[Music]
this image of the Cuyahoga River on fire
in northern Ohio became an icon of sorts
of the environmental movement they
caught fire 15 times by 1969 after that
in the first Earth Day in 1970 some
really great things happen for
environmental protection Congress passed
the Clean Water Act the Safe Drinking
Water Act the Clean Air Act the National
Environmental Policy Act the Endangered
Species Act and many others they also
established the Environmental Protection
Agency all of that during a Republican
administration those pieces of
legislation did some great things for
our environment and environmental
protection but they picked what I might
call the low-hanging fruit I’ll let you
in on a little secret scientifically
it’s pretty darn easy to fix a river
that catches on fire stop pouring
gasoline on it the environmental
problems facing humanity today are much
more complicated much more complex and
insidious than a burning River and their
solution lies within our entrenched
societal behavior that’s the sum of all
of our individual behaviors
I learned something when my wife and I
were fortunate enough to live and work
in the Yellowstone National Park the
park cops work in a division known
formally as visitor protection and
resource management they told me that
they knew their job was protecting the
resources in managing the visitors it’s
the culture it’s the people that need
management and that’s exactly where we
are today with our environmental
problems we’re not going to solve these
problems until we face the biggest
threat and that’s us our behaviors
I’m really lucky right now to be
involved in research along a nearly
pristine trout stream the white river in
Manistee National Forest in Michigan and
there because the Forest Service asked
for some help I’m on my lunch break in
this picture here the streams in West
Central Michigan are they support trout
they support salmon spawning runs out of
Lake Michigan and they’re sustained by
groundwater now this is something that
gets somebody like me and environmental
hydrogeologist kind of fired up and
excited this is groundwater very
aggressively flowing out of the stream
bed
it’s literally making that stream it’s
that continual inflow of groundwater
that maintains stable stream levels it
maintains cool stable temperatures all
year long it maintains nutrient inputs
to that stream if that groundwater is
threatened then the stream is threatened
and if the stream is threatened the
trout and salmon are threatened and if
the trout and salmon are threatened well
the two billion dollar a year fishing
industry in Michigan is threatened so
why was the Forest Service concerned why
did I go up there well because Nestle’s
Ice Mountain bottled water company
drilled to test wells to extract ground
water from private property about a
hundred yards off the bank of the White
River the boundary with the National
Forest the border with your public land
will pumping groundwater from adjacent
to a trout stream threaten that stream
absolutely how much well trying to
measure that threat and assess those
impacts were the scientific questions
that the Forest Service wanted some help
trying to answer but let’s move beyond
the science why are those questions even
being asked well it’s because our
society has an addiction to little
plastic bottles of water 30 billion
plastic bottles every year just in the
United States we consume non-renewable
fossil resources to manufacture and
transport and distribute those bottles
single serving plastic bottles generate
any nor
volume of waste the far majority of
which is not recycled and extracting
groundwater for bottled water does pose
very real threat to some aquatic
resources the only reason that those
problems originate is because we choose
the drink water out of little plastic
bottles we now have a thing called the
Great Pacific Garbage Patch thousands of
square miles between California and
Hawaii where human debris is trapped in
a jar of Airy large circular ocean
current we might envision massive
floating piles of garbage but it’s
actually much more insidious than that
most of its tiny micro plastic suspended
in the water column plastic beads from
beauty products raw material plastics
for manufacturing the broken fragments
and charged from our disposable
lifestyle
Diana Parker from the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration says if
you tried to clean less than 1% of the
North Pacific Ocean that takes 67 ships
one year to clean until we stop that
debris at its source it’s just going to
continue to congregate in those areas
there’s very real damage from this and
from all of our behaviors nearly every
dead albatross in the Hawaiian island
regions has plastic in its gut attracted
to that plastic as if it were food many
of them starve to death because their
gut has no no room for real food this
isn’t this isn’t debris from cruise
ships this is the stuff that runs
downstream it’s the stuff that flows off
of our continents from our disposable
throwaway society water is at the center
of many of our environmental problems as
