The event started in 1970, tho it’s history begins sooner (and there’s debate over who founded it). That’s the same year Pres. Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency, and the U.S. Congress signed the Clean Air Act (and a few others) into law. Earth Day was born in the age of the Vietnam protests, the decade of love and the hippy era and dawning awareness about the damage we were doing to the environment.
It’s been almost 40 years. Has Earth Day come of age? Does it still mean much? Has it lost its edge?
I have over 20100 earth days logged and zero non-earth days. Can’t imagine doing them anywhere else. I will say the old girl could be treated a little nicer than she is. She could use a nice spa treatment. How about everybody grab a broom and tidy up a little bit.
Well-to-do middle class white people getting together for a big day in the park and leaving behind loads and loads of disposable trash from their earthday picnik after a day of speeches about how “precious” our planet is. Then they drive home to their over-sized house built from clear-cut Northern Canadian wood and encased in toxic petroleum-based materials and watch teevee, maybe poop in the drinking water.
Earth Day, which every year has become less and less the revolutionary event it once was, seems this year to have entered a new phase of meaninglessness. Indeed, this year it appears to gone into a form of retrograde motion and begun to move actively away from the concept of comprehensive sustainability that drives all rational environmentalism. ...
The biggest problem with Earth Day is that it has become a ritual of sympathy for the idea of environmental sanity. Small steps, we’re told, ignoring the fact that most of the steps most frequently promoted (returning your bottles, bringing your own bag, turning off the water while you brush your teeth) are of such minor impact (compared to our ecological footprints) that they are essentially meaningless without larger, systemic action as well. The strategy of recycling as a gateway drug—get them hooked on it and we can move them on to harder stuff—has failed miserably. ...
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What may be worse is the recent plethora of “green issues,” “green guides” and special Earth Day sections that have blanketed our media. A decade ago, we would have been excited to see green ideas (even lame ones) given such prominent play, but these days, such editorial eco-ghettos strike us more as an admission of skewed priorities, with ecological sanity presented as a product feature, like a well-designed cupholder, rather than as a fundamental strategy for avoiding widespread collapse.
