MUSIC: Our World theme
Straight ahead on "Our World" ... people around the globe mark Earth Day number 35 amid new concerns about the global environment ... and astronomers say they've spotted what could be a belt of rocky asteroids -- around a star 40 light years away!
BEICHMAN: "We're really interested in understanding more about the asteroid belts of mature stars because they tell us more about our own Sun and whether our own planetary system is the norm or exceptional."
Those stories, plus the latest on the uncertain fate of the Hubble Space Telescope. Hi, I'm Rob Sivak, sitting in this week for Art Chimes. Welcome to VOA's science and technology magazine ... "Our World."
Friday, April 22nd was Earth Day in the United States ... and in the more than 140 other countries that mark the occasion. Launched in 1970 by a group of American environmental activists led by U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson and environmental activist Dennis Hayes, the annual event has grown to become a mainstream way to boost environmental awareness. Earth Day 2005 events -- staged by tens of thousands of activists, community groups, governments, and industries, were designed to focus public attention on the environment and how well, or how poorly, we are caring for it.
President Bush marked Earth Day by traveling to the Great Smokey Mountains National Park in Tennessee, one of the nation's most popular and also most polluted national parks, where the extraordinary mountain vistas are often shrouded by smog. The President used the occasion to promote the importance of conservation and volunteerism in the effort to protect our environment. On Thursday at the White House, Mr. Bush honored a group of young Americans who've been spending a great deal of their time and energies on environmental stewardship. In presenting this year's Environmental Youth Awards to members of the government's Freedom Corps, Mr. Bush praised their volunteer spirit:
BUSH ON VOLUNTEERS (:40) (not transcribed)
President Bush speaking Thursday at the White House.
While Earth Day is about raising ecological awareness and forging shared interests in the protection of the environment, it's also a day that underscores the continued tensions between activists, government leaders and the business community over policies that impact the environment. Here in the United States, new national energy legislation passed this week in the House of Representatives is stirring debate over whether the Bush Administration and the Republican-led Congress are favoring industrial companies -- and putting the environment at risk -- by relaxing some air pollution standards in the Clean Air Act. It's a debate that also plays out in communities across the country. In the Great Lakes state of Wisconsin, this Earth Day highlights a classic environmental stand-off. Environmental activists are concerned that two new coal-fired power plants, due to be built soon on the dune-covered shores of Lake Michigan near Milwaukee, will increase air pollution and destroy the natural beauty of the lakeshore. The power company says it needs to build the plant to meet the region's increasing demands for electricity. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium's Ann-Elise Henzl has more:
HENZL: Wisconsin Electric power company has more than one million customers in Wisconsin and Michigan's upper peninsula. The company says soon, it won't be able to provide power for all of them with its current plants, and the transmission lines that allow Wisconsin Electric to buy power from other states are over taxed. So the company wants to expand a coal-fired power plant twenty miles south of Milwaukee. That would add two coal-burning units and double the plant's size and output. Paul Shorter is the manager for site coordination.
SHORTER: "From the infrastructure standpoint, if the state wants to grow and attract business, I think that's one reason. The other reason is to meet that growing demand of about two percent a year, which is related to telephones, TV's, VCR's, computers. We're always asking for more, and companies are producing it, and they have to be supported by energy."
HENZL: On a windy spring morning, Shorter is standing on the roof of the existing plant. As waves crash on the Lake Michigan shoreline, Shorter looks north, pointing out the site for the expansion.
SHORTER: "Now this whole area over here is going to be excavated, for placement of the new facilities, there's going to be about five million cubic yards of dirt that we're going to move around on the property. Part of it is to cut down that bluff, to get everything down to the level of this current facility."