it should be Senator Barry Goldwater
once said a man from the West will fight
over three things water women gold and
usually in that order
water is environmental lifeblood it’s
societal lifeblood it’s really amazing
what we’ll do to that which we need
remember we let a river catch on fire 15
times and then we actually had to draft
federal law to stop it this is a noisy
graph and we’ll talk about it briefly
but then then we’ll move on and we’ll go
beyond the science this graph is showing
the concentrations of synthetic
chemicals in streams of the United
States the US Geological Survey detected
these chemicals in 80 percent of the
streams at it sampled in our country a
third of the streams had 10 or more of
these chemicals they’re in low
concentrations but scientifically we
don’t really know what that means we do
know that they aren’t removed by normal
water treatment process what are the
implications of exposure to low levels
of testosterone and fire retardant in
water that’s some challenging science
any of you want to volunteer for that
clinical trial let’s throw in some
veterinary antibiotics and steroids and
painkillers and opioids plasticizers and
insecticides now what you know fish and
amphibians don’t have a choice they’re
in a clinical trial we have detected
intersex fish male fish with egg cells
female dominated fish populations and
streams that are contaminated by
estrogen the problem of pharmaceuticals
in our natural waters is a cultural
problem and it will only be solved when
societal behavior changes and in this
case that’s when we and our livestock
become less medicated science can’t fix
this problem so we had a pretty cool
total solar eclipse a couple months ago
I had a really good fortune of traveling
with a group of homeschool students
including our son David to the path of
totality it was awesome
I knew exactly where to go and precisely
when to be there in order for those kids
in my family to see totality I never
heard anybody ever deny that this
eclipse was gonna happen I never heard
anybody say that this eclipse was just a
big hoax I never heard anybody say oh
this eclipse is just a way for a bunch
of geeky astronomers to get research
funding and yet I’ve heard all of those
things said about climate change said by
our policy
well the methods and approaches that we
use to know when and where we can go
observe in Eclipse are exactly the same
methods and approaches that we use to
detect climate change we use those
methods to describe past climatic
conditions we use those methods to
quantify changes that are happening to
our climate right now and we use those
methods to predict the trajectory of
climate change given our burning of
fossil fuels science has done its job
the solution to climate change is almost
entirely in societal hands now just like
a burning River it needs strong
leadership and sound policy to guide and
change behavior maybe it is low-hanging
fruit you don’t stop dumping gasoline in
a river the river doesn’t burn stop
dumping co2 in the atmosphere the globe
doesn’t want scientifically it’s not
that confusing but I’ll admit it
certainly is an inconvenient truth we’ve
had global scale cultural successes –
environmental problems before the
Montreal Protocol in the 1980s was the
first universally ratified United
Nations treaty and it addressed the
concern that some synthetic refrigerants
and aerosol propellants chemically
degraded stratospheric ozone that’s on
that we like we want that it reduces the
amount of ultraviolet radiation that
reaches the Earth’s surface
this protocol gathered to get the global
interest and they develop policy and
implemented solutions and it appears to
be working the polar ozone holes are
shrinking the Stockholm convention of
the early 2000s address the issue of
persistent organic pollutants peopies
like DDT impact animals ability to
metabolize calcium and it was that
biochemistry that led our national
symbol the bald eagle to become an
endangered species in the 1960s there
were only 500 breeding pairs of the bald
eagle
in the lower 48 states of the United
States now there’s 10,000 ironically one
of the very few countries that did not
sign on to the Stockholm convention was
the owner of that national symbol the
United States we degrade the resources
that we depend upon we unsustainably
consume non-renewable resources and we
greatly enhance our exposure to risk by
modifying global environmental processes
science has with integrity describe
those threats to our environment
it’s quantified the impacts of those
environmental threats to our environment
and it’s predicted future impacts from
the environmental bets that we face a
solution to these problems is is in
societal hands at this point we we have
the ability to solve these problems by
modifying our individual behaviors the
solution is changing societal behaviors
which again is very simply a collection
of our individual behaviors
so the solution changing behaviors on a
societal level our own individual level
and that essentially equals our growth
thank you
[Applause]
[Music]
this image of the Cuyahoga River on fire
