by Bill Nye
The world was careening toward crisis, yes, but I was going to meet up with the people who were ready to do something about it. And I was going to have a chance to be a part of the solution. I was so into it all that I fashioned a cardboard sign, held on my lower back or posterior with twine. The sign said, “Pedals Don’t Pollute.” The letter “o” in “Pollute” was the squeezed Greek letter theta, which had become the Earth Day symbol, like this: Pedals Don’t Pθllute. Laugh all you want; what happened changed history. Nationwide, 20 million people showed up to help create the modern environmental movement. We are still living in the aftermath.
I locked my Schwinn Super Sport bicycle to a flagpole at the Washington Monument, just as you would if you were riding around in a small town. (If you tried that today, your bike would probably be taken to a remote location, x-rayed, and destroyed. Such is change.) Then I joined the thousands of others making their way to the National Mall. On the Mall side of the US Capitol Building was a huge stage; over the course of the day, a succession of speakers there described in chilling detail the ways that humans were harming the planet and urged us to reform our environmentally evil ways.
In those days, we were all intensely concerned about pollution. Just a year earlier, Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River had essentially caught fire when a large oil slick on the water near the Republic Steel mill went up in flames. Soon, that river fire became an emblem of industry run amok. I remember riding my bike near the Potomac River around that same time and being incredulous that there were people out there on boats. It seemed impossible to me that anybody would voluntarily get near the Potomac, let alone on it: “Isn’t that water too polluted to put valuable boats on or in? You can’t be serious. What if a boat driver were to get some of that river spray in his mouth? Wouldn’t he be dead in a few hours or even minutes?”
If you think today’s environmentalists are doomsayers, you should have heard the Earth Day speakers. The message that I came away with was “Humans are bad.” “Don’t drive a car.” Also, “Don’t waste water—so wear dirty clothes” (like any good tree-hugging hippie). The overall lesson seemed to be that humans are bad for other living things, as well as themselves—us. Scientists were just starting to come to terms with the scope of our impact on the planet. The word “ecosystem” was relatively new, as was the field of ecology. It wasn’t hard to see the overall trend, though. Living things interact in predictable ways, and we were seriously messing with those interactions. I might be exaggerating the mood a bit; the views of a teenager can do that. But to me, the warnings all seemed logical and conclusive. We couldn’t keep on going the way we were going because we were destroying our world. Those views struck many as extreme, and they reinforced the idea in certain quarters that Earth Day was organized by that imagined bunch of dirty hippies.
I also got another, much stronger message that day: We have a collective responsibility and, along with it, the power of collective action. The majority of the 20 million people who showed up were ordinary people from all classes and cultures who were deeply concerned about the environment. When you added up that much concern, it was extremely influential. Factions in the US Congress quickly found common cause with President Richard Nixon and agreed to establish the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). This is a piece of environmental history that is too often overlooked: The government agency most responsible for clamping down on polluters and making this country more green was born under a conservative Republican president. Equally impressive, the legislation creating the EPA was enacted just 8 months after Earth Day. Partisan divisions and gridlock on environmental issues are not necessarily a given.
Since its inception, the EPA has continually fought the good fight. Its mission is to protect human health and the environment. The agency wages a continual battle for the public good as industries and individuals seek to externalize their costs. “Externalize” is an economist’s term that means “make someone else pay for it.” External costs are the consequence of the basic truism that you can’t get something for nothing. In general, polluting is easier than not polluting; otherwise, people wouldn’t be doing it. As a result, there will almost always be some expense involved in being cleaner and more benign. Those costs run headlong into another truism: People don’t like to pay for something if there’s some way they can stick someone else with the bill. Industries and individuals fight one another all the time these days to externalize the costs of living. The problem is, somebody has to pay for the services and quality of environment that we all want.
In the case of the environment, we all pay for waste-treatment facilities that have to include systems to get rid of all the dirty things we produce, from industrial solvents and debris to our food preparation and digestive by-products, along with the dirty motor oil that your neighbor decided to pour down the storm drain. If the power company on the Potomac River discharged an effluent so hot that it killed the fish, the rest of us would not have to deal with rotting fish carcasses downstream.
Come to think of it, we did. As a Boy Scout, I once paddled a canoe through a slurry of fish corpses on the Potomac River. It was an eye- and nose-opening experience. The fish had died because, at the time, the local power company was not required to cool water from the generating plant before that overheated water was pumped back into the river. When the company eventually addressed the problem by installing expansive cooling systems, it charged us all higher electric fees to offset the cost of the cooling equipment and the extra real estate it was built upon. In this example, the company redirected its externalized costs to the people who pay electric bills, rather than onto the fish and the people who would otherwise have had to deal with disposing of the rotting fish carcasses.
Economists call situations like this the “tragedy of the commons,” a reference to the shared grazing land in the British Isles. Some people might decide to graze one or two more cattle than is allowed in the commons agreement. A little cheating doesn’t seem like it would cause any harm. But if most or all the people do that, pretty soon the commons will not be able to support everyone’s grazing animals. In other words, common resources will vanish unless people share responsibility for tending to them. So how do you ensure that the commons, and any other shared resource, isn’t being exploited by someone or some agency that puts its needs ahead of the common good?
