About 10 years ago, a local professor who was also an elected city official told a group of neighborhood association members that Albany needed to decide between fostering job creation or protecting the environment. I heard that and rolled my eyes. Protecting the environment helps the economy and protects our quality of life, including our health.
There are those who are again trying to promote the false choice between environmental protection and jobs. Will we ever learn?
The conservative state policy organization, Empire Center, has put out a report attacking the State Environmental Quality Review Law, which was enacted in 1975 in the wake of disasters like the toxic contamination of Love Canal. SEQR is a state environmental policy law and a process requiring review of environmental impacts along with social and economic considerations for both public and private projects. It was called a "look before you leap" law. Its purposes include promoting "efforts which will prevent or eliminate damage to the environment and enhance human and community resources" — like the resources harmed when a chemical spill contaminated water for Charleston, W.Va., and surrounding counties.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo appears to have bought into an anti-environment line of thinking when he announced a forthcoming "regulatory rollback plan." The governor has already shown his hand with a budget slashing $43 million from the state's environmental operating budget. Willie Janeway, executive director of the Adirondack Council and a former top state environmental official, declared, "The ability of state agencies has been stretched beyond the breaking point and further cuts mean that things will not get done."
A great deal is at stake for the people and economy of the state if we cut back on our environmental regulation.
Medical researchers connect environmental health with the health of human's across their lifespan, as they increasingly find connections between chemicals and cancer, diabetes, infertility and autism. Researchers at Emory and Texas Southern universities found "74 out of the 86 Alzheimer's patients — whose average age was 74 — had DDE (a chemical compound left when DDT breaks down) blood levels almost four times higher than the 79 people in the control group that did not have Alzheimer's disease." We are playing fast and lose when we are not careful with our use of contaminants.
Global warming is putting a premium on our ability and commitment to protect our environment and control negative human activity. Scientists predict global warming can worsen air quality, degrade food and water supplies, increase levels of allergens and increase flooding in some places and desertification in other places like California. Looking before we act, as SEQR requires, and having adequate environmental protection staff are of growing importance.
Environmental quality is not only a means of our protection, it is a proactive step to growing a knowledge economy. New York and other states are spending billions of dollars to foster high tech economies. These are industries of the mind and require brilliant and highly trained workers who are in demand and who can chose places to work that have first class environments. We need first class environmental management.
Environmental quality is also a factor for major companies like Coca-Cola, which has always focused on its bottom line and has now "embraced the idea of climate change as an economically disruptive force." These forces include "increased droughts, more unpredictable variability, 100-year floods every two years." Binghamton, for one, knows about frequent 100-year floods.
We live in a dangerous and disruptive time when we should not weaken environmental regulation and cut back on environmental management.
Bray's email is secsunday@aol.com