point is that all of the resources we spent on weapons could have been spent on ensuring that the Earth remained a habitable place–but we took a pass.
• In 1991, this all played out in horrifying fashion. An attempted power grab by a petty megalomaniac resulted in the first Gulf War–and the result of the first Gulf War included my insignificant self standing among the oil well fires wondering what we did wrong. Even my airmen knew it–one of them asked me: ‘Sir, I heard that these oil well fires are destroying the Earth. Are they?’ And I responded, to my lasting regret, with the answer that they were small fires on a big Earth. I would never give that answer today.
• My deployment to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 ignited more than a passion for emergency and disaster management. It also educated me in the relationship between what we consider ‘development,’ what we probably should consider ‘seriously unwise development,’ and what nature tends to treat as a human folly. To be more precise, if Nature–the Earth’s awareness–were sitting above us watching our activities, she would laugh at our dikes that were meant to keep water out of areas like the Ninth Ward; be enraged at the levees that prevented natural wetlands to form that would dissipate hurricane impacts; and be bemused at how we had to scramble to save as many people as we did.

If we were actually educated and cognizant of the Earth’s processes and limitations–and vindictiveness–none of these stories should ever have happened. And that, really, is the lesson of Earth Day and that environmental awareness has for emergency and disaster management–that if we humans would only take care of our home, then the only threats we would have to deal with would be earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, and the like–but because we ignore the Earth, now we have to deal with pollution, fracking, war, global warming, non-renewable resource depletion, and THOSE categories. And in truth, what we’ve done to ourselves is probably far worse than what the Earth would have done to us naturally.

So on this Earth Day, in honor and remembrance of that speech given by a naive teenager so long ago, I would just implore you to understand the relationship between the environment and emergency & disaster management; to go out and identify those environmental actions that could be taken to lessen the potential suffering of our served public; and then GO DO THEM!

About the time that I gave the speech that caused me to start along the journey that brought me to this place, one of my teachers told our class: ‘I don’t believe in Earth Day. I believe in Earth Year.’ I now understand what he meant. So make every day Earth Day. Make every year Earth Year. You will be accomplishing more than you can imagine if you can just start citizens–especially our young people–down the path that I’ve taken.

Go for it.