A Yom Kippur pledge to the earth
September 16th, 2002
On the holiest day of the year 5763 and 2002, I?m incredibly honored to be before you so, perhaps, we can think out loud---together---over the rumble of our tummies----for a bit.
I?ll never forget my first public speaking engagement. In my life, I had never been that nervous. I prepared for months. The day prior to speaking I made a special trip to the hair dresser for this special engagement. That night I slept in a chair so as not to crush my hairstyle and ended up not sleeping a wink. Now, I chuckle every time I look at my Bat Mitzvah pictures, because my hair was a mess AND I looked exhausted!
So, here I am, twenty-six years later, not particularly concerned about my hair and much better rested.
On this Yom Kippur, a day of atonement and honesty, I?d like us to be honest about the role we play in sustaining both the environment and our lives, not to mention those of the younger generation. It?s a day to own up to the need for individual responsibility to making this a better world. These are some of the concerns that underlie my presentation today.
As a distraction from our hunger, I?d like everyone to give a little thought to one word. This is a word that will become increasingly important in your future. Of this, I am certain. It?s a word that you?ve all heard before but one which, I would bet, you?ve not given much thought.
That word is HABITAT.
Now take this word and in your mind, turn it into a something visual. What do you see? Maybe you think of a coral reef teaming with brilliant tropical fish. This deep sea habitat could be abundantly stocked with strange and beautiful creatures all co-existing with each other in a gently swaying ballet choreographed over millions of years of evolution.
Maybe you?re a landlubber and the habitat you imagine is a rain forest. Your habitat is a busy haven for bugs, birds, and chimpanzees. You can appreciate the delicate balance of air and water that nurtures the creatures in your mind?s habitat. You can probably also appreciate the symbiosis of life with the delicate balance of food chains, natural controls and scarcity that sustains this habitat. These habitats, known as ecosystems, have evolved over time in a glorious, but precarious give and take.
Are you asleep yet? Have I lost you? Are you unable to relate? Maybe the discussion of food chains sent you off into dairy fantasies of kugels and fruit platters.
I have one more habitat for us to consider. Our own! Think about what sustains us as humans. What is the delicate balance that supports your life?
Well, a few short years ago, I would have quipped that my habitat is my kitchen and my daily sustenance comes from Starbucks. I know I?m lucky enough to be at the top of the food chain and everything is laid out in great bounty at my local Stop and Shop. My drinking water is delivered on a big green truck, because I want nothing less than the best for my family. As a lucky member of the human species, the world is my oyster and all there for my consumption.
Well, today I?d like to challenge this thinking. Our bounty is not without limits and the very habitat that sustains us is not all that stable. If we continue to take it for granted in the way we do, it will no longer sustain us. The evidence is all there, we just need to open our eyes. But be warned, once your eyes are opened, you may never close them again. It all started for me back in the summer of 1998.
It was late Sunday morning on day three of an official heat wave. Bruce and I had just finished packing up towels and lunches and were heading over to my parent?s house to go for a swim with the kids. My girls, then 2 and 6, were pretend picnicking out on the deck in nothing but their bathing suits. We had the steps down to the yard gated off for their safety.
When I was packed and ready to go, I called them inside. Jamie toddled up to the door and her helpful big sister, Casey, helped her climb up the one step into the kitchen. They then dashed around the kitchen singing a song they had just heard on Sesame Street.
With great anticipation, everyone was ready to go. Until?.I looked down and there, all over my white ceramic tile floor was a random array of little tiny black foot prints.
?Oh no. What a mess! Shoot. I?ll clean this up before we leave,? I said. I grabbed a wet sponge and tried to clean things up and was surprised to see that the prints only smeared. ?What was on the kid?s feet? They weren?t in the yard at all.? I asked Bruce.
Bruce went out to our deck and said, ?Honey, come out here. Come see this.?
I stepped out onto the deck and noticed something for the first time. My deck was covered with this black soot. And, it was not just my deck---it was the furniture, the hammock and all of the kid?s toys. Yuck.
I gathered up the kids and sat them down on the counter with their little feet dangling into the sink and washed off their feet with soap and a good scrub. When their feet were clean, I did the same thing for the floor.
While we lunched at the pool, I relayed this story to my parents. They suggested that it might be that power plant on Salem Harbor. They suggested I find out who owns it and call them. The next day I did just that.
Within a few weeks, PG&E, the owners of the power plant, responded to my call by sending an insurance adjuster to my house. As I pointed out the soot, the adjuster took samples with sticky tape and placed them in little glass vials. These samples were then sent off to a lab.
