faulker083

The complacency by too many Americans while their government is gutting science harkens back to those onerous days in the 1850’s when our fragmented country tried tooth and nail to hold on to slavery—despite the evil. Russia (1723) and the British Empire (1808) had abolished slavery. New York State had made slavery illegal in 1827. Yet, at the federal level: “Fugitive Slave Act was passed by the United States Congress on September 18, 1850, as part of the Compromise of 1850 between Southern slave-holding interests and Northern Free-Soilers”( Wikipedia ). Though most people believed that slavery was truly evil by the 1850’s, most of the public still sat on the sidelines until they were forced into the fray with their very lives, the Civil War, where 600,000 people perished. The war was terrible; it wasn’t inevitable; it could have been prevented had it not been part of our compromised Constitution. We could have given into our better angels. But we didn’t. The Three-Fifths Compromise is...

( This is an update of my 2008 article: Not So Easy To Be Green .) It should be easy being green. That is to say, it should be easy to live sustainably. It should be easy to work and play and move from place to place and keep ourselves warm (or cool) and eat and breathe and allow our children and those in the future to do the same without crashing our life support system. But unless you are living in Ashton Hayes, England, “a well knit community of about 1000 people that is aiming to become England's first carbon neutral community” 1 , you’re probably going to find being green tough.  Fossil fuels, which Trump is trying to resuscitate and reinvigorate, are so ensnarled into our way of life that even the best of efforts to go green are still going to have a significant carbon footprint. If you travel, what you drive is either power by fossil fuels or made with them. Even if you walk, that involves fossil fuels because sidewalks are made with machinery made from burning fossil fuels....

One of the problems in conducting risky experiments are the ethical problems highlighted by the infamous USPHS Syphilis Study. It was called the "Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male" and was conducted between 1932 and 1947. When the study of syphilis in poor black sharecroppers began, there was no known cure for syphilis. But “When penicillin became the standard treatment for the disease in 1947 the medicine was withheld as a part of the treatment for both the experimental group and control group”: “While the panel concluded that the men participated in the study freely, agreeing to the examinations and treatments, there was evidence that scientific research protocol routinely applied to human subjects was either ignored or deeply flawed to ensure the safety and well-being of the men involved. Specifically, the men were never told about or offered the research procedure called informed consent. Researchers had not informed the men of the actual name of the ...

It’s hard to keep your eyes on the ball when everyone starts throwing hundreds of balls on to the court. It’s hard to prioritize addressing Climate Change when the GOP and Trump are lobbing grenades each day onto the headlines. Our most cherished values are under attack and they all must be addressed: immigration, science, food programs, education, war against the media, our international reputation, the sanctity of the office of the Presidency, and who knows what else lurks in the heart of these clowns.   But even these every-freaking-day assaults must be viewed through the lens of Climate Change. For if we allow our attention to be diverted from addressing Climate Change, all other issues will be exacerbated or eliminated altogether because our life support system will be breaking down. Climate Change is an existential crisis requiring that we make massive shifts in the way we live, how we get energy, and how we treat our environment. Climate denial is a backfire-effect (when...

Our recent spate of hard storms and the public’s reaction to the government and power company response provides an interesting learning moment about the public’s expectation of preparedness in a time of Climate Change. Was Rochester Gas and Electric prepared for storms? Questions persist about whether the Rochester region's largest electric utility was prepared for the fury nature unleashed the past few weeks. Yet complete answers could be a long time coming for customers and citizens whose lives were upended by the storms and power outages. And while Rochester Gas and Electric's handling of the crisis is of immediate concern to many, more troubling may be questions about long-term preparation, including maintenance of the local electrical system. (March 17, 2017) Rochester Democrat and Chronicle) Many in the Rochester area were not happy with the response time or the infrastructure vulnerabilities revealed by these recent storms. Were our authorities ready? Were our infrastru...

According to  Carbonify.com , the atmospheric carbon dioxide level was 365.26ppm in 1998 when I began RochesterEnvironment.com . Today it’s 406.13ppm. In some places it’s projected to soon hit 410ppm. We have known for quite some time now that we are quickly warming up our planet, which is and will continue to affect all life on Earth, while increasingly making it problematic as to whether we can adapt. For ten thousand years of the Holocene, during which humanity thrived, our carbon dioxide concentration levels hovered around 280ppm. Then in the mid-1800’s our planet’s temperature took off. There is much about Climate Change that folks are debating and denying, but these figures on the concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere are pretty clear. Hard to squirm away from the math. Carbon Dioxide Could Reach 410 PPM This Month A never-ending stream of carbon pollution ensures that each year the world continues to break records for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This year...

Ever since humanity began large-scale industry, business folks have been duking it out with nature lovers. It would be convenient to entirely blame Pruitt and President Trump for attempting to gut the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). But this present crisis, where the EPA is getting eviscerated , where decades of good work by our top environmental agency is getting attacked by the Trump administration, is but a dramatic point along a continuum of our collective compliancy towards our life support system. For most of humanity’s existence, we have fought for our place in our environment among dangerous predators and hostile climates. Some time ago, our numbers grew and our ability to dominate and even subdue nature allowed our species to thrive. We discovered how to exploit the bounties of our environment and didn’t think much about replacing or compensating important components (think, forests) because it didn’t even occur to us until centuries ago that our resources were finite. ...