In 1969, Senator Gaylord Nelson of Minnesota witnessed the Santa Barbara oil spill. Harnessing his f...

1. Earth Day 2007: contemplate the past and future of human
survival
In 1969, Senator Gaylord Nelson of Minnesota witnessed the Santa Barbara oil spill. Harnessing his
feelings of outrage, he returned to Washington, D.C., and designed a bill designating April 22 as a
national day to celebrate planet Earth. The bill was enacted, and the first celebration took place in
1970.
Earth Day 2007 is a day like any other, but can serve as a useful milestone to take stock of our
environmental situation. We reside on a dot on an endless line, to borrow a concept from geometry.
That line extends to the distant past in which humans evolved from less cerebral primates, and
extends to a hopefully distant future in which we may gain the wisdom to live at better terms with
nature. I say "hopefully" because it is not yet clear that we will survive our current predicaments
to live in that distant future.
Speaking of milestones, we are also approaching the 400th anniversary of the settlement of
Jamestown, the first English settlement of North end suction centrifugal pump America. It is sad.
Most installed pumps were not initially designed for their current use. Quite often, a line in a plant is
moved and a pump that once providedcooling fluid to an injection molding machine is now asked to
move oil from a rail car to a tank. All too often, this causes a substantial number of problems for the
pump and the plant. Pumps operate where the pump curve crosses the system curve. When you
relocate a pump from one system to another, this means that the system curve is different. This new
system may cause the pump to operate away from its best efficiency point, leading to vibration and
other component failures that are simply symptoms of a mis-matched pump and system.to consider
that the colonists sailed into an earthly paradise on the James River, a few miles from my home in
what is now the USA. They stared down through 30 feet of crystal clear water to oyster reefs that
filled the river to such an extent that navigation was a problem. When the Shad run occurred, they
recorded the fact that the river was so filled with fish that it would be possible, figuratively, to walk
across on their backs. One day they noticed a group of Atlantic Sturgeon congregating to breed in
the river, and waded out to slaughter a couple of the massive 8 feet long creatures with clubs and
swords. Wolves roamed the forest, which was filled xylem flygt mechanical seal with massive trees
100 to 120 feet tall and 5 feet thick at the base.
Fast forward to 2007. The wolves are extinct in Virginia, a few thousand shad migrate up the James
in the summer (the number may rise, as small dams blocking the headwaters have been demolished)
and the oysters are mostly gone from diseases and polluted water. A relic population of Sturgeon
have been noticed in the lower James, and efforts are under way to foster their survival. Instead of
seeing the bottom 30 feet down, you are lucky to see your feet if you wade out to the waist-deep
point due to the murk of floating silt and dissolved nitrogen from home construction, fertilizer
runoff,  and sewage outflow. Though we spend hundreds of millions on water quality
measures, the millions of residents in the Chesapeake watershed outweigh these efforts. Roads
crisscross the region, and box turtles and snakes are disappering as they are crushed by cars. The
recent session of the Virginia General Assembly borrowed 3 billion dollars for road construction and
maintenance, but failed to tackle the problem of upgrading every municipal sewage treatment plant
in order to reduce the load of nitrogen that causes algae blooms and dead zones in the Chesapeake
Bay during summers. It feels nice to say that the environment is now a financial priority, but the
money statistics do not support that view.

2. How about the future? The 21st century is bringing challenges of a planetary rather than local
dimension. Instead of dealing with an oil spill on 30 miles of coastline, we will be concerned with the
challenge of feeding 10 billion humans without driving the Tiger and the Rhino into extinction.
Instead of the challenge of shutting down one smokestack because the people downwind are
coughing, we will face the challenge of reducing CO2 emissions everywhere in order to slow or
prevent the flooding of Florida, Louisiana, Â and Bangladesh from glacier melt. Â And no, I am not
interested in debating climate science at this time. I am just telling you what the scientists say.
There is a missing element in our outlook. We use the word "environment" as if we are separate from
it. Try to live without a source of freshwater and access to arable land. Human survival is dependent
on the chemical and biological living systems that exist in the planetary biosphere. Be aware of
multiple straightforward improvements which should be added to a commercial
centrifugal or positive displacement pump. Beginning with pumps with overhung impellers, a solid
shaft is a straightforward upgrade compared to the basic sleeved shafts. Mechanical seals can be
upgraded with the addition of tungsten carbide faces, and elastomers can be replaced with EPDM.
In addition, magnetic bearing protectors will prove to be a great improvement in relationship to the
lip seals which the vast majority of commercial pumps rely on to keep bearing sump oil
contamination free.
The fact that I am typing this into a computer while protected from a spring rain by an asphalt
shingle roof does not change the fact that the living world is the source of my survival. In a broader
sense, I do not relish mere survival. If the only way to feed the human race is to reduce the other
living species of our planet to corn, wheat, rice, cattle, chickens, tilapia, broccoli, and oranges,
well, I do not wish to live in that world. I suggest that we need to think of every day as Earth Day,
not just April 22. I suggest further that we need to commemorate Earth Day not just by filling a
recycle bucket or pulling a tire out of a river, but by looking at the sustainability of our overall
livestyle in terms of what future generations will need. I will not claim that I do all that I should in
this effort- and I suggest that you may not either. One last suggestion- vote.  300 million
Americans continue to use 25% of our planet's oil supply despite consitituting only 5% of its human
population. At a certain point, collective action is called for, not just your individual feel good
voluntary gestures on a single day.