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| A Prominent Environmental Scientist Lectures at NJIT |
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NEWARK, Nov. 11
“In 1908 Ford autos got 28 miles per gallon and today fuel efficiency for automobiles averages 25 miles per gallon. Is that progress?” asked Allen Hershkowitz, PhD, a senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council during a Nov. 9 lecture at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT).
Hershkowitz detailed some of America’s worst environmental practices in his lecture, saying environmentalists must call upon more-diplomatic tactics, such as working with corporations and starting their own businesses, to combat the practices.
He began by noting America’s lack of environmental progress. Fuel efficiency for automobiles, he said, has not improved in nearly 100 years. The environmental climate is also getting worse, he said. The nine hottest years on record have all occurred since 1990. Deforestation is proceeding at an alarming rate: One acre of tropical forest has been cut down every year for the past 20 years. “We pay companies a lot of money to do ecologically stupid things,” he said.
He discussed his efforts to stop one of the Earth's most biologically outstanding eco-regions – the forests of the southern Appalachian Mountains – from being ravaged, polluted, and converted into toilet paper, newsprint and mail-order catalogues. If current trends continue, he warned, the southeast forests will become one giant, biologically sterile, and polluted pine plantation. Paper products made from recycled paper are a vastly better alternative to products made from virgin trees, he said.
“Do we need to produce what might be called our least inspiring consumer product – toilet paper – “by destroying one of the universe's most inspiring places – the forests in the southeast?” he asked.
The best way to fight these bad environmental practices is for environmentalists to run their own businesses and factories, he said. In the early 1990s, he tried to do build an environmentally benign $600 million paper mill on an abandoned, polluted site in the South Bronx. The mill would use recycled newsprint. Hershkowitz spent eight years trying to build the mill and “just before the mill was to be approved,” he claimed, “it was killed for political reasons by former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.”
At first, Herskowitz felt he wasted eight years of his life on the mill. But he soon realized that he and other environmentalists mustn’t lapse into anger and despair. “Environmentalists must be willing to work with, and even for, corporations and to forge coalitions with community groups and private interests,” he said. “Building a sustainable planet is too big a job to do if you work angrily, or alone.”
Hershkowitz’s lecture was part of the university’s 2005 technology and society forum series, which explores the connections between the technologies that students study and the geo-political issues that affect human life.
The National Resources Defense Council, based in Manhattan, is a nonprofit environmental action group that works to protect the planet's wildlife and wild places and to ensure a safe and healthy environment for all living things.
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New Jersey Institute of Technology, the state's public technological research university, enrolls more than 8,200 students in bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in 100 degree programs offered by six colleges: Newark College of Engineering, New Jersey School of Architecture, College of Science and Liberal Arts, School of Management, Albert Dorman Honors College and College of Computing Sciences. NJIT is renowned for expertise in architecture, applied mathematics, wireless communications and networking, solar physics, advanced engineered particulate materials, nanotechnology, neural engineering and eLearning.
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