On a cool autumn morning a month later, a letter arrived from PG&E. They had determined that this mess could have been from their operations and although they were unable to share their results with me, they would be happy to power wash my deck and furniture. I would, of course, need to sign something releasing them from any kind of liability now and in the future. This was what they referred to as their ?good neighbor? policy.
This was a defining moment for me. I stood there in my kitchen holding that letter and looking down at my children, thinking PG&E has missed my point. I don?t really care about my deck or my furniture---WHO IS GOING TO POWERWASH THEIR LITTLE LUNGS?
At almost the very same time, friends were gathering at a funeral for a friend in Marblehead. Norma Warren was a local activist who had died of breast cancer and after her funeral her friends began to pay tribute by saying how brave she had been. Two friends in particular, Lynn Nadeau and Linda Weltner, said, ?Why do we have to be so brave? Why can?t we be safe??
Questions and personal experiences like these were the impetus for the creation of HealthLink, The Marblehead Cancer Prevention Project, The Marblehead Pesticide Awareness Coalition, and the League of Woman Voters drinking water study.
Through letters to the editors, meetings and occasional headlines our ranks quickly grew as we discovered ordinary citizens, fishermen, business owners and the occasional brave politician who shared our concerns. We named this movement ?HealthLink? as we set out to explore the ?link? between our health and our environment. We studied and observed. We soon learned that the power plant in Salem Harbor---not very far from here as the crow flies, was ?grandfathered? from stricter air regulations under The Clean Air Act of 1970. Soon the Harvard School of Public Health tied emissions from that plant to asthma, brain and other neurological disease, heart disease, lung cancer and even premature death. We also learned that pollutants from the plant contribute to acid rain which is destroying our lakes and forests.
We began to take our message to different communities with something we affectionately called ?Road Shows.? The now familiar site of a television satellite truck was then amazing and exciting to all of us because of the number of people we were reaching with our message. Doug Petersen, a treasure of a state representative, coached us along and spoke on our behalf, in spite of our political ?hot potato? status. A treasure of a physician, Dr. Mitch Jacobson, spoke out bravely as a doctor and father, even though we were drawing conclusions from common sense and statistics and proof still remained elusive.
Okay. I will admit this. We began to behave obsessively. We were driven by passion and outrage. The laws that were supposed to protect our health, we learned, were doing nothing more than protecting corporate polluters. These corporations had become as rich and powerful as small governments. The whole system was perverted.
Then, only by divine intervention, I received an email about a new movie that was being released about a mother who took on a big utility in California. Through some internet research, I soon learned that the utility that she had been fighting against was the very same one that we were dealing with here in Massachusetts. So, I picked up the phone, called information in California, and then called Erin Brockovich. We spoke for two and a half hours. We laughed, we shared stories, and we plotted. She pledged the help of her law firm, Masry & Vititoe, and provided me with some invaluable strategies.
After the movie was released, she sent an associate out to Marblehead to help us with some legal strategy and make a presentation at a town meeting in Abbot Hall. Extensive media coverage, the lead story on 6 different networks and many newspapers kicked our campaign for clean air into full gear. The Clean Air good news, I can tell you now, is that because of the work done by HealthLink, Massachusetts now has the strongest power plant regulations in the country.
But there?s more.
One day in January of 2000 I was pretty much just stalking the power plant. I had my two junior sleuths safely strapped in to their car seats in the back seat of my car. As I drove by the plant a giant dump truck was just leaving. Black ooze was slopping over the top and through the seams of the truck. I wondered, ?Okay now, what else is coming out of that plant??
Around the same time a front page story ran in The Boston Globe where Erin cheered on our work at HealthLink and then mentioned me by name. My phone rang off the hook for 5 days. One call in particular struck a chord. The caller reported the existence of an old gravel quarry in Beverly known as The Vitale Fly Ash Pit that I may be interested in hearing about. This pit, mined beneath the groundwater in the early 1900?s was filled in over two decades with solid waste, known as fly ash, from the Salem Power Plant. At that point, I knew what was in that dump truck.
I soon discovered the sad fact that this fly ash pit was only about 500 feet from beautiful Wenham Lake, drinking water for 80,000 residents of Salem, Beverly and parts of Wenham. This environmental time bomb was on the radar screen of the EPA but it had been given a low priority because of an error in its evaluation. When I realized that Jan Schlichtmann, the main character of ?A Civil Action?, lived up in Beverly, I gave him a call.