This is where the unfairly vilified term “regulation” comes in. As an engineer, I think of regulations as being like a complicated modern factory, complete with robotic welders, conveyor belts, sorting devices, and so on. You could easily get carried away when designing a factory like this, buying too many machines and giving the assembly line too many twists and turns. That would waste money and reduce efficiency, and perhaps create serious snags in the production process. On the other hand, there is a critical minimum set of components that a factory needs to operate. You can’t arbitrarily step in and decide “I don’t like the look of that robot, so let’s not bother doing that part of the welding process.” And once you’ve worked out an agreeable set of components to keep things moving smoothly, you have to remain alert to malfunctions. You cannot let the belts wear out; if you don’t maintain them, they will break and bring the whole factory to a halt.
So it is with environmental rules. We want all the ones we need, but no more. Too many and we start to interfere with innovation and economic growth while providing little practical benefit. Too few legal protections pose a more critical risk, however. If we don’t pay enough attention to our shared responsibilities, we can allow serious harm to humans and to the other species we rely on. Environmental pollution, especially the carbon dioxide emissions associated with climate change, is the tragedy of the commons writ large—as large as can be. Regulation is really just a legal analog of smart engineering. It formalizes our ideas about how best to take care of the planet (and ourselves) so that the whole system keeps running smoothly.
It is fashionable in certain circles these days to talk about government agencies
as if they are autonomous devices that merrily go about pursuing their own agendas. That is about as absurd as criticizing a factory foreman for caring more about the machines than for the final product. Taking care of the machines is inseparable from taking care of the production process. Similarly, agencies like the EPA were created to take care of the planet and avert tragedy. I can tell you, as someone who was on the scene at the first Earth Day, there could hardly be anything more human than the worried, passionate, diverse crowd that gathered there to agitate for a cleaner planet. The EPA, and all the other agencies that do like-minded work, is composed of true ardent nerds working hard to focus on the big picture and to serve the needs of the many rather than those of the few. When those agencies are under assault, we are all under assault, and we need to defend our common interests.
The EPA is the American people, and we are the EPA. At least, we should be.
It may be hard to recall, but for a long time the idea that humans could change the entire planet seemed ludicrous. The prevailing attitude since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution was that Earth is so huge, and humans so puny, that the most we could do was local damage. That view started to change in earnest only in the 1960s, for several reasons. Astronomers began to compare the climates of other planets with the climate of Earth. When the first photo of Earth, looking delicate and alone outside the window of the Apollo 8 command module, was sent around the world late in December 1968, the impact was huge. Those first personal images of our planet from afar caused a dramatic change in perspective.
And then there was that first Earth Day. It wasn’t “Local Cleanup Day” or “National Environment Day.” The rally was about getting us all to think of our planet as a single enormous ecosystem—the Earth, the global commons. There’s an inherent morality in this everything-all-at-once attitude. We are all responsible for the global commons. We all have to look out for our neighbors, and now it’s clear that those “neighbors” might be halfway around the planet. Whether you are a scientist or an artist, a very important leader or an ordinary citizen, you have an obligation to pitch in for the greater good. Soon that way of thinking seemed not just reasonable but also obvious . . . well, to most people. So yes, Earth Day was effective. It had and continues to have a considerable impact.
After its initial rousing success, Earth Day has been celebrated on April 22 every year. I rode down to a few more of the events when I was in high school in the early 1970s. Like so many things in our society, Earth Day gatherings became more organized and more commercialized. From one perspective, it’s easy to wonder what good my short bike rides to the gatherings really did. One could argue that my attendance at those rallies made no material difference to the politicians calling the shots in the Capitol Building and the White House. I’d dispute that view, though. I think the continued crowds, year after year, helped maintain support for the EPA and the many other, less visible state agencies that magnify its work.
I can tell you for certain that Earth Day motivated me. I was convinced that we were headed for trouble as a species unless we could start using our brains more rationally, and it shaped how I approached my own environmental impact and goals for the future. Ever since that first event, I have done whatever I can to fight the good fight and to get you to fight alongside me. Support the causes you believe in. Show up at rallies. Find your community, or help create one if you can. Share support and inspiration for nerdy compassion and responsibility. Stand up and be counted as an active, rather than a passive, member of your democracy. And use your time at these gatherings to find out what courses of action you can take next that can continue to make a difference at the local level and beyond.
A lot of what I have done over the past 4 decades—including writing the book that you’re reading right now—was inspired by the need to help people understand what it means to be a global species. We humans know we can change the world because we’re doing it right now—but so far we’re doing it mostly by accident. The challenge is taking responsibility for our actions, assuming deliberate control of the change. We’re all in this together. There’s nobody else who can pick up the external costs. Where, exactly, would you send the bill? I don’t think any of us has that address—ha, ha, ha (?).
