2008 Woodie Awards
Nader wants to go green
Former candidate's speech draws more than 400 people
Tara Young
Issue date: 11/14/07 Section: News
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"Going Green: Getting to the Bottom-Line in a Globalizing World," was hosted by many organizations including the UCF Global Perspectives Office, Burnett Honors College, Focus the Nation at UCF and the Political Science department.
"We are participating in the university-wide GEP theme of environmental global climate change," said John Bersia, director and special assistant to the president for the Global Perspectives Office. "We had a lot of people say they were interested in Ralph Nader, so we took that interest and went to him, discussed it and he agreed to come."
About 10 minutes before Nader was set to begin speaking, staff members stopped allowing entry to the room, fearing they would be asked to cancel the talk for exceeding room capacity, which should have capped off at 403 people.
The doors were left propped open to allow the not-so-lucky crowd standing outside to still hear Nader speak. Despite the extra efforts to accommodate guests outside the room, people lined the walls and floors of the room.
Nader opened his speech by touching on history's stages of environmentalism.
"The early [wave], in the early 20th century, was to establish the national parks and forests, and the state parks and state forests," Nader said. "The second wave came in the late 60s and early 70s with the introduction of the air and water pollution laws."
Nader then discussed issues with government policies, business-as-usual attitudes and the majority of power resting in the hands of a few elite. All are contributors to the lack of environmental initiatives in the country, he said.
"It's a way of thinking," Nader explained. "It's a higher expectation level that this has got to be a government that represents human beings first, that corporations were designed to be our servants not our masters and that money and politics have got to be gotten rid of so that the vote counts and politicians argue on the merits, not the money."
Nader said he feels that despite the threat of global warming on the horizon, most of the government-funded research continues to go into environmentally inefficient energy-use practices.
"It's a political issue," Nader said. "That is, most of the research that's gone into energy in the last hundred years has gone into coal, gas, oil, how to extract it, how to refine it, taxpayer subsidies and the like - very little has gone into solar."