After chasing Jan around the country with inter-state phone calls, faxes and emails, he finally returned home. Like so many of us, Jan did not want to hear about a potential environmental threat so close to his home. When he finally grew tired of my persistence, he read the environmental reports I had sent him and commented, ?This is just terrible! Why didn?t you tell me??!!?
So, from then on, Jan was completely committed. By the end of the year 2000, Jan had decided that it was time to check to see if the fly ash was also in the lake. On a freezing cold day in December a group of 10 of us walked out on the frozen lake and borrowed an auger from an ice fisherman so we could drill a hole in the ice. Into the hole we placed a 10 foot long Lucite tube, capped it, and pulled up a cross section of the material at the bottom of the lake. Sure enough, there was about 6 feet of power plant waste at the bottom of this precious drinking water supply. I remember crying for the lake that evening as if it had just received a terminal diagnosis.
Through an effective combination of community activism, outrage and some minor theatrics, we were able to rouse the sleeping giant, New England Power, who created this mess in the first place. In unusual unison, we have united corporate polluters, citizens, and local and state officials to navigate the tricky permitting process to get this waste out of the drinking water. Today, this filtered drinking water supply continues to meet all federal and state standards but is showing serious signs of stress. The natural systems that sustain the health of the lake have been choked off by the thick blanket of waste and an ?acceptable? amount of arsenic is testing out in the post-filtered water. If the waste is not removed, the drinking water quality will likely show a slow but steady decline.
These are the two stories I wanted to share with you while I had your attention this Yom Kippur, because their substance is what got my attention. I learned an important lesson about the power of truth and activism, which is something I hope to impart to my children.
Although they both appear to be edging towards happy endings, I can assure you that success stories are few and far between in this field. There are no real villains in these stories either, because we?re all guilty. It?s the lack of political will that has created both of these threats to our habitat and the lack of political will that is also threatening the very future of civilization as we know it. As I?m sure you?ve figured out by now our human habitat is in peril. Global Warming and radical climate change is real and underway. Glaciers are retreating, the Arctic ice pack has lost about 40% of its thickness over the past 4 decades and global sea level is rising about three times faster over the past 100 years compared to the previous 3,000 years.
But what does that mean for you? Locally, we are seeing wild climate swings such as last year?s snow-less winter and drought conditions this summer. For the second straight year in Massachusetts we have experienced record number of ozone alert days, exacerbated by extreme heat, where we are advised by EPA and DEP that the air is unsafe to breathe and a danger to our health. Think about that. This is our state and federal regulators telling us that they have failed in their mission to protect us. Last year alone there were nearly 30 days of unsafe air.
It may seem remote, but what is central to these threats is our nation?s energy policy. Never in history have we had an administration with such shameless ties to big energy. With these ties, an unprecedented assault on the environment has been launched upon all kinds of hard fought environmental laws which are being set back by decades. The sole beneficiaries of these roll backs are the coal, oil and gas industries who contributed so heavily to this administration?s election. Never has our government behaved so transparently in favor of corporate welfare while in complete secrecy from the American public. Never have the environmentalists suffered from such marginalization.
It is time for us to make the connections between bad policy and our children?s health. We need to preserve the earth, not consume it. Our nation?s policies need to recognize this and we need to demand it. You may say, ?Well, politics are not for me.? But I can assure you that each and every time you swish your credit card at the register, you are casting a vote. Are you voting for organic farming which minimizes the chemical load on your body? Are you shutting out your lights when you leave the room so we?re not voting for coal being burned in Salem Harbor? Are you voting for less wasteful automobiles that burn the amount of fuel that is appropriate for your cargo?
In the spirit of atonement, I have to admit that I am a reformed SUV driver. Knowing what I know now, I have a Toyota Prius, packed with subsidized bells and whistles, which came with an additional kicker, a tax rebate! This vehicle is priced competitively, peppy as heck, incredibly inexpensive to run, gets 50-60 miles per gallon, and is a great hope for our very survival! The key to independence from our oil addiction and the great political costs associated with that addiction is through individual conservation, utilization and promotion of more energy efficient appliances, as well as a government committed to the development of renewable resources such as wind, solar, geothermal and hydrogen technologies.
It?s not just your dollar votes that count. Your voice counts as an individual, an American and a Jew. Just recently there was a Senate vote on whether or not to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve or ANWR that was appearing to be evenly split along party lines. Democrats were in favor of continued preservation while Republicans were in favor of drilling in order to supply us with a tiny amount of oil.
