CLF President John Kassel in front of the MA State House on his commute from work.

Every year, environmentalists and the public alike celebrate Earth Day in late April. It is a day with a long, proud history – a day when, for a brief moment, we share our environmental concern with a broader public. But let’s be clear: one day is not enough.

This year marks more than 40 years since the first Earth Day, 50 years since Silent Spring, and 20 years since the Rio Earth Summit. The mounting environmental threats we face as a region, and as a nation, cannot be dealt with in a day. They require sustained effort towards a sustainable future. They require every one of us to do our part, every day.

That may sound daunting, but here’s one solution that’s as easy as walking or riding a bike: one of the best things you can do for the environment is to bike more, to walk more, or to take public transportation. This Earth Day, give your car a rest.

There’s no question that driving is a strain on our environment, our economy and our health. Transportation is the largest US consumer of petroleum, accounting for twenty percent of US greenhouse gas emissions. High prices aren’t slowing us down, either: last year Americans spent $481 billion on gas, a record high. That’s in part because the number of “extreme commuters”— those who travel ninety minutes or more each way—have been the fastest-growing category.

For all the money (and time) spent, it’s not making us happy. Drawing on a body of research, David Brooks wrote in the NY Times that “The daily activity most injurious to happiness is commuting.” Nor is it making us healthy. Commuting by car raises people’s risk of obesity, increases their exposure to pollution, reduces air quality through hazardous air pollution, and reduces sleep and exercise. Across the US, vehicle exhaust accounts for 55% of nitrogen oxides, and 60% of carbon monoxide emissions. For those driving, and the 25 million Americans living with asthma, this is a bad thing. These reasons and many more, CLF is proud to be affiliated with the Environmental Insurance Agency (EIA) that offers discounted insurance rates for those who drive less.

The portrait is clear: driving is one of the most polluting things we do nearly every day – and we don’t even think about it. If you want to celebrate Earth Day, drive less.

I’ve been a bike commuter my entire adult life. I rode to work in Boston in the mid-1980’s, and now, 25 years later, I’m doing it again. I can tell you that the over those years, the biking culture here in Boston has changed dramatically. When I first began riding, it was very common for me to stop at an intersection and be the only bike commuter. Now, I’m almost always part of a large pack.

A MassBike fact sheet claims that “in 2000, 0.52% of Massachusetts workers 16 and older (15,980 people total) used a bicycle to get to work.” Meanwhile, the League of American Cyclists claims that between 2000 and 2009 bike ridership in Boston increased by 118%. This rise makes sense, given the efforts by Boston’s bike-supporting Mayor Menino and his bike Czar Nicole Freedman, under whose tenure the city of Boston has installed more than 50 miles of bike lanes. Boston’s great bike sharing program, Hubway, also undoubtedly helps. After having been named one of the country’s worst biking cities by Bicycling magazine, last year they named us one of the country’s 26 best.

There’s no doubt we’ve come a long way. Back when I began riding to work in Boston, there was a fend-for-yourself, cowboy sort of attitude. That’s all changed, and for the better. Cyclists follow the rules far more frequently now. This makes for safer travel for all, and gains respect among drivers and the general public for this alternative form of transportation. Biking shares the road, and also reduces the need for public expenditures on roads. By encouraging biking, we make the most of our shared investment in transportation.

We need the same increase in respect for other forms of transit, like buses, subways and trains, which also help us get the most out of our transportation dollars. Instead of continuing to build infrastructure that funnels everyone onto roads across New England, in their cars, we need to share our transportation resources, for our benefit, and the planet’s.

We also need to optimize our transit system for walking, for biking, for trains and for buses. And we need to treat all forms of transportation equally. As CLF’s former President Doug Foy once said at UVA’s Miller Center, “It’s always amazed me that we refer to driving, roads and bridges and then everything else an alternative form of transportation.” Indeed. Isn’t walking the primary form, for all of us? The one we first learned to use? All of these “alternatives” should be equal forms of transportation, with equal access for all.

The growth of urban biking is due in large part, in recent years, to the power of numbers. And the improvement in bikers’ attitudes also continues to help: if you give respect, you get respect. But there’s also something else going on here: You can’t keep a good idea down. Let’s consider a few stats:

• A short, four-mile round trip by bicycle keeps about 15 pounds of pollutants out of the air we breathe. Source: MassBike.
• A 15-minute bike ride to and from work five times a week burns off the equivalent of 11 pounds of fat in a year. Source: MassBike.
• Individuals who switch from driving to taking public transit can save, on average $10,120 this year, and up to $844 a month. Source: American Public Transportation Association APTA

Who wouldn’t want to save money, improve their health, and save the earth? A newspaper put it well when they ran a headline that said, “Commuting to work is ‘bad for your health’ (unless you cycle or go by foot…).”

