Hurricane Sandy: Nature’s Warning About Our Treatment of the Earth

My thoughts and prayers are with everyone who was affected by this hurricane

Helping to conserve, preserve, and care for the earth is in everyone’s interest. Global climate change is posing a significant threat to environmental, agricultural, and human health, by contributing to:

• Melting and receding of glaciers worldwide, as well as, our polar ice caps
• Unpredictable and often extreme weather patterns
• Rising ocean levels
• Risk of coastal and inland flooding
• Disruption of agricultural practices, crop production and yield
• Increases in algae, mold, bacterial, and fungal growth
• Increases in insect populations which transit infectious pathogens

Our politicians, corporations, factories, energy sector including coal/oil/gas/nuclear power, chemical industry, public transportation systems  (e.g., airlines, cargo/tanker/cruise ships, trains, automobiles, buses), and communities all need to do far more to:

1. Reduce emissions, environmental degradation, pollution, and waste.
2. Respect and protect nature’s natural flood plains and barrier islands which help to buffer us from the force of storms.
3. Reduce unnecessary development along the coast and banks of rivers, and protect existing coastal communities.
4. Protect the quality of our air, soil, water used for drinking and agriculture, oceans, rivers, lakes, streams, and estuaries, in order to protect public health and well-being.
5. Reduce, reuse, and recycle more.
6. Provide efficient forms of public transportation in cities, towns, and suburbs, as well as more pedestrian and bicycle paths.
7. Design communities where residents can safely and easily walk for shopping and work.
8. Promote safe, clean, renewable forms of energy, such as waste-to-energy, solar, and wind.

The United States could learn much from countries in northern Europe and Scandinavia, such as Austria, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Germany, and the Netherlands, who have made environmental and public health a priority:

This region has some of the highest recycling rates in the world, favors safe, clean, renewable energy, and uses 400 state-of-the-art, energy-efficient, waste-to-energy plants that burn only non-recyclable material in their energy-generating incinerators. The incinerators are equipped with modern filters which prevent toxins from entering the air and are relatively inexpensive to build, maintain, and repair. Moreover, they are much safer for environmental and public health than our current coal, nuclear power, oil, and natural gas production techniques in the United States. Europe has greatly surpassed the United States in developing technology to convert residential and industrial trash into heat and electricity, without the release of harmful emissions or environmental degradation.

Waste-to-energy plants have been used successfully for years in Europe and would reduce the need for landfills, as well as, the expense of hauling of urban and residential waste to landfills. New York City alone ships 10,500 tons of residential waste each day to landfills in Ohio and South Carolina.