in northern Ohio became an icon of sorts
of the environmental movement they
caught fire 15 times by 1969 after that
in the first Earth Day in 1970 some
really great things happen for
environmental protection Congress passed
the Clean Water Act the Safe Drinking
Water Act the Clean Air Act the National
Environmental Policy Act the Endangered
Species Act and many others they also
established the Environmental Protection
Agency all of that during a Republican
administration those pieces of
legislation did some great things for
our environment and environmental
protection but they picked what I might
call the low-hanging fruit I’ll let you
in on a little secret scientifically
it’s pretty darn easy to fix a river
that catches on fire stop pouring
gasoline on it the environmental
problems facing humanity today are much
more complicated much more complex and
insidious than a burning River and their
solution lies within our entrenched
societal behavior that’s the sum of all
of our individual behaviors
I learned something when my wife and I
were fortunate enough to live and work
in the Yellowstone National Park the
park cops work in a division known
formally as visitor protection and
resource management they told me that
they knew their job was protecting the
resources in managing the visitors it’s
the culture it’s the people that need
management and that’s exactly where we
are today with our environmental
problems we’re not going to solve these
problems until we face the biggest
threat and that’s us our behaviors
I’m really lucky right now to be
involved in research along a nearly
pristine trout stream the white river in
Manistee National Forest in Michigan and
there because the Forest Service asked
for some help I’m on my lunch break in
this picture here the streams in West
Central Michigan are they support trout
they support salmon spawning runs out of
Lake Michigan and they’re sustained by
groundwater now this is something that
gets somebody like me and environmental
hydrogeologist kind of fired up and
excited this is groundwater very
aggressively flowing out of the stream
bed
it’s literally making that stream it’s
that continual inflow of groundwater
that maintains stable stream levels it
maintains cool stable temperatures all
year long it maintains nutrient inputs
to that stream if that groundwater is
threatened then the stream is threatened
and if the stream is threatened the
trout and salmon are threatened and if
the trout and salmon are threatened well
the two billion dollar a year fishing
industry in Michigan is threatened so
why was the Forest Service concerned why
did I go up there well because Nestle’s
Ice Mountain bottled water company
drilled to test wells to extract ground
water from private property about a
hundred yards off the bank of the White
River the boundary with the National
Forest the border with your public land
will pumping groundwater from adjacent
to a trout stream threaten that stream
absolutely how much well trying to
measure that threat and assess those
impacts were the scientific questions
that the Forest Service wanted some help
trying to answer but let’s move beyond
the science why are those questions even
being asked well it’s because our
society has an addiction to little
plastic bottles of water 30 billion
plastic bottles every year just in the
United States we consume non-renewable
fossil resources to manufacture and
transport and distribute those bottles
single serving plastic bottles generate
any nor
volume of waste the far majority of
which is not recycled and extracting
groundwater for bottled water does pose
very real threat to some aquatic
resources the only reason that those
problems originate is because we choose
the drink water out of little plastic
bottles we now have a thing called the
Great Pacific Garbage Patch thousands of
square miles between California and
Hawaii where human debris is trapped in
a jar of Airy large circular ocean
current we might envision massive
floating piles of garbage but it’s
actually much more insidious than that
most of its tiny micro plastic suspended
in the water column plastic beads from
beauty products raw material plastics
for manufacturing the broken fragments
and charged from our disposable
lifestyle
Diana Parker from the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration says if
you tried to clean less than 1% of the
North Pacific Ocean that takes 67 ships
one year to clean until we stop that
debris at its source it’s just going to
continue to congregate in those areas
there’s very real damage from this and
from all of our behaviors nearly every
dead albatross in the Hawaiian island
regions has plastic in its gut attracted
to that plastic as if it were food many
of them starve to death because their
gut has no no room for real food this
isn’t this isn’t debris from cruise
ships this is the stuff that runs
downstream it’s the stuff that flows off
of our continents from our disposable
throwaway society water is at the center
of many of our environmental problems as
it should be Senator Barry Goldwater
