When Earth Day was launched 40 years ago today, it was observed as an environmental “teach-in” to foster awareness of the ecological balance that sustains our world and our place in it. Probably few guessed that it would become a global celebration promoted by 17,000 organizations and observed by people in 174 countries today. Fewer still may have guessed that it would fuel a “green” revolution which, despite the Luddism of so many environmental naysayers, is rapidly becoming the standard by which advanced economies will be measured for investment purposes.
Indeed, the fact that so many now pause to reflect on the cycle of natural systems that sustain our environment is an accomplishment far greater than the sum of its parts. It reminds us not just of the amazing complexity and seamless utility of our environment, but also of the need to protect our natural physical envelope from the daily hazards we project that jeopardize it.
Earth Day underscores, as well, the rapidly increasing economic efficiency of sound environmentalism, and the moral mandate and empirical necessity to respect our duty as stewards of the world that our children and their progeny will inherit.
Our appreciation of our environment — how we enjoy clear air, fresh clean water, vibrant forests and fruited plains — means nothing, however, if we carelessly fail to protect it. Yet the fact that there is no controversy over the former defies comprehension of the failure of so many to correct reckless environment abuses.
Regardless, we are constantly confronted by political friction over whether to require industries, and citizens acting as consumers, to quit externalizing the cost of wastefully using energy, and destructively dumping their waste, instead of cleaning up their toxic emissions and keeping them from contaminating our water, air and land.
Science has credibly established the harm of mercury, lead and thousands of other toxins that can invade and sicken our bodies through polluting emissions to air, soil and water. So why is there this constant determination by many to rationalize pollution and politicize the pursuit of a safer, cleaner, more energy efficient environment?
This is hardly an idle question. A dozen major electric utilities, including TVA and Georgia Power, still exploit their wrongful evasions of the 1977 amendments to the Clean Air Act by dumping vast amounts of sulfur dioxides into our air. By stalling on requirements to install sulfur scrubbers, they harm our lungs, cause respiratory disease and poison water, crops and forests.
Coal mining companies, aided by compliant politicians, insist on their misperceived right to commit the moral and environmental outrage of mountain-top destruction mining (they euphemistically call it mountain-top “removal”) by blowing off the tops of mountains, sending the debris, and later toxic coal waste, to choke and pollute watersheds and drinking water sources in the valleys below.
These are but obvious examples of everyday environmental abuse. Few Americans who drive big cars, and who live in over-sized, over-heated and -cooled houses in distant subdivisions, however, can pillory industry for its excesses.
Citizens world-wide are now contributing to hundreds of huge dead zones in the world’s oceans — some created by fertilizer, oil and plastic-based runoff and garbage jettisoned in urban zones far inland from the oceanic damage. Just as TVA’s air pollution from our electricity plants rides the wind to New England’s towns, lakes and forests, fertilizers from Signal Mountain lawns and Harrison farms wash into the Tennessee River and ultimately flow out via the Mississippi River into the huge dead zone in that river’s vast, oxygen-depleted delta in the Gulf of Mexico.
But just as our environmental wreckage continues, we are slowly making significant progress. Despite the anti-environmentalism of right-wing extremists, clean, green alternative energy systems and zero-waste policies are becoming the rising standard for industry because of their superior cost efficiency.
Increasing numbers of citizens are buying energy efficient heating and air systems, appliances and light bulbs, installing thick insulation and programmable thermostats, and recycling and composting their waste. More people are gardening and buying local foods — and helping reduce the 1,500 air-polluting miles that the average grocery store product is trucked. And more donors and citizens are boosting land trusts, bike paths and greenways.
Threatened species, ocean fisheries and old-growth forests have gained attention, aid and increasing protection from preservationists and governments. And this is not happening not just in advanced industrial nations, but also among our strongest economic competitors. China, for example, has embarked on energy efficiency, car mileage and high-speed rail programs that easily surpass ours.
It seems to have dawned on industrial nations, in fact, that the only path to a sustainable economy is, indeed, the protection of a sustainable environment, one in which we measure and treasure the natural resources we have left — and hopefully yet act in time to preserve. Such a legacy from the movement that spawned Earth Day is still serving us well.