Thinking of Earth Day

For those not in the know, today is Earth Day. Not only that, it is the 40th anniversary of the first Earth Day in 1970. Earth Day was both a celebration of the Earth as an entity and a sort of political initiation of environmental legislation. During the Nixon administration, The Clean Air and Water Acts were signed into law, which in turn lead to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency to enforce those and subsequent laws. The Environmental Movement of the 1970s was mostly marked by a wilderness ethic--preventing the despoiling of wild spaces--and cleaning up the mess left by industry--industrial effluent and exhaust. It had its vast cultural significance, but most of the images associated with the cultural impacts of the Environmental Movement often become swept up in images of psychedelic music, free love, and the Anti-War Movement, so it sort of loses its content.

Wilderness organizations like the Sierra Club (founded in 1892), Ducks Unlimited (1932) and Nature Conservancy (1952) were well-established by the first Earth Day. Their agenda generally pursued the fostering of both public and private stewardship of open, healthy landscapes, which was put into legislation in the United States in 1964. The Wilderness Act described its purpose, like those of the aforementioned organizations, to be one of preservation of wilderness, memorably defined as, "A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain." This terminology and the subsequent enforcement of the bill identified the Wilderness Act with lineage of national parks and nature reserves, intended to maintain spaces for the sometimes contradictory purposes of preservation of wild spaces and access to wilderness by tourists.

What the Clean Air and Water Acts notably provide is a intellectual and political breach between "natural" and "artificial" spaces; that is, in order to preserve the well-being of people, it is pertinent to preserve the well-being of natural spaces and resources. This thinking can be linked to Rachel Carson's book, Silent Spring published in 1962, in which Carson goes into painful detail the role of chemical pesticides in literally maiming the landscape, its animal and vegetable occupants, and the human communities that share or live downstream of such "managed" landscapes. Carson's work, both in Silent Spring and beyond, argued for a more thoughtful, systemic analysis of management plans and a general prohibition on potent chemical poisons. Her work was a catalyst for the significant reduction in chemical landscape management and chemical agriculture in subsequent decades.

Though it can be said that significant episodes in environmental history occurred between these dates (further development of the EPA, Superfund sites and management, the Nuclear and Anti-Nuclear Movements, protecting endangered species, etc.), I want to leap ahead to 1987 and the Montreal Protocol. The chemists Frank Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina studied strong, synthetic chemicals called CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons), whose work led to the understanding the CFCs and similar synthetic chemicals deteriorated in the upper atmosphere, releasing Chlorine atoms, which destabilized ozone molecules. (Note: CFCs are called synthetic chemicals because the literally did not exist before we made them. They were often used as refrigerants and as ingredients in aerosols.) The Montreal Protocol is often considered a landmark, global achievement in establishing a healthy environmental political ethics because the issues demanded the participation of all parties (i.e. nations) that allowed industries to use ozone degrading chemicals. With hard deadlines pressed, claimed and monitored by participant nations, chemists and manufacturers moved toward low- and no-impact replacements, thus averting one of the first pressing global environmental issues.

Even at that time, though, climatologists were identifying the tell-tale calling cards of global warming. The steady rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide, compared to historical records as established in ice and soil cores, strongly suggested that the planet was in store for a responsive increase in global temperatures. (Note: The science behind this is pretty cool, as it takes field work from all over the planet to confirm just a handful of the relationships at play. First, ice and lake-bottom soil core samples hold various levels of oxygen or biological matter respectively, which in turn provide information on the amount of photosynthesis taking place at the time the samples were forming based on oxygen isotopes found therein, and finally can be compared to contemporary levels of oxygen at various latitudes, altitudes, and those regions temperatures. At least, that is the rough of how I think it works.) Various climatologists, both professional and amateur, had begun to express alarm in the early 1980s, which peaked in intensity when James Hansen spoke to the US Congress about the importance of responding to rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Unlike the issue of CFCs at the Montreal Summit, carbon dioxide is not a mere tool for certain industrial processes; carbon dioxide and similar greenhouse gases are generally the result of the developed world's way of life. Therefore, any efforts to curb or eliminate carbon dioxide in a serious way require a serious reconsideration of lifestyle in those countries.

Those first political maneuvers went generally unnoticed and forgotten in the economic booms that were to come over the following twenty years. Whether it is climate talks today or the original maintenance of clean waterways, environmental politics are virtually always framed as activists vs. industry. When the economy is doing as well as it did throughout the 1990s, arguing that industry needs to change runs into heavy social opinion in the other direction. In the meantime, in order to increase funding, the EPA incorporated more and more roles under its belt, simultaneously sacrificing its ability to perform tasks well. The result being that even companies failing to meet the demands of established environmental legislation are rarely charged with more than token fines if anything. That sort of imbalance can be shown contemporaneously by the painful example of Massey Energy and the Upper Big Branch Mine: Massey was repeatedly charged with fines for criminal negligence and poor working conditions, none of which adequately discouraged their practices, leading to the worst mining disaster in forty years.

Especially in the current economic recession--no matter what Wall Street says--it is extraordinarily pertinent to set aside the rhetoric of environment vs. industry. Not only is it clear that such a dialogue goes no where, but itself is a mechanism for paralysis. The jobs that are needed now more than ever are a combination of highly-skilled, scientific and engineering positions to move our technology not just forward but outward, to fill the needs we are able to but have failed to satisfy (renewable energy, appliance energy efficiency, more powerful recycling programs, public transit, etc.); and the newly and not-yet trained technicians to install and institute those technologies well. In addition, there is an increasingly, glaringly obvious necessity to motivate a grander rethinking of our lifestyles, the rules that govern our communities, and the responsibilities we demand of our industries and businesses. When I touch on issues of school lunch programs, sustainable agriculture, and urban planning, this latter category is the subject to which I speak. These are jobs; real, necessary jobs that will fill the pockets of the unemployed and the fractures of our society.

Over the past two decades, despite the efforts of environmentalists and political activists the world over, the politics of the environment have been sidelined. The reality of the environment is the reality of peoples livelihoods as farmers, fishers, manufacturers, merchants, politicians, and everyone else. The reality of global warming is the reality of the water and nutritional needs of people alive today and tomorrow, of billions of people abroad and millions of people in the United States. The reality of pollution is felt in the lungs of urban youth the world over, in the premature deaths of mothers and fathers, in the muscle fatigue of laborers in nearly every country in the world, and even in the distracted minds of our school children.

I have been thinking about something for the past few days. I have been thinking about a question. That question is,

"How would you treat the Earth if you had only one?"

I ask that question because we have only one Earth, but we act as if we have many, maybe innumerable Earths. Our One Earth is the freshwater we drink, the clean air we breath, the topsoil from which our food grows and the animals that eat its grass and leaves. Our One Earth is air and water and earth and wood and fire. We eat our food, we eat of the Earth; when we lay down to sleep, we rest on the shoulder of the Earth; and when we die, we become the Earth. Perhaps we can realize that in our deaths, we never strayed, we never divided, we never became something other than our One Earth.