Environment

LETTER-WRITER Kim Empson points to a few votes, taken out of context, as evidence that the future of our environment is not something important to me. I'd like to take this opportunity to correct Ms. Empson's misstatement. Our children and grandchildren deserve to enjoy the benefits of a clean, protected environment, just as my generation has. America's vast environmental resources have always been among our nation's greatest assets, which is why I've long fought to preserve them.

President Bush's recent State of the Union address has awakened environmental activists such as they haven't been for some time. They are concerned not by what he said but by the lack of public reaction to what he did not say. He spoke of the nation's problems and the dangers it faces, particularly in regard to national security, but he gave no indication that he recognizes the dangers of global warming. Surely it has been brought to his attention that scientists are increasingly alarmed over the rapidity with which the world's environment is being poisoned by the refuse of human endeavor.

RE PATRICK O'Brien's letter "Is there a place for a family guy in Philly's sports palaces?" Pat, even if you could afford to go to one of these games, I don't think you would want to bring your family. A friend of mine brought her son to the Sixers game on Jan. 9, and paid $50 for each ticket. Once there she was afraid to ask to be moved from the group of "animals" who were sitting next to her and her son because she has to walk a mile to her car afterward. These men were cursing, throwing things and causing everyone around them to be uncomfortable.

The Clinton administration is taking yet another waffling approach to our environment. Global warming is not an issue we can afford to waffle on. Al Gore has actually written a book on the disastrous effects of global warming. We have a president and Congress who agreed to a treaty in Rio claiming we would cut our emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2000 (a promise we simply ignored). And our president, addressing a panel of top economists and scientists, spoke ever so eloquently about the dangers of global warming.

Bringing art and a message of environmental awareness to the people is Margot de Wit's aim in her multimedia installation, "Dichotomy Project No. 18," at the Painted Bride Art Center. De Wit is a Dutch-born Philadelphia sculptor and artist-in-residence at Glassboro State College. The installation includes a video portion created by a team including poet Ernest Yates and composer Edo Jasper. Her video images zero in on the urban environment; deteriorated housing here and elsewhere receives considerable attention - most notably the once- grand Parkside Avenue mansions on which her camera effectively dwells.

Frankly, we've had our belly full of President Bush's equivocating about whether he'll go to the largest gathering of world leaders ever - the United Nations' Earth Summit on environment and development in Brazil this June. One day he says he sure would like to go. The next, he frets about signing accords that might hamstring the U.S. economy. Still later, he remarks, "We do have room for compromising. " He's starting to sound like Mario Cuomo. What's really going on here is that the White House staff is split about the politics of whether to go to Rio. Some say Mr. Bush can't afford not to: All the other guys are going and, besides, it coincides with the California primary, when environmental stuff is likely to be hot. Others say it's a loser.

When he sails New Jersey's intracoastal waters, Rep. Jim Saxton remembers a time when Barnegat Bay was lined with treetops, not rooftops. That's why he has fought to expand the state's wildlife refuges and preserve its estuaries. He also remembers the late 1980s when red tides plagued New Jersey's coastline; dolphins were dying, and garbage and medical waste washed ashore. Now, the Republican congressman can boast that New Jersey's beaches are among the nation's cleanest - a model for states - because of clean-water laws he sponsored.

In the flood of news accounts, magazine articles, political oratory and governmental reports generated by the drug crisis, one can drown without ever confronting this fundamental question: Why in the last two decades of the 20th century do so many Americans of all races and economic levels turn to drugs as a means of coping with reality? Any program that hopes to be effective in reducing drug use among Americans must have, if not an answer to this question, at least a working hypothesis.

With the threat of global warming and acid rain, and with preservation of the Amazon rain forest on the minds environmentally conscious adults, Joseph Pilyar is looking to the future for help by asking children of the Delaware Valley to join in the fight and "Hug the Earth. " "The idea emanated from me, the store and my interest with children," said Pilyar, who is owner of a bookstore and the founder of the year-old, nonprofit environmental organization for children called Hug the Earth.

After returning from a trip to Russia several years ago, Karen Seaton, a teacher at Buckingham Friends School, asked her students to draw pictures about their images of Russians. "All the drawings," Seaton says now, "were dark and violent. " But no sooner had the school helped dispel those fears by starting an exchange program with a Russian school than Seaton discovered another fear just as insidious. "When we were talking about the environment I realized the students felt the same way as they had once felt about Russians," she said.

