Another Earth Day has come and gone, and perhaps this is a good time to reflect on how things have changed over the past 50 years from the perspective of someone who is old enough to remember the first Earth Day.
I remember the first Earth Day as an opportunity for teenagers and adults to scare us kids about how we had not been cleaning up after ourselves enough. I was not great about cleaning up my own messes as a ten-year-old and was fairly familiar with being admonished by my parents for my slovenliness. Now here I was being told that not only did I have to clean up my own mess, but that my classmates and I were all going to go outside with garbage bags, and wander around picking up other people’s litter. It did not seem like a great way to engender love for our natural environment. It seemed like a lecture and a punishment. But despite my initial reaction, it changed my way of thinking.
It got me to realize that not only was it my responsibility to avoid littering, but that if I wanted to help out, I needed to do something more, even if it was only a bit more. And that if everyone else felt that way too, that would make a big enough difference to solve the litter problem. And for some reason, my memory of the first Earth Day is most clearly focused on litter. We went out and picked up litter because it was Earth Day. There was no Earth Day cake, no Happy Earth Day song, no Earth Day party. We picked up litter and called it a day.
I had some vague awareness that our rivers and our air were being polluted, that there used to be a time (before I was born) when it was safe to swim in most rivers, even though that was no longer true by 1970. Less than a year before, the Cuyahoga River was so dirty that it had caught on fire. That was kind of a wake-up call for a lot of people. The river was a symbol of how we had been treating the entire planet. Want to get rid of something? Just throw it in the river. That should take care of it. It will wash away, and we won’t have to worry about it anymore.
Turns out you can’t get away with that forever. Earth Day was the beginning of getting people to realize that we couldn’t keep treating everything like it was okay to just toss it like litterbugs. (That was a new word then, “litterbug”.)
President Nixon actually took notice, and by the end of 1970 the Environmental Protection Agency had been established to, well, protect the environment.
Instead of being a one-time event, Earth Day started to catch on. It became a bigger deal the next few years, as the Environmental Movement became more popular. There were clean-ups all over the country. People started to feel like they were connecting to lots of other people in different parts of the country and the rest of the world (this was before the internet). Obviously, a lot has changed over the past fifty years. We started to clean up our rivers, and we have made some serious progress cleaning up the air we breathe (that we had been using as an open sewer). We got rid of lead in gasoline (my first car was made to run on leaded gas) and we were all kind of proud of ourselves, especially when we figured out how to solve the problem with the hole in the ozone layer. But looking back on the last fifty years this way makes it seem like it was a continuous line of progress borne from the growth in environmental awareness that Earth Day created. But that’s not really true. It was a lot of people doing a lot of hard work, and sometimes there was progress and sometimes we just protested. There were frustrations and backsliding. What had seemed like a bipartisan effort (who doesn’t want clean air to breathe?) devolved into a partisan fight between those who were getting campaign contributions from polluters and those that cared more about the rest of us who just had lungs.
But the biggest change since the first Earth Day is that the range of environmental problems we are now contending with are no longer local or cosmetic issues like dirty rivers or pollution from a nearby factory or highway. Now we are faced with global environmental issues that border on the existential. If we continue to dump green house gases into the atmosphere at anything close to our current rate, we are in for a very nasty series of events that we are nowhere near prepared to handle without enormous suffering and death. And we are starting to run out of time. So maybe now’s a good time to remember what Earth Day originally taught us: at first it may feel like a lecture and a punishment, but if we all do a bit more, if we all act like the stakes are as high as the future habitability of our planet, we might still have a chance to turn things around before it’s too late.
Sure seems like it’s worth trying, doesn’t it?