Republicans tried to court favor with a coalition of Jewish organizations, known as COEJL, saying that drilling would help Israel by freeing up our dependence on Middle Eastern oil. This coalition refused. It reiterated the position of the majority of Jewish organizations that drilling in ANWR would provide only a small amount of oil. Our voices were heard.
Great if you?re a caribou, but don?t assume that there is someone out there actively protecting our habitat here in our own back yards. About a year ago I came up with an idea very much on a whim. I created a simple petition called the ?Grandfathers against Grandfathering?of old power plants.? The original concept was to give grandparents a vehicle for expression of their outrage at this insult to their grandchildren. I dedicated it to my dad, Harvey Litman, who many of you knew, the grandfather of my kids who grew up in Salem and always felt that the power plant was a hazard. I wrote up this simple petition and set it free on email. What came back was amazing. Grandfathers and Grandmothers wrote words of encouragement. At their stage in the life, they understand how precious and tender life is. People shared this simple petition with their family members and friends in other states who lived near these plants. I was so surprised to hear that some were outraged that I was only limiting this to grandfathers----so I bent the rules a bit. Emails came in from around the world, some in need of translation. When all was said and done, I had thousands of signatures from all 50 states and 8 foreign countries.
This past April, disgusted with the constant rollbacks in environmental protections, HealthLink decided to bring this petition to Washington to let the administration know that ordinary people are fed up. We got on a plane, on our own nickel, and met up with representatives from about 15 different states. About 20 of us met with officials at EPA and five of us met with DOE. Then, with some ground support from Greenpeace, we rallied at the Lincoln Memorial and marched over to the White House to deliver our petition. We had previously been told that nobody from the White House would meet with us. A few days later our rally was featured on the same page of Time Magazine as President Bush and Christie Todd Whitman, EPA administrator. Our message was heard!!!
This was incredibly empowering, but at the same time, surprising. This didn?t feel extraordinary to me. It just seemed like common sense. Well, if current affairs are proving anything, it?s that today, like no time ever in history, the individual is king. As Thomas Friedman muses in his new book, ?Longitudes and Attitudes?:
?Because globalization has brought down many of the walls that limited the movement and reach of people, and because it has simultaneously wired the world into networks, it gave more power to individuals to influence both markets and nation-states than at any other time in history?So you have today not only a superpower, not only Super-markets, but also what I call ?super-empowered individuals.? Some of these super-empowered individuals are quite angry, some of them quite wonderful---but all of them are now able to act much more directly and much more powerfully on the world stage.?
He also shares the story of Jody Williams who discovered the key to all this a few years ahead of me:
Jody Williams won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 for helping to build an international coalition to bring about a treaty outlawing land mines. Although nearly 120 governments endorsed the treaty, it was opposed by Russia, China, and the United States. When Jody Williams was asked, ?How did you do that? How did you organize one thousand different citizens? groups and non-governmental organizations on five continents to forge a treaty that was opposed by the major powers?? she had a very brief answer: ?E-mail.? Jody Williams used email and the networked world to super-empower herself.
So, if any of what I?ve spoken about is important to you, guess what? You?re an environmentalist. You may not wear tie-died T-shirts or walk around hugging trees and eating tofu, but I bet you care about your kids, your grandchildren, yourself. Environmentalists are you and me and our children trying to preserve our habitat so it can continue to sustain us in the way our very lives depend. You too, are what Thomas Freidman refers to as a ?Super-empowered individual? whether you choose to believe it or act on it. You should, however, recognize the element of responsibility you have to counter those super empowered individuals who are not so nobly motivated. Once you realize that, you?ve been drafted for good.
This Yom Kippur, when you pray for peace, also make a related pledge for your children and their habitat.
Hinei ma tov u?mah nayim, shevet achim gam yachad.
Behold how good and how pleasant it is for brothers and sisters to dwell together in unity.
Thank you.
Lori Ehrlich
Discussion questions:
- Have any of you felt endangered by your immediate environment?be it air you breathe, water you drink, etc.
- What do you think can and should be done to address the source of the problems you?ve experience, besides seeking medial treatment? (like for asthma)
- Do you think you as an individual can make a difference in seeking progress in improving public health standards, or are most of us truly powerless to face off against the ?big guys? in the corporations whose policies adversely affect us and our kids or grandchildren?
- If you were Adam, would you say that Paradise is lost, no matter what you try to do, or are you prepared to take a pledge to maintain the ?garden? we call life?
