A couple weeks back, I was interviewed by NPR’s Neda Ulaby for an upcoming environmental piece on Morning Edition.
I just got a note that the segment is scheduled to air Monday.
The topic is whether the environmental movement has become preoccupied with global warming. It’s based, at least in part, on a piece I wrote for Lighter Footstep last June: Five Things that Are Worse than Global Warming. I published it on •the day of the Live Earth concerts, and it ended up being one of Lighter Footstep’s most read (and most controversial) articles.
Neda interviewed me for the better part of a half hour, and I expect the finished piece will only be three to five minutes. That means the bulk of what I had to say will remain on NPR’s virtual cutting floor. We’ll have to see what ends up actually making it on-air.
Lighter Footstep is primarily about personal approaches to Green Living, so we don’t directly address climate change that often. But the position I took with Neda is that the global warming issue was a real sea change for the environmental movement. Before An Inconvenient Truth came out, U.S. environmentalists were deeply demoralized after six years of being largely dismissed by the current administration. Within a matter of months, everything turned around. People are actually talking about the environment again, and you can’t walk into a store or turn on the television without seeing an unprecedented variety of green products and services.
The downside to all this attention to global warming is that other issues — some related, some not — are getting the cold shoulder. People are pretty quick to wonder how much carbon dioxide comes out of an automobile tailpipe or the stacks of some coal-burning power plant, forgetting entirely the tons of mercury, sulfur dioxide, and an alphabet soup of known carcinogens which find their way into our food and lungs each year. In terms of time line, the most pressing environmental issues probably have to do with water and energy. Our oceans are under increasing pressure from pollution and overfishing; deforestation is advancing at an alarming pace; and we have yet to fully address the ultimate environmental threat: nuclear weapons.
It’s a complex web of problems. We’ll see how the segment turns out. You can track down your local NPR station here. NPR also makes streaming audio available from their website.
I’d like to thank Neda for having me on, and WUWF — our NPR affiliate here in Pensacola — for so courteously proving me with studio time.
• Streaming audio of the Morning Edition feature is now available here.
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