Green America: Why Environmentalism Is Hot

With windmills, low-energy homes, new forms of recycling and fuel-efficient cars, Americans are taking conservation into their own hands.

One morning last week … 29 years after president Jimmy Carter declared energy conservation “the moral equivalent of war” … 37 years after the first reference to the “greenhouse effect” in The New York Times … one day after oil prices hit a record peak of more than $75 per barrel … Kelley Howell, a 38-year-old architect, got on her bicycle a little after 5 a.m. and rode 7.9 miles past shopping centers, housing developments and a nature preserve to a bus stop to complete her 24-mile commute to work. Compared with driving in her 2004 Mini Cooper, the 15.8-mile round trip by bicycle conserved approximately three fifths of a gallon of gasoline, subtracting 15 pounds of potential carbon dioxide pollution from the atmosphere (minus the small additional amount she exhaled as a result of her exertion). That’s 15 pounds out of 1.7 billion tons of carbon produced annually to fuel all the vehicles in the United States. She concedes that when you look at it that way, it doesn’t seem like very much. “But if you’re not doing something and the next family isn’t doing anything, then who will?”

On that very question the course of
civilization may rest. In the face of the coming onslaught of
pollutants from a rapidly urbanizing China and India, the task of
avoiding ecological disaster may seem hopeless, and some environmental
scientists have, quietly, concluded that it is. But Americans are
notoriously reluctant to surrender their fates to the impersonal
outcomes of an equation. One by one