Today marks the 52nd anniversary Earth Day. That’s long enough to make it easy to imagine that Earth Day has always existed, but it’s worth taking a minute to look back at a time before the first Earth Day in 1970.
At that time, pollution was considered the price of progress. Leaded gas, huge and inefficient vehicles, smog – these were just what life consisted of in the U.S. To be concerned about the environment was to be a naive, tree-hugging hippy. Throwing trash anywhere was a common practice.Mad Men’s picnic scene is no exaggeration).
The scale of environmental destruction and the horrors such as the 1969 oil spillage in Santa Barbara were becoming too much to ignore. Many people came together to clean up the spillage and witnessed the oil-soaked birds and other animals dying.
Earth Day was created at a time when radical protests and teach-ins were forcing change in the status quo. It offered the possibility for taking action – for taking a stand – and for pushing corporations to take responsibility for the environmental degradation they caused.
But over time – 52 years being a lot of that – corporate sponsorship and greenwashing shifted the focus of Earth Day to individual responsibility and to volunteerism. Even that was not enough. famous – and very effective – anti-littering ad with the “crying Indian” was a corporate dodge that defined littering as a personal sinThis is a personal responsibility, not a business obligation.
This has diluted Earth Day’s potential, and helped block real progress in the fight to save the planet.
This is not meant to discredit individual efforts like cleaning up after natural disasters, reducing the waste, growing plants, taking transit, and riding bikes. BART even developed a new tool that shows how much carbon transit riders have saved. All that is possible, thumbs up! Individual action is not enough if corporate polluters continue to use their money to avoid responsibility.
Earth Day’s conception coincided with new regulations on state and federal levels, including the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Clean Air Act, and the Clean Water Act. These are important and useful interventions that have brought many benefits to Californians and Americans. But they haven’t been able to slow the pace of the climate crisis. And while air quality is nowhere near as bad as it was in the ’70s, it is still very bad. Twelve California cities were among the 25 worst in terms of air quality in the United States. A recent report by the American Lung Association.
2022
Today, Earth Day is an annual global mobilization of people.. It has been an effective tool for raising awareness about environmental problems. It provides opportunities and ideas for local actions that people could take part in and feel good about.
But it’s important to remember the genesis of Earth Day, not as a corporate-sponsored festival, but a radical call to change the way corporations are allowed to degrade the environment we all depend on for our lives.
The issues Earth Day asks us to be aware of have not changed much from 1970. The fight to hold polluters responsible is far from over.