Youth Activism: Considering Higher Ground

We were raised in river cities. Brendan’s first home was on the east side of the Susquehanna River, while Mike grew up near the confluence of the Tennessee, Cumberland and Ohio Rivers. Water flows some 1,200 miles to get from Harrisburg to Paducah, yet one event joined our thinking as sure as the flow of the rivers. On March 28th, 1979, a partial nuclear meltdown occurred on one of two reactors at the Three Mile Island plant in Dauphin Island, Pennsylvania. This environmental disaster in Brendan’s “backyard” made international news. Although neither of us remembers many details of that accident, we have always been skeptical of nuclear power as an alternative to the hyper-fossil-fuel-based society in which we live. Perhaps because the proliferation of nuclear power plants never progressed in the United States following this accident, or maybe just because we were kids who thought more about sports and other ventures than the environment, this event did not inspire us to learn or do anything.