The Environment in America

When people think of the environment they think of Al Gore as a caricature of someone using global warming scare tactics to make Americans give up their combustible engines and start walking again. But the environment was an issue of the United States and the world since the early 1960s. Scripture teaches us that we are given dominion over the Earth but we are required to be good stewards of the Earth. In fact, Richard M. Nixon was the president who signed into law the EPA Administration in 1970 and presided over the very first Earth Day on April 22, 1970.

During the 1973 Christmas Tree Lighting, the United States was in the middle of an energy crisis. Nixon, in his comments, when lighting just the single star at the top of the tree made reference of his goal of alternative energy by 1980. Later in the decade, President Jimmy Carter went so far as to put solar panels atop the White House only to be taken down when the Reagans moved into the White House in 1981. Today, one of those solar panels is housed in the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library.

Throughout the 12 years of the Ronald Reagan and George HW. Bush administrations; the environment took a back seat to deep tax cuts for companies that pollute the air we breath and the water we drink. If you were a child growing up in the Akron/Canton, Ohio area of the United States between the Post War Era to the time NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) went into effect, chances are your father worked at Timken Steel or Goodyear or Firestone Rubber. On soft, warm summer nights there would be families passing by those humming factories where the fathers would roll down the windows of the family car and tell the kids, "Take a good whiff of that kids. That’s the smell of money being made down there." It was a great middle-class living to work in those Rust Belt states. But as time went on, the science caught up with the economics and the factories were not prepared to convert to a clean energy economy.

In the early 1990s, Senator Al Gore wrote a book titled EARTH IN THE BALANCE. He warned that if we don’t start changing the way the world does business, in the next 30 years (2020s and beyond) we will witness some serious and severe weather caused by global warmer that the human species could start to become extinct. Throughout the 1990s, the Bill Clinton administration laid the groundwork for a cleaner and greener economy and environment. Because of the Iraq War in the 2000s, the George W. Bush Administration put the environment on the back burner.

By the time Barack Obama became president in 2009, the Obama administration brought the environment up front again. Starting with Cap and Trade in 2010 and then the Paris Agreements late in his administration only to be removed when Donald Trump became president in 2017.

The Trump administration for the next four years would see members of the Cabinet for Interior and Commerce as well as an EPA administrator we’re doing all they could to tear down the environment, again, all in the name of deep tax cuts.

The Joe Biden administration since 2021 has been working hard to save the environment as we are now where Al Gore warned us way back in 1992. For the next four years, start preparing for an administration to work to bring about alternative energy and vehicles to clean up the environment. The news right now is not good for the human race and the environment, but we may have a narrow window to start reversing the trends so that children born in 2000 and beyond can live to a healthy old age.

This collection is to teach us and bring awareness about the environment so that we can all do our part to save the planet.