Nerds don’t give up when there’s a problem to be solved, and so I’ve kept working on my climate message, redoubling my efforts to try everything all at once. I describe climate change in my kids’ books and made a point to do climate change demonstrations on the Bill Nye the Science Guy show. I’ve spoken at Earth Day events in Washington, DC, at the invitation of both Democratic and Republican presidents. I managed to host a special on the National Geographic Channel with Arnold Schwarzenegger about environmental destruction and global warming.
One thing led to another, and President Barack Obama had me as his guest at the 2015 Earth Day celebration. We went to Florida to call attention to environmental issues there and to celebrate a redesigned and rebuilt system of public works, bridges, weirs, and roads that together are helping manage a major redistribution of surface water in and around Everglades National Park. The Everglades has an exotic, delicate ecosystem full of species that are found nowhere else on Earth. If you want clean water in South Florida, you want that surface flow to be filtered by the complex chemistry of the living systems in North and Central Florida. All this is worth preserving, and the efforts currently underway are impressive. That is part of what President Obama wanted to discuss with me.
The Everglades restoration is a metaphorical drop in the bucket, however. As global temperatures rise, sea level is rising, too. Ocean saltwater may soon inundate large parts of Florida, including the Everglades. Humankind, the United States especially, has done very little to address climate change. We need to press on and apply nerd thinking much more broadly. I try to do my part on the individual level. I recycle. I bike on local errands and to local business meetings. I drive an electric vehicle. I have solar panels on my house. I have a solar hot-water system. Most of the people I know take all kinds of personal actions to help out, too. But that’s not enough. We need to put on our Big Data goggles and remember the power of applied science and engineering, especially when we harness it together.
I ask myself—and I hope you will ask yourself, too—what will turn the tide this time? What will motivate the United States and the rest of the world to settle in and get to work addressing the effects of our warming world? I am quite sure that it will take all of us working collectively toward a common cause. Crazy, large-scale idealism isn’t crazy at all. It really can be put into practice. Air and water are much cleaner than they were in 1970 across most of the developed world. Rivers no longer catch fire in the United States. Washington, DC, is a much wealthier and fancier town than it was back then; the neighborhoods burned out during the riots are once again vibrant communities. But the kind of urgency that led to the rapid adoption of environmental regulations is lacking this time around. The crisis mentality of 1970 wasn’t pleasant, but it got results.
The responsibility lies with every one of us. Whether you frame the problem in terms of the tragedy of the commons or in terms of everything all at once, the message is the same. We have to address climate change every way we can, using the very best scientific methods. We have to reduce our waste and do much more with much less. We have to develop clean-energy technologies. We have to provide access to these emerging technologies to everyone we can. And we have to do it not just one by one, but also as a nation and as a planet. It’s a moral imperative, and it’s also imperative for our survival.
Rekindling the sense of responsibility that so many of us felt at the first Earth Day is one of the great challenges we face in putting today’s environmental ideas into action. To a large extent, we are victims of our own success. The environment is much cleaner and the economy is much stronger across much of the Western world. Reports of heat waves and flooding do not stir a sense of immediate outrage the way a flaming river did. With the growing cynicism tow
ard government institutions, people are not as invested in public service as they once were. There’s no one solution to all of that, but there is one idea that I keep thinking about . . .
Perhaps because both my parents were veterans, I took an interest in joining the US Air Force when I was in college. I considered myself a patriot, I was fascinated by jets, and I wanted to do something for the country—all the more so if it helped pay for my college education. So in 1975, I took the first steps toward becoming part of the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC). While I was waiting to take my physical at the Air Force base in Rome, New York, I got to talking with a few Air Force pilots there. I asked them how often they flew, and they said, “Oh, every couple months, maybe every six weeks.” Then I asked what they did between flights. They replied, “We memorize procedures, do paperwork.” The pilots and their skills were languishing.
What I heard from those nonflying flyboys sounded like a drag, so I didn’t stick with it. I delisted without consequence. But I often think about how different my life would be if I had stayed—if there had been an exciting role waiting for me, whether or not it involved flying fighter jets. I might have ended up in a lifelong career of service to my native country. At the very least, I would have had formative experience in public service. I would have been keyed in to issues of national and foreign policy in a completely different way than I am now. Perhaps I would have found my way to the ideas of collective responsibility and collective problem-solving more quickly.
Then I think about how it was for my parents. During World War II, my father was captured and held in a POW camp. Once you’re in a prison camp, you pretty much have to stick with it; there’s no delisting. Meanwhile, my mother worked for the Navy, solving puzzles to help win the war while wondering about her boyfriend who had disappeared from a remote Pacific island. For them, public service was not optional. They had no choice but to work side by side with people from all walks of life, everyone pursuing the same goals. Blue-collar workers fought alongside guys in law school. Women from the poor and rich parts of towns riveted airplane wings working elbow-to-elbow. Everyone pitched in, because the situation was so serious, and there was no one who did not perceive what has become a popular term: the “existential threat.” The very existence of everyone’s homeland was at stake.