once said a man from the West will fight
over three things water women gold and
usually in that order
water is environmental lifeblood it’s
societal lifeblood it’s really amazing
what we’ll do to that which we need
remember we let a river catch on fire 15
times and then we actually had to draft
federal law to stop it this is a noisy
graph and we’ll talk about it briefly
but then then we’ll move on and we’ll go
beyond the science this graph is showing
the concentrations of synthetic
chemicals in streams of the United
States the US Geological Survey detected
these chemicals in 80 percent of the
streams at it sampled in our country a
third of the streams had 10 or more of
these chemicals they’re in low
concentrations but scientifically we
don’t really know what that means we do
know that they aren’t removed by normal
water treatment process what are the
implications of exposure to low levels
of testosterone and fire retardant in
water that’s some challenging science
any of you want to volunteer for that
clinical trial let’s throw in some
veterinary antibiotics and steroids and
painkillers and opioids plasticizers and
insecticides now what you know fish and
amphibians don’t have a choice they’re
in a clinical trial we have detected
intersex fish male fish with egg cells
female dominated fish populations and
streams that are contaminated by
estrogen the problem of pharmaceuticals
in our natural waters is a cultural
problem and it will only be solved when
societal behavior changes and in this
case that’s when we and our livestock
become less medicated science can’t fix
this problem so we had a pretty cool
total solar eclipse a couple months ago
I had a really good fortune of traveling
with a group of homeschool students
including our son David to the path of
totality it was awesome
I knew exactly where to go and precisely
when to be there in order for those kids
in my family to see totality I never
heard anybody ever deny that this
eclipse was gonna happen I never heard
anybody say that this eclipse was just a
big hoax I never heard anybody say oh
this eclipse is just a way for a bunch
of geeky astronomers to get research
funding and yet I’ve heard all of those
things said about climate change said by
our policy
well the methods and approaches that we
use to know when and where we can go
observe in Eclipse are exactly the same
methods and approaches that we use to
detect climate change we use those
methods to describe past climatic
conditions we use those methods to
quantify changes that are happening to
our climate right now and we use those
methods to predict the trajectory of
climate change given our burning of
fossil fuels science has done its job
the solution to climate change is almost
entirely in societal hands now just like
a burning River it needs strong
leadership and sound policy to guide and
change behavior maybe it is low-hanging
fruit you don’t stop dumping gasoline in
a river the river doesn’t burn stop
dumping co2 in the atmosphere the globe
doesn’t want scientifically it’s not
that confusing but I’ll admit it
certainly is an inconvenient truth we’ve
had global scale cultural successes –
environmental problems before the
Montreal Protocol in the 1980s was the
first universally ratified United
Nations treaty and it addressed the
concern that some synthetic refrigerants
and aerosol propellants chemically
degraded stratospheric ozone that’s on
that we like we want that it reduces the
amount of ultraviolet radiation that
reaches the Earth’s surface
this protocol gathered to get the global
interest and they develop policy and
implemented solutions and it appears to
be working the polar ozone holes are
shrinking the Stockholm convention of
the early 2000s address the issue of
persistent organic pollutants peopies
like DDT impact animals ability to
metabolize calcium and it was that
biochemistry that led our national
symbol the bald eagle to become an
endangered species in the 1960s there
were only 500 breeding pairs of the bald
eagle
in the lower 48 states of the United
States now there’s 10,000 ironically one
of the very few countries that did not
sign on to the Stockholm convention was
the owner of that national symbol the
United States we degrade the resources
that we depend upon we unsustainably
consume non-renewable resources and we
greatly enhance our exposure to risk by
modifying global environmental processes
science has with integrity describe
those threats to our environment
it’s quantified the impacts of those
environmental threats to our environment
and it’s predicted future impacts from
the environmental bets that we face a
solution to these problems is is in
societal hands at this point we we have
the ability to solve these problems by
modifying our individual behaviors the
solution is changing societal behaviors
which again is very simply a collection
of our individual behaviors
so the solution changing behaviors on a
societal level our own individual level
and that essentially equals our growth
thank you
[Applause]
[Music]
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