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Room 108 in the Psychology Building was well beyond its maximum capacity on Friday with former presidential candidate Ralph Nader set to speak at 1 p.m. on the topic of going green in today's world.
"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."
He also discussed global warming and addressed gimmicks that the government uses to divert attention from true solutions.
"There's much more focus on gimmicks," Nader said. "Gimmicks like the cap-and-trade which can be manipulated, which has winners and losers depending on where you live and which is nowhere near the comparison with affirmative expansion of solar energy."
Nader said he feels that solutions like the cap-and-trade, where companies can buy permits that allow them the right to pollute and where companies that have low emissions can sell their permits to higher-emitting ones, is really a mask to hide behind the real solution of having all companies at lower emissions. It also puts a controversial price tag on pollution, something Nader views as a form of violence.
"First of all, we should define pollution as violence, because that's what it really is," Nader said. "It causes cancer, birth defects, respiratory illness - you name it."
He said that to begin to solve the environmental problem, the government and the country need to be more rational, realistic and prudent with natural resources. This prudence will lead to reduced pollution and other secondary benefits.
Nader said: "By rationalizing the use of natural resources - not just oil, gas, or coal, but paper, water, copper, zinc, iron, timber - by rationalizing and improving the amount of work we get out of a certain unit of zinc or copper we're not just reducing the contamination, the ravages of strip mining, the silting into the water of acidic waste, the cyanides, etc. that flow from these mines but we're also improving the efficiency of the economy."
Another reason Nader said he feels environmental issues are not taken seriously, is because many people exhibit a detached, corporate attitude.
"We grow up corporate, we don't grow up civic…we look at the world through corporate eyes," Nader said.
As a solution to this problem, he promoted the introduction of a civics course in schools to help reshape the public's attitude away from the corporate lifestyle.
"I want to ask you to push, if you don't have one already, for a civic skills course," Nader said. "This is learning how to deal with serious issues, problems and conditions from your community, from your campus, all the way to the world and have the skills to do it."
Many students enjoyed the speech, but one audience member had a bone to pick with the former presidential candidate.
"In the year 2000 you told the country that there was no difference between a Nobel Peace Prize winner for environmentalism and the idiot that we have for president now; you've given us seven years of George Bush by your egomaniacal determination…; you've given us the Iraq war; do you realize you've been played the fool by Karl Rove?" a man in the audience asked Nader.
Nevertheless, Emily Lanster, a freshman business major, enjoyed what Nader had to say.
"Honestly, I was kind of against Nader before I came, because back in 2000 voting for Nader was taking away from Gore, and I was pro-Gore, so I kind of wanted to see why everyone hates him so much," Lanster said. "I didn't know much about him so I thought going firsthand to his speech I could develop my own opinion of him. I thought it was very informative and he's a funny guy."
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