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As Earth Day circles around again – more than 50 times now on April 22 – it comes with a different breed of environmental concerns than the ones that spurred the first Earth Day in 1970.
This year’s Earth Day is filled with sobering climate change assessments.
The International Panel on Climate Change’s(IPCC 2) The planet was in dire danger according to the Sixth Assessment reports from February and earlier this month. They listed a number of extreme conditions and recommended drastic and rapid cuts in emissions within years, not decades.
The U.S. continues being ravaged by climate extremes, which are undoubtedly functions climate change. Just a few examples of these events are historic droughts, wildfires and extreme precipitation. They have flooded coastlines and destroyed homes. Wildlife on the verge of extinction
The Russian invasion in Ukraine has given another reason to get the world off its feet While reliance on fossil fuels is a problem, nations like the U.S. are considering drilling for additional resources to escape from Russia’s.
Connecticut, too faces climate change alarms that seem to be worsening: increased air pollution, falling behind on greenhouse gas emission reductions, the prospect of yet another difficult hurricane seasons plus generally more severe storms — all in addition to what may prove to be a conservative prediction of 20 inches of sea level rise by the middle of the century.
While focused on climate change now, Earth Day was borne of the brown smog clouds that blanketed American cities and the toxins and trash that rendered many of the nation’s rivers all but unusable. Earth Day is the main reason that the Clean Air Act (and Clean Water Act) were created. But is it still relevant today, two generations later?
It’s not scientific, but we’ve asked a cross section of Connecticut folks — all of whom are engaged in the world of climate change and the environment — what they think. How far we’ve come or not; what’s changed about the focus; the most pressing priorities now; and whether Earth Day even matters.
Expect surprises.
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Sena Wazer was only 5 when a children’s story about a whale caught in a fishing net left her in tears for days. She has never lost her passion for all things environmental. She is 18 years old and will soon graduate from UConn.
She’s the director of the Connecticut chapter of the youth environmental organization Sunrise Movement, through which she’s run climate strikes and legislative advocacy. She doesn’t see Earth Day as an old environmental paradigm, which is perhaps not surprising.
“I think it does mean something,” Wazer said. “I think the main reason that it means something to me is because it’s a moment when the whole world turns — well not the whole world, but many countries and the U.S. — turn their perspective and we all look at the planet together for a moment. And as much as that should be something we’ve done all the time, it’s not. And so having that time when everybody kind of is thinking about this issue is really valuable.”
Despite failures so far of state legislation she supports — requiring climate education for K-12 and a moratorium on new fossil fuel infrastructure — Wazer said she’s seen progress even in her limited time.
“There’s been a shift in national discourse, and that’s really important and I’m very happy for that. But we have a much greater way to go,” she said.
The problem she points to and where she gets frustrated is what she characterizes as older, privileged political leaders who don’t see the urgency in the climate crisis the way people her age do.
“A lot of the folks in the legislature are not going to feel the consequences of not taking that action,” she said. “But people like myself and my classmates and the students that I work with are.”
She’d like to see the state move forward on environmental justice to make it an underpinning to all environmental action. She would like to see the passing of the Transportation and Climate Initiative so notoriously failed in 2021. And having fought for the development of A plant producing incredibly high levels of natural gas. she’d like to ensure something like it never happens again.
And while she said she tries to focus on the hopeful aspects of what she does — something she intends to continue doing from within government at some point — she is mindful that there’s not much time left to get emissions truly under control and see them peak by 2025 as the IPCC recommends.
“It’s very, very hard to see that we’ve known about these issues for so long, and we’re still where we are. We have a lot to gain. We have a lot energy. We have people all across the world and across the state who are really passionate about these issues and willing to help,” she said.
Her message to political leaders: “I want them to sit down and to listen. We need to listen. Listen to the people being impacted and the young people I work every day who are scared about the future. If we don’t act now.”
Laura BozziThe director of programs is Yale Center on Climate Change and Health. The report will be available starting in 2020 Climate Change and Health in Connecticut she, as co-author, has revealed the unvarnished truths of what is already happening in the state, what lies ahead, and what actions are critical — digging far deeper and more specifically than it’s going to be hotter and sea levels will be higher.
Earth Day was already established when Bozzi, now 41 years old, visited the warming planet. For her it has meant a lot of folks hitting her up for her expertise on health and climate change, which she’s observed across the nation while working in several states.
