Today is the 41st celebration of Earth Day (which I know thanks to a 40th anniversary of Earth Day post by Jennifer from last year). Just like with our Cherry Blossom pic, the picture below was taken by a Library of Congress employee, Chris Carlson. He has a great photo blog.
President George Bush said that “[t]o save the Earth will require our best efforts.” In last year’s Earth Day Presidential Proclamation, President Barack Obama said that “[o]ur future is inextricably bound to our planet’s future, and we must be good stewards of our home as well as one another.” For more information on Earth Day, see the great research guide created by the Library of Congress Science Reference Services.
The Globe outside of the Law Library of Congress Reading Room (photo by Chris Carlson)
The entrance to our Reading Room is through a door just behind this globe.
April 24, 2012 at 12:34 am
Happy Earth Day belatedly:.
The Center For People With Disabilities, Inc., now based in Austin, Texas, focuses on, among other things,education and research in the area of Environmental Disabilities. Indeed, our Environmental Disabilities Program originally focused on what was going on in the Gulf of Mexico with the oil pollution from stemming from BP’s spill. Linking to sites such as that at Texas A&M in Galveston, Texas and the U.S. DOE, we also began to try to ascertain that what was happening to the Marine Life and the human ecological system posed a potential threat to the health and safety of everyone living along the Texas Gulf Coast.
We sought funding for our research efforts, but no to avail to date. And then we got to thinking what other ecological disasters had far reaching implications that were also being overlooked and not properly addressed? For example, do we know for sure that the fish and sea life being harvested by fishing vessels off our Coasts are healthy? Are they still being rigorously tested by our EPA?
What Congressional Task Groups have been put together to investigate the spill and its after effects? Has all testing stopped because public attention is now focused elsewhere? What about the people who live in the City’s and Town’s along the Texas Gulf Coast?
Why haven’t State Government’s done more? Why hasn’t more research funding been poured into examining and documenting the links between pollution and disabilities? Why haven’t more Marine Biology research funds been allocated to examine and explore the links between Marine sealife and disability prevalence (which is higher in certain areas than others) along the Texas Gulf Coast?
Please help us get our efforts made more public and more widely known. Thank you.