Green Wombat

The challenges posed by global warming can seem insurmountable, demanding such radical economic, political and lifestyle changes as to be beyond the realm of the doable. But we’ve made such seismic shifts before, as Green Wombat was reminded watching an Earth Day program about the San Francisco Bay Area environmental movement on Quest, the half-hour science show produced by local public television station KQED. (In an apparent first for public TV, "Where We’ve Been, Where We’re Headed" premiered online five days before it is to be broadcast tomorrow. Quest’s managing editor is Paul Rogers, Green Wombat’s former colleague from the San Jose Mercury News and one of the nation’s best environmental journalists.) For those of us who live here, the Bay Area has been an ecotopia for so long now that it’s easy to forget the dystopia that was developing in the 1960s, in the days before the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the EPA and the Bay Area
Rapid Transist system. Today I can look out my 29th floor window (crappy camphone photo at right)  and enjoy the view of a sparkling Bay, the Marin headlands and Mount Tamalpais, thanks to the fact that the region suffers only a couple of smoggy days a year; in the Summer of Love era, the average was about 65 bad air days annually, though there were four million fewer people and some three million fewer cars in the Bay Area in the late 1960s. While Rachel Carson was penning Silent Spring, plans were afoot to fill in 70 percent of the Bay.  Not that you could enjoy much of the shoreline back then – only 4 miles were accessible and fire-prone landfills dotted the best bayfront real estate, as Quest minds us. Today, 200 miles of shoreline are available for hiking and biking. Where I mountain bike in Marin was to be the site of a new city, and let’s not even talk about that six-lane coastal freeway and nuclear power plant planned near where seals frolic in Bolinas Lagoon. So what happened? As Quest shows, a grass roots environmental movement of hippies, housewives, conservationists and their allies in the local, state and federal governments changed the law and then an entire way of life  – one that we now take for granted.  That’s not to minimize the incredible hurdles posed by radically lowering greenhouse gas emissions and revamping a global industrial infrastructure. But present-day enviros enjoy one advantage: while the nascent green movement of the ’60s and ’70s spent a signficant amount of time, energy and money fighting Big Business, Corporate America is beginning to enlist as allies in the fight against global warming, out of enlightened self-interest if nothing else. And technology – from the Internet to solar power – is being deployed to search for solutions rather than destroy.