Air Date: Week of February 16, 2007

Living on Earth dips into the mailbag to hear from our listeners.

Transcript

CURWOOD: It’s time now to hear from you, our listeners.

John Meadows, who listens to us on WHYY in Philadelphia was disappointed to hear little but criticism of President Bush’s comments on climate change in his recent State of the Union address. “I am not a registered Republican or Democrat and generally not an admirer of the Bush administration,” Mr. Meadows writes. But statements like that of California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s environmental advisor Terry Tamminen that the house is burning and the president is mowing the lawn, “continue to fan the fires of this debate. Even if we're just mowing the lawn,” Mr. Meadows continues, “it may help stop the spread of the blaze. Blame and shame have largely been exhausted as means of achieving an end.”

We recently interviewed Democratic Congressman Henry Waxman about allegations that the Bush administration tried to suppress scientific data about climate change. That prompted this comment from Grant Garber of Henderson, North Carolina:

GARBER: Ten or twenty years from now when New York City, Miami, New Orleans, Los Angeles and San Francisco go under water ex-President Bush probably would have said, “Mistakes were made” to hide this obfuscation of the truth as he did the procurement of false intelligence on Iraq. But with Waxman on his case he’ll have to say it a bit sooner.

CURWOOD: Several of you wrote in about our recent interview with Tim Smith, the author of the Buck Wilder outdoor stories for children. Mr. Smith’s comment that the average American spends as little as ten minutes a day outside really hit home with KCFR listener Robert Stencel. Mr. Stencel works at a public observatory in Colorado and he says that he’s watched “the annual attendance figures dwindle year after year” over the last 15 years. He laments that young people seem to have stopped looking at the night sky altogether. And he puts the blame on light pollution.

You can illuminate us with your comments. Send them to comments@loe.org. Once again that's comments at L-O-E dot O-R-G. Or drop us a line at 20 Holland Street, Somerville, Massachusetts, 02144. And you can call our listener line at 800-218-9-9-8-8.
That's 800-218-99-88.