| Earth Day: Not Just for ‘Greener Than Thous’ |
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| Friday, 22 April 2011 | Marita Prandoni | Blog Entry |
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When Gaylord Nelson launched Earth Day 41 years ago, he envisioned it as a grassroots teach-in to make Washington aware of growing public concern over the state of the environment. Historically, our lawmakers have been more concerned with the Gross National Product—maintaining economic growth at any cost—than the ecology. It’s odd that the environment should take a back seat to the economy. The environment is the economy. That first Earth Day, one in 10 Americans took part, and they were not just a spillover of exuberant hippies and students off college campuses and into the wider community. Housewives, labor-union members, farmers, scientists and politicians were among the 20 million participants. Despite this momentum, industry continued to have carte blanche to pollute American air, soil and waterways. In 1978, Lois Gibbs, the mother of two sickened children attending school atop a toxic waste dump in Love Canal, began a fight to evacuate 833 families. Her struggle eventually led to the development of Superfund cleanups around the country, also known as the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980. With no activist experience, Gibbs demonstrated “that in order to protect public health from chemical contamination, there needs to be a massive outcry—a choir of voices—by the American people demanding change.” She later founded The Center for Health, Environment and Justice (CHEJ). Earth Day is not just for environmental activists. It’s a day for every breathing, drinking, consuming, pulsating bipedal sack of saline solution (as Brock Dolman likes to refer to humans) to reflect on what makes our existence possible and to vow to work with the Earth, not against her. A Gross National Product would not even be possible without free ecosystem services. As we extract those finite resources beyond nature’s ability to regenerate them, we run into decreasing returns. Despite having long overextended Earth’s carrying capacity with overpopulation, just consuming less can make a difference. By slowing demand from heavy industry and improving energy efficiency, we will free up investment capital for lighter manufacturing and services, which pollute less and employ more. The billowing ash spewing from the volcano beneath Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull glacier, which last year veiled the airspace over Europe, might just be an example of our planet’s immune response. Though some scientists think the volcanic eruption is too small to have an effect, others believe that the highly particulate ash might remain in the stratosphere for one to three years reflecting the sun’s rays to create global cooling. In any case, it has saved the atmosphere tons of emissions by grounding tens of thousands of flights. More importantly, nature has again rendered us fragile and humble by proving that our technologies can’t fix everything. This Earth Day and every day, to paraphrase John F. Kennedy: ‘Ask not what the Earth can do for you, but what you can do for the Earth.’ If you’re looking for ideas, the Earth Day Network is a good place to start. Comments
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"If we could tap into the environmental concerns of the general public and infuse the student anti-war energy into the environmental cause, we could generate a demonstration that would force the issue onto the national political agenda.”
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This is a bold statement to remind us that content has no meaning without context.