Charlie Cohen, Alabama ExCom, Treasurer
Group: North Alabama Group
What are your specific environmental interests?
I think it is important that a person do what he is good at. As Alabama Chapter treasurer, I promote environmental causes by handling the Sierra Club’s money. I leave the environmental education and political activity to other people who are better at those activities than I am.
I am a retired scientist, having made my career doing research in meteorology, working with atmospheric simulation models. Scientists and engineers make good treasurers because we spend our careers analyzing data.
What are your thoughts on conservation and environmental action?
Decades ago, a prominent climate scientist explained that all of the proposed remedies for human-caused climate change are things we should be doing for other reasons. For example, there are many reasons to stop using fossil fuels. We all remember the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. A couple of years before that, there was a spill of coal ash into a tributary of the Tennessee River. Burning coal pollutes the air. Coal miners suffer from black-lung disease. Oil pipelines leak and pollute the ground water. Another proposed remedy for human-caused climate change is to stop cutting down the tropical forests. We need wild forests as sources for new medications and for new varieties of food crops, when pests evolve to become able to eat our current crops. So, whatever you think is causing climate change, we should all agree to reduce our use of fossil fuels and to preserve biodiversity.
We are faced with conflicting problems. We want to preserve nature, but at the same time there are many poor people who have trouble feeding themselves or finding adequate shelter. Over the past several decades, private homes in this country have become much larger, using more land and more resources. If everyone in the world tried to live as affluent Americans do, the earth would not support us. The best way to preserve nature may be to encourage affluent people to simplify their lives and limit their material desires, so that the world can support all of us adequately.
I do not remember exactly how I became interested in hiking and in environmentalism. That was half a century ago. In my younger days, I went on several backpacking trips with the national Sierra Club in the western U.S., ranging from southern Texas to northern Alaska. Although we never did any technical rock climbing, we did some things that would have terrified less skilled and experienced backpackers. In northern Alabama, I have led many day hikes for the Sierra Club.