Some Earth Day hand-wringing
Warning: Contains lamenting and finger-pointing
Having experienced the first Earth Day celebration as a school child in 1970, learning about new disturbing concepts like “pollution” and “endangered species,” doing projects and oral reports and listening to grownups talk about protecting our planet, it’s kind of cool to think that the commemorative date has actually survived these 40 years. It’s also sad and distressing to see that in terms of environmental sustainability we have actually slipped backward from those heady days when Nixon’s administration established the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Why have the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act been battered and threatened almost to extinction? How did climate change explode on us to arguably become the number one threat to life on earth?
Especially vexing is the fact that there is actually so much more awareness now, and so many thousands of organized groups striving to save some bit (or all) of the planet. Great work is being done every day, from local initiatives like Boston’s Sustainable Business Network and the Massachusetts Energy Consumers Alliance, to larger national and global projects like those of Greenpeace (also founded in 1970), and Friends of the Earth.
You may have your own theories about the cyclone of environmental destruction. To me, a consistent policy of favoring big corporate power in the U.S. is always a ripe candidate for culpability. Oil companies are allowed to operate seemingly unfettered by restrictions or taxes and nefarious subsidies are issued to big polluting companies. Not to mention the massive corporate giveaway/environmental catastrophe that is NAFTA. To add insult to environmental injury, corporations have adopted greenwashing as a Standard Operating Procedure, making sure that consumers and shareholders are distracted by a facade of ecological benevolence.
These issues form a basis for a sort of global economic idea of why things have gone so wrong. And for many of us here in the U.S., the whole picture of what is going on in China (Red China as we called it in 1970) is almost unimaginable. They are the fastest growing economy in the world, and poised to challenge us for the title of greatest abuser of natural resources. At the same time, they seem to be leaders in progressive environmental action.
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