This Earth Day, ditch the car and pick up your bike. Or go for a walk. And then, when it comes time to go back to work, keep on riding. I’ll see you on the road.

Peter Shelley, CLF senior counsel. Photo credit: Evgenia Eliseeva

Twenty-eight years ago, we at CLF said we were going to take Boston Harbor back from the state polluters for the benefit of the children at the beach, the economic opportunities around a clean harbor and the future of Massachusetts. No one at CLF even suspected that this was to be a $4.5 billion, generational effort, let alone that billions more would be needed to rebuild metropolitan Boston’s water distribution system. Last week, the final major capital project from the original litigation to create that cleaner harbor was completed, producing feelings of great satisfaction as well as nostalgia. It was the light at the end of the tunnel that CLF entered on behalf of our members so long ago. Our supporters have been patient beyond recognition.

It is safe to say that it was worth the wait and the investment. Today, Boston Harbor is swimmable and fishable. Boston now has a world-class water and sewer authority and a new National Park celebrating the Boston Harbor Islands. Billions of dollars were invested in real estate, producing thousands of jobs around the harbor in the process, and Boston Harbor now also has its own watchdog—Save The Harbor/Save The Bay, a group CLF helped form to carry our vigilance forward. While CLF was just the point of the spear that made all this happen, there is no question that we were the point of that spear.

So many of the people who made this a success story are now gone. At the top of that list would have to be Massachusetts Superior Court Justice Paul G. Garrity and Federal Judge A. David Mazzone, neither of whom lived to see the final realization of their judicial efforts. Judge Garrity singlehandedly faced down the Massachusetts Legislature and refused to budge until they released their control of the sewer and water system by creating the Massachusetts Water Resource Authority (MWRA). In the process, he may have issued the only city-wide building ban in Boston history. Judge Mazzone was the harbor cleanup program. He loved this harbor and threw his keen intellect, his brilliant strategic skills and his wonderful sense of humor—not to mention a couple of unbelievably good law clerks—into the challenge that was thrown before his court. Also in that list has to be Sam Hoar, a long time friend of CLF’s who died in 2004. Sam selflessly volunteered himself and some of the best lawyers at Goodwin, Procter & Hoar to help CLF survive the relentless legal briefing of the early days.

Among those who have moved on to other things are Doug Foy, Paul Levy, Doug MacDonald and Dick Fox. Doug Foy is gone only in the sense that he is no longer CEO of CLF. He needs no special introduction to the CLF family. His vision never faltered when he had made up his mind that something had to happen with Boston Harbor. Paul Levy and Doug MacDonald both performed project management miracles to bring one of the biggest and most complicated public works projects in Massachusetts history online both on schedule and on budget.  They, of course, were just the tip of the iceberg of the extraordinary staff at the MWRA. As for Dick Fox, lead engineer for CDM, the project design and construction lead, I’ll never forget the moment in open court when Judge Mazzone leaned his long frame forward, fixed Dick Fox in his eyes and said: “I’m going to hold you to your promises here.” Dick not only didn’t flinch; he responded “I expect you to.” This may have been a court-supervised cleanup, but make no mistake—it was a cleanup that happened because of the personal integrity commitment of lots of folks like Dick Fox.

Great credit also has to be extended to Diane Dumanowski, one of the finest reporters ever at the Boston Globe and one of the best environmental reporters in the country. Her series in the Globe on the collapse of the Metropolitan District Commission sewerage system, backed up by strong editorials from Globe columnist Ian Menzies, was the spark that ignited Doug Foy into action. Finally, no story about the Boston Harbor cleanup would be complete without mentioning Bill Golden, then solicitor for the City of Quincy, whose fateful jog on the feces-strewn Wollaston Beach in 1982 made him mad as hell and got the whole ball rolling.

CLF is not done with Boston Harbor, however. All the tributaries coming into Boston Harbor still suffer from significant pollution discharges from multiple public and private sources. These discharges expose Massachusetts residents to disease, damage the environment, and frustrate new economic opportunities. With the same energy we brought to the battle for Boston Harbor, we are hard at work fighting those upstream pollution sources with a terrific coalition of community groups and partner conservation non-profits. We look forward to similar moments of great accomplishment and satisfaction in the future when we can finally say that this great harbor’s entire watershed has a clean bill of health.