“For people that are working in the field, we think about this stuff every day,” she said. “The idea of there being one day that we’re supposed to think about it and make a big deal of it, I find that sort of odd. But I think the point of it is that it’s not for me, it is for other people, and it’s really helpful to have a time to center attention around it, and I get that.”
In her time in the climate change field, she’s seen a shifting focus, especially in the area of climate and health. She said that doctors and nurses now lobby on climate change and that opinions are now being provided by medical journals. Yale School of Public Health now offers a concentration in climate change and public health.
“It’s growing really quickly,” she said.
Most of her interactions with students are through her Clinic in Climate Justice, Climate Policy, the Law, Public Health, and Clinic in Climate Justice.
“It makes me feel real old, when I see how much they have changed. The way that they see the world environmental issues is so different than the way that I went through it,” she said.
That was 2003. The field was still technocratic, and the idea of environmentalism was still focused on individual action — like signing a petition would be enough. “It was still very white and privileged,” she said.
“All of that has changed so much. Even that framing is rejected by students. It’s not even a question to them anymore. I think that there’s much more acceptance around advocacy and addressing structural issues. There is an expectation of interdisciplinarity in environmental work, at the least among students I have met. It’s so fantastic.”
Bozzi’s report and its Follow-up issues briefsConnecticut should take a number of climate-related actions, including a staggering array of them. Her suggestion for the first thing to tackle: “I think housing is one of those issues where a lot of the pieces come together,” she said. “So for being resilient to an extreme weather event or to other kinds of shocks that are happening, having stable, high-quality, affordable housing is a really key.
“I think the overall point that I tried to make is that climate change is a health issue and that it is something that’s happening today in Connecticut to people. I think people are coming around to that and things that have happened lately make it harder to ignore than it used to be.”
Leah Lopez SchmalzHer Cajun family introduced her in Louisiana to the environment, which would become her passion.
“I think I’ve always been connected to water,” said Lopez Schmalz, now 47. “Being close to the wetlands of Louisiana and knowing about the threat from an early age of loss of wetlands, always being worried about hurricanes and what that’s going to do to the landscape.”
An environmental lawyer with 20 years experience. Save the Sound, now as its vice president of programs, she recalled Earth Day’s early simplicity in slogans like “Give a Hoot, Don’t Pollute,” making posters and picking up trash. But she admits the dramatic change in environmental concerns and climate change since then has come with a good bit of cynicism as it’s moved from bi-partisan to hyper-partisan.
“Everyone wanted to protect the planet. There wasn’t a debate about whether or not clean air was deliverable and whether or not everyone deserved it. And now, bi-partisan environmental initiatives are about as rare as endangered species.”
On the other hand, she said, in the last three years especially, she’s seen more environmentalists focusing on the intersection of justice and health, as well as more grassroots support in those areas. And she’s seen funders and corporate entities stepping up to support their efforts or take action themselves. She said federal investment in Long Island Sound has gone from $5 million a year to $30 million a year in the 20 years she’s been involved.
Even so, Save the Sound’s Climate Action Plan 2022The document, which was released earlier this month, lists yet another list of daunting environmental tasks for Connecticut. Much of it is based on previous years’ failures. Lopez Schmalz stated that one of the key components she sees in the state’s environmental policy is accountability for its implementation and enforcement. It’s also important to put teeth into laws such as the one supporting environmental justice, so, for instance, the state can deny permits to a power plant because of its location or the fuel it would run on — something it can’t do now.
And she said it’s time for the General Assembly to stop thinking in terms of partisanship when it comes to climate change policy and other environmental measures to support administration goals.
“I think it’s incumbent upon people from all parties to sit down and think about what the residents deserve for a future as opposed to what’s going to get them elected,” she said.
As for Earth Day, despite the fracturing partisanship, she thinks it hasn’t outlived its usefulness.
“It’s turned into an Earth month,” she said. “I think that the idea of using it as a touchstone to show our progress and how hard change can be, but how successful we can all be whenever we pull in the same direction. And so I think even with all the differences that we have — being able to show ourselves as a country, progress over time to do the hard thing — I think is useful, and I do think it motivates people, and, you know, I think it does motivate legislators.
“I think it was always just kind of a major messaging piece in some ways to draw attention. And to me, that will never outlive its usefulness.”
