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Diatribe
merits answer
To the Editor
Mason Gardner’s anti-Earth Day diatribe in your April 23 issue demands response.
While it is true that technical debates continue over the mechanisms, impacts, and even existence of global climate change, and while it is true that scientific understandings of complex natural systems are imperfect, it is also true that there is plenty of scientific evidence documenting in detail the deleterious impact of human activities on the world environment. It is evidence compelling enough to have led us to establish a previously non-existent pollution control industry employing many thousands of people—and to convince thinking people that much yet remains to be done before our ecosystem is restored.
There is in the U.S. today a sort of Neo-Know-Nothing movement which asks us to ignore scientific findings and intellectual conclusions about their implications. Unfortunately for us all, the evidence is also measured in other than “scientific” terms that are all too obvious: declining water tables, disappearing species, skyrocketing cancer rates, destruction of the Chesapeake Bay seafood industry, explosion of the Guadalajara sewer system, and (because of deficient land use policies) a national banking collapse that may well end up on average costing every man, woman, and child in the United States $2,000—to name a few.
Mr. Gardner concludes that pollution “has always existed” and therefore constitutes no threat. Perhaps this man from Gainesville peddles that idea in Rappahannock County because it won’t sell in Prince William, which suffers among many other things a serious problem of chemically contaminated groundwater.
ROBERT T. DENNIS
President
Piedmont Environmental Council
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