Preface
The airline industry has been an interest and a passion of mine since I was a young child. Growing up in New York, I was able to experience, first hand, some major developments in the industry. I was there when the Pan Am Building became the Met Life Building; “World’s most experienced airline” ceased operations in the early 1990s. New York was Pan Am’s main hub city and world headquarters for decades; the airline was brought down after fighting to survive for over a decade following deregulation.
New York has also been home to many airline industry experiments during my lifetime. I remember taking flights on TowerAir during the 1990s; TowerAir began service from New York shortly after deregulation. With a fleet made up entirely of old 747s, packed with as many economy seats as could fit, TowerAir operated short-haul, and intercontinental flights with “no-frills” service. This airline eventually failed after it gained a reputation for putting profit before safety. Around the time TowerAir ceased operations, JetBlue Airways initiated operations from New York. JetBlue’s approach to cost-savings differed from TowerAir, as JetBlue set out to provide service while keeping its passengers interests in high regard. JetBlue is still thriving today.
My experiences with the airline industry from living in New York are valuable; New York is a very competitive market for airlines and success does not come easily, if at all. The airline industry in the United States, in general, is very mature and established, and still, lessons continue to be learned.
The global change in carbon dioxide (CO2) has received
considerable attention from the scientific and policy communities
worldwide. Global warming, sea level rise, and changes in Earth’s
patterns of precipitation are all now well recognized to be related to
the changes in CO2 in the atmosphere. Scientists and policy makers have
focused considerable effort in understanding the extent to which the
change in CO2 may be related to man’s activities. From the efforts of
thousands of individual scientists to the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore,
the consensus is overwhelming that man’s activities have resulted in an
acceleration of the change in carbon in the Earth’s atmosphere.
However, while media attention has been focused on global changes due
to carbon, changes have occurred in another element, nitrogen, and
these changes also have large global consequences. Nitrogen is a
neighbor to carbon on the periodic table of elements and can be
considered the secondary building block of life. The purpose of this
paper is to describe how global nitrogen has been changed by man’s
activities, and why, like carbon, it needs to be considered in the
global change discussion.
It is with great pleasure that I introduce you to the third edition of the Hobart and William Smith Colleges Public Affairs Journal. This edition is of particular importance for many reasons, but perhaps the most significant aspect of the third edition is our continued commitment to open dialogue about civic engagement and public policy by beginning a bi-annual release of the Journal. In this sense, releasing a new edition twice a year instead of just once should allow readers and writers to analyze a wider array of ideas, thus allowing for a more engaged and more informed debate about public affairs.
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