Gov. Christie has received a well-deserved failing grade for his environmental policies. He appointed a global-warming skeptic to the Board of Public Utilities, and an opponent of the Highlands Act to the council that must enforce that water- and land-preservation law. He put industry representatives in water-quality positions, pulled out of a regional program to reduce greenhouse gases, and weakened rules allowing beach access. No wonder the New Jersey Environmental Federation gave Christie a D-minus on his environmental policies.

NEW ORLEANS - BP P.L.C.'s settlement with plaintiffs suing the company over the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico may address harm to individuals and businesses, but there is nothing in it that compensates the public for damage to its natural resources and environment, the Justice Department said Saturday. That is a potentially critical issue because a separate victims' claims fund that was set up months after the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion was also meant to cover environmental damages, but it is now expected to be used to cover the BP settlement with plaintiffs.

OPERA MAY be suffering in other cities, but Philadelphia provides an environment in which opera thrives. The Opera Company of Philadelphia recently announced that it will present five productions in 2012-13, a move the Philadelphia Inquirer's classical music writer David Patrick Stears recently described as "highly unusual in the opera world. " The company also participates in the American Repertoire Program, which enables it to produce a new American work each year for the next decade.

CHIANG RAI, Thailand - No one asked the elephants, or their mahouts. In 1989, to halt the rape of its thick forests, Thailand banned the centuries-old industry of logging. The result: Logging was stopped (legal logging, anyway) - and thousands of elephants suddenly found themselves jobless. This was less of a problem for the elephants than for their gobsmacked mahouts (owners), who faced the challenge of providing their elephants with about 500 pounds of food a day with no source of income.

Ann Mack, director of trendspotting for the global marketing agency JWT, predicts 2012 will be the year food emerges as the prominent environmental issue of our time. In other words, concern about the quality of our air, water, and earth is coalescing under an overall food banner as folks become increasingly aware of how and by whom food is grown, harvested, transported, sold, cooked, and consumed - and the implications of those acts. Mack says companies that want to be perceived as being on the side of food justice should take note.

Happy with all those new electronic devices you got for Christmas? Not so fast, Bucko: What about the old ones? You are going to recycle them, right? It's getting easier. State laws forbidding their disposal in landfills - already in effect in New Jersey, and coming into effect in 2013 in Pennsylvania - mean that opportunities for responsibly ditching the out-of-date devices are growing fast. Already, both states make manufacturers responsible for the afterlife of the devices they produce.

ATLANTIC CITY - With its curved, 47-story, glass-and-steel facade, the Revel casino resort is designed to "embrace" the beach and Boardwalk in a way that no building on this famous oceanfront has done before. The $2.4 billion megacasino - the state's second-tallest structure, behind the Goldman Sachs Tower in Jersey City - envelopes the onlooker like a giant, sculpted wave. "That was what was the concept from the very beginning," said Robert Andersen, executive vice president of project development for Revel Entertainment Group.

By Judith A. Enck Protecting our environment creates jobs and makes our communities healthier places in which to live. The Environmental Protection Agency has a great example of environmental job creation in the Camden area, where cleanup work at just one site put about 330 people to work last year. The Welsbach Gas Mantle Superfund site consists of two former gas mantle manufacturing facilities contaminated by the radioactive substance thorium, which was used to make the mantles in gaslights glow brighter.

In 2010, veteran New Jersey lobbyist Jeff Michaels made more money from old clients, picked up new ones, and earned more than $430,000. It was the kind of year a Trenton insider hopes for. How did his lobbying earnings jump sevenfold in one year? He partnered with well-connected lawyer Philip Norcross, one of Senate President Stephen Sweeney's most trusted advisers and the brother of both a senator and one of the state's top Democratic power brokers. Michaels and Norcross started a lobbying and strategic planning firm called Optimus Partners L.L.C.

WITH THE Atlantis landing, the U.S. space program came to a grinding halt. NASA and Congress need to get their act together as space exploration is needed to develop offshore planetary resources to continue to modernize society and relieve shortages that would affect humankind. It can be done if government gets its act together by stopping partisan politics and giving the store away via lopsided "free trade" agreements and outsourcing that does nothing but destroy American ingenuity and capability to produce uniquely as a nation.