Word: environmentalist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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When George Bush proclaimed himself the environmentalist candidate in an outdoor campaign speech on Aug. 31, 1988, he had to mop his brow several times as he spoke. Last year was the hottest ever recorded, spurring a debate among scientists as to whether the mercury was registering proof of the "greenhouse effect." Carbon dioxide and other chemicals are spewed into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels like coal and gasoline; the gases trap radiation that has come from the sun and that would otherwise escape into space. The result is global warming: over time, sea levels will rise...
...there, but probably without a policy. In February the U.S. will be host to an international conference on climate change in Washington. Bush is expected to address the conference. The temperature in the hall will probably be more comfortable than it was when he gave his "I am an environmentalist" speech in the hot summer of 1988. But unless he has more to show on the greenhouse effect than rhetoric, the President should be mopping his brow anyway -- at least in embarrassment, and perhaps in anxiety for the future of the planet...
Waldeck was raised in Philadelphia in a family that liked to have music playing. Nicknamed "Tinker," he started with the drums ("I was pounding out rhythms before I could sit up") and learned guitar at 14. His father was a handyman and, in Waldeck's view, a true environmentalist. A handyman is the ultimate recycler, he says, who knows how to fix things rather than throw them away...
Sting may be a dedicated environmentalist, but has he ever toured Alaska? Oliver and Waldeck have. Last year they, along with fellow performer-activists Dana Lyons and Mavis Muller, traveled through the 49th state in a Volkswagen van on their Keep It Wild Tour, giving concerts from Anchorage and Fairbanks to such wilderness outposts as Talkeetna and Girdwood. Preaching preservation in a state where many settlers came only to plunder the resources, they found themselves singing about the evils of mining and trapping to audiences that included miners and trappers. That made for some uncomfortable moments. One night...
...recent "education summit" with the nation's Governors produced some interesting ideas about national standards but little about how to pay the costs of helping public schools meet them. His much trumpeted war against drugs was more an underfinanced skirmish. Bush told voters last year that he is an environmentalist, but the most significant clean-air proposals put forth this year -- stringent new standards on automobile emissions -- were adapted from California's strict limits for the 1990s...