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If you listen very carefully, you can hear environmentalists all over the world squeaking and yelping. Hours after the inauguration of Barack Obama, they’re still pinching themselves.
Because at last the United States of America has a president with more than a snowball’s chance in global warming hell of doing something about the ecological crisis.
It shouldn’t be remarkable, but after eight years of Bush, the prospect of a leader who publicly values scientific endeavour is freakishly exciting. I half-expected Richard Dawkins and Bill Bryson to rush in and give Obama the victory bumps when he announced on the steps of the Capitol building yesterday that science would be “restored to its rightful place”.
For some time, web users have known that Obama gets the internet too. His presidential campaign was as much about his ability to communicate in the novel intimacies of the online world as it was to speak to thousands of assembled Democrats in crowded malls.
And, whatever happens next, it’s now plain for the whole world to see that he gets the environment as well.
Yesterday’s speech was thin on detail (who wants detail at a party?), but the pledge to “roll back the spectre of a warming planet” was arresting.
And on the shiny new White House website, there are two items plucked from the lengthy presidential agenda to appear on the homepage: Economy and Energy & the Environment.
That’s enough of a statement of intent for me.
And intent is what’s needed right now. One of my favourite comments so far appears in the discussion on Andy Revkin’s excellent Dot Earth blog.
Amid the conditional welcomes, the thoughtful caveats, the concerns over Obama’s pledge to pursue clean coal, Susan Anderson of Boston writes:
Today I feel like a 10,000 pound weight has been lifted from my heart. Words are not sufficient. Intelligence, awareness, and conscience have returned to my country, and I may lift up my head and heart and begin to act.
A sentiment not to be misunderestimated.
IMAGE by Patrick Leahy/AP/PA Photos
