Message from Ecology director, Jay Manning

At a conference in Seattle in 1969, Senator Gaylord Nelson from Wisconsin announced the plan for America’s first Earth Day, which would take place in April 1970.

In nearly four decades since, Earth Day, Earth Week, even Earth Month, have become a rallying point for citizen action and for education about the earth and the species that share it.

Only in the late 1960s-early 1970s has the level of urgency and awareness been more apparent than it is in 2007.

Global warming has moved environmental issues to the top of the public agenda. Our miraculous blue planet is sending a steady stream of warnings that it is in trouble. People accept the fact that they are a big part of the problem and a necessary part of the solution.

Climate change has long been mired in uncertainty, seemingly too remote and far off to justify potentially painful actions. In the last year, the scientific uncertainty has all but disappeared, and evidence of the adverse impacts of climate change is appearing all around us.

Let me give two examples:

In 1984, I hiked over Spider Gap in the North Central Cascades, east of Glacier Peak. At the top of the pass, I stood on Spider Glacier, a source of the Chiwawa River, a beautiful, alpine tributary of the Wenatchee River.

Spider Glacier does not exist today. It has melted away, along with several other glaciers in the Cascades. In a state that depends heavily on melting snow and glacier ice to feed our rivers and streams in dry summer months, our North Cascades glaciers have lost up to a third of their volume since 1984.

From Alaska, I have received reports of numerous villages in the far north where sea-level rise and loss of ice and permafrost are forcing wholesale movement of villages to higher ground. The economic and human cost is staggering. Sea-level rise poses a similar threat on our coast and in Puget Sound. If sea level rises even one foot, millions of Washingtonians and billions of dollars of property and infrastructure could be affected.

Washington State, along with cities, counties and states around the nation, is taking climate change seriously. We are responding aggressively to reduce our contribution to global warming, and we are preparing for those climate-change effects that are unavoidable.

There is much that we as individuals can do, too. (Read more about what YOU can do.)

I encourage you to join me this Earth Week in renewing our individual and shared commitment to environmental stewardship. I hope you will join me in making choices each day over the next year that reduce pollution, prevent waste, and sustain nature and resources for continued use by all of who are fortunate to share this Evergreen State and our amazing blue planet.

Jay J. Manning, Director,
Washington Department of Ecology