For Mark MitchellThe concepts of environmental justice and healthy living are not new. He’s been talking about and advocating for both for nearly a quarter-century, and indeed in 1998 founded the first environmental justice organization in Connecticut, the Connecticut Coalition for Environmental Justice.
It was an outgrowth of his time directing Hartford’s health department, during which he saw firsthand the unequal treatment of environmental issues in Hartford and the lack of response and support from the public health system for the city’s Black and Latino children.
Mitchell is a trained public health and environment health physician. Mitchell uses all of his experience to work remotely. As an associate professor at George Mason University in Hartford, he is responsible for climate change energy and environmental justice equity.
Given how long it’s taken for the health and environmental equity Mitchell has been so passionate about to be regarded as serious and far-reaching outgrowths of climate change, he’s surprisingly optimistic.
“Now we know that climate change is much more of an issue, much more of a problem than we had anticipated previously,” he said. “I’ve been working for 25 years on environmental justice issues, and now they have taken center stage. People are now taking this seriously and investing in the underinvested. So that’s all good news.”
He also sees Earth Day’s track record as pretty noteworthy, since at 65 he can remember the conditions of the times that precipitated it.
“From my perspective, the good news is that the U.S. has been able to solve every major environmental problem that they have had the political will to address,” he said. “We don’t have rivers catching on fire anymore. Los Angeles’ brown haze, which was visible over many other cities, has decreased and has disappeared in many places. The hole in the ozone layer has been closed. The acid rain situation is much better than before. So the major issues of the ’70s and ’80s and ’90s are no longer the major issues that have gotten the attention.”
He realizes that the matter of “political will” is not nothing but says that’s part of the point of Earth Day. “What Earth Day has done is to focus the attention of the public on major environmental problems to garner the political will to address them.”
But he’s concerned about Connecticut.
“I’ve been very disturbed that over the last 20, last 15 years, that the investment in environmental justice has been virtually non-existent, and the investment in community-based organizations and community-based advocacy has dried up tremendously.”
He said that’s one of the reasons the Transportation and Climate Initiative, TCI, failed.
“I think that it crashed and burned because they didn’t involve environmental justice communities early on,” he said. “One of the major principles of environmental justice is we speak for ourselves.”
He said TCI needs to pass, and he thinks it will, now that coalitions are finally being built and at least there’s talk about investing in environmental justice. “Which is something,” he said.
He sees two critical forces at work. He believes that public opinion has dramatically changed to be more aware of climate change and more supportive of action. He also notes What he calls the “racial awakening” that began with George Floyd’s death.
“I think that generally public health and environmental justice are now getting a lot closer to the attention that they deserve,” he said.
Margaret Miner is probably best known in Connecticut’s environmental advocacy world for her two decades as executive director of Rivers Alliance. Now 84 and retired from that position — though not much else — her reflections on all the Earth Days that have come and gone are stark.
“I’m becoming more and more restless with celebrations,” she said. “This year, we’re celebrating the 52nd Earth Day, the anniversary of the Clean Water Act, the anniversary of the Connecticut Wetlands act. We’re celebrating all these things, and we’re not doing very well.”
She said that natural resources have improved since the 1970s and that the rivers and water she loves have improved since then.
“They’re sliding back. We’re facing an unbelievable crisis from climate change,” Miner said, noting an increase in methane emissions last year. “What are we thinking? We can’t just plant a tree here or there and do cleanups, important as they are. Look at it as a need for more — more confrontational, more energetic, probably more political extensions of the Earth Day spirit.” The hope, she said, is that there actually is change.
That environmental justice and broadened health issues are now part of the climate change concerns, Miner proclaims that it’s “about time” and ticks off a list of indignities including shorter lifespans around the world, high levels of infant mortality, increases in lung disease and others.
“The health of much of the world and obviously of the non-elites in much of the world, by every measure, is not doing well,” Miner said. “It’s like these miners in the coal mine with their canary. The canary drops over dead, and the miners say, ‘Oh, good, more air for us.’ That’s the way we’re looking at it.”
She admits that it took her a while to realize how dire the situation was. Her assessment remains sobering.
“The climate news is terrible. The news about food and water is horrible. We don’t have a lot to celebrate,” she said. “It’s good to celebrate. I don’t want to always be gloomy. But I think in every celebration, there should be a serious call either to action, and if you can’t do the action, you should at least participate in the investment. And if you can’t do the investment, you can at least join and do some of the action at a community level. Whatever one could do.”
