EARTH DAY 2015: DID YOU MISS IT?

I happened to look at the calendar in my office and noticed that yesterday was Earth Day.  This was the 45th Earth Day.  I can readily remember the first earth day in 1970.  As a senior in engineering school there was much discussion about what engineers could do to make a difference.  It seemed that on every college campus and in most major cities thousands if not millions of people got together on campus or in the streets to call for a cleaner earth.  It was quite the scene.  The New York Times reported about the events using a six column headline on the first page.  There on the front page was a picture of thousands of people on 5th Avenue closing it from 14th Street to 59th Street.

Earth Day was the idea of a Democratic US Senator from Wisconsin, Gaylord Nelson.  He had been witness to a massive oil spill in Santa Barbara, California and thought that more awareness of the consequences of damaging our environment  was needed.  The idea was his but the formation was truly grass roots.  Why was the first Earth Day so successful in bringing out supporters?   I think that there was a confluence of several factors that made it so big.

First, this was time of student activism.  The Vietnam War was in full swing and quite unpopular.  Student groups were formed on every campus who were opposed to what they thought was an unjust war.  The nightly news solemnly reported on the massive killings of Vietnamese as well as the ever mounting body count of soldiers killed or captured.  There were sit ins, teach ins, and other methods of civil disobedience to show the students displeasure with the direction we were heading.  This was the era of the vocal and principled.  Not only was the Vietnam War a topic of concern so were race relations, voting rights and women’s rights.  There was an infrastructure in place that got the word out and supporters to appear.

Secondly, was the environmental situation we had created in the United States.  The oil spill in Santa Barbara was just one of many things that were going wrong.  Much of our river and coastal waters were being inundated with raw sewage causing our rivers to become much like large cesspools.  Swimming and fishing were banned in many places.  The water problems culminated on June 22, 1969 when the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland actually caught fire.  The river was so contaminated with industrial effluents of all kinds that it just started to flame.  Add to this the situation we were experiencing with air pollution.  In the 1960s there were more smog alert days in major American cities during the summer months than there were not.  Los Angles became infamous as the smog capital of the world but all major cities were involved.  It was common to hear people say that the air was heavy to breath and had a taste like one was eating metal.

With a functioning infrastructure and environmental degradation all around us it was the brain child of Senator Nelson to harness the student anti-war energy and funnel it to the environment by suggesting we have a “national teach-in on the environment” to reporters from the national media.  He knew a bi-partisan approach would be best so he gained Republican support by getting Pete McCloskey, a Republican Congressman to be co-chair of the movement. The Senator then recruited Denis Hayes, an environmental activist, as the national coordinator.  Mr. Hayes tirelessly went on to promote Earth Day events all across the country.   So it began and rather successfully.

In part due to this kind of environmental activism many things were accomplished.  The Clean Air Act, The Clean Water Act, the formation of the EPA were all done in a very short time and in a bi-partisan way on Capital Hill and supported by US President Richard Nixon, a Republican.

I believe that these early successes lead to the sustainability of the Earth Day movement.  In the 1970s cleaning up our air and water were deemed solvable problems.  There was clean-up technology we knew or could imagine.  Now there was sufficient demand from the population to allow significant resources to be assigned to building waste treatment plants and for giving tax incentives for industry to add better air control techniques.  Then in 1976 came Love Canal, a toxic waste dump over which a housing development was built.   Terrible health outcomes to the people who lived there were linked to the contact with the wastes.  Now we had a new problem to solve and the environmental movement had a renewed reason for being.  Not only had we damaged our air and water,  we also had soil and ground water messed up as well.  Once again there was an environmental issue that was front page news and once again the Earth Day environmental movement saw success in the bi-partisan passage of CERCLA, the superfund law.  Cleanup technology was available and now with the law so were the resources to get to it.

The 1980s brought the next hill to concur, the ozone hole.  In 1985 scientists discovered that the ozone layer over the poles of the earth were being depleted.  Once again this was front page news.  Scientists found that CFCs, chlorlflurocarbons, a man made substance was primarily responsible.  Without an adequate ozone layer the earth would experience more ultra-violet radiation coming from space.  It is feared that increased UV radiation would cause more sunburn, skin cancers and eye problems in humans and the loss of a vital food chain substance, plankton, from our oceans.  The Earth Day movement now had a new problem to solve and solve it they did.  This time the solution was global.  The Earth Day environmental movement was growing  to be a world wide phenomena.  The public attention lead to the signing of the Montreal Protocol in 1987.  The Protocol banned the sale of CFCs and other ozone depleting chemicals within a rather short time period.  Today almost all countries of the world are signatories.  Thus yet another environmental movement success.  It should be noted that the US  lead the world in banning the sale of CFCs as it anticipated the ozone problem and moved forward with the solution in 1978.  It took the rest of the world almost ten years to catch up.

In the decade of the 90’s the spirit of environmental movement officially went global.  Denis Hayes, the original Earth Day coordinator, was asked to organize a global Earth Day Campaign.  The theme chosen for the 1990 Earth Day was recycling.  In fact the now so familiar recycling symbol was designed as a result of a contest.  It was reported that more than 200 million people in over 140 countries celebrated Earth Day in 1990.  This huge world-wide recognition that we are the stewards of our environment was the product of twenty years of work by those involved in the movement.  Such was the success of the global reach that then US President Bill Clinton awarded Senator Nelson the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1995 for his role as founder of the Earth Day movement.   This is the highest honor given to civilians in the United States.

The new century brought us the next problem to wrestle with, Global Warming.  Scientists say that the burning of fossil fuels is releasing Carbon Dioxide and other chemicals into our atmosphere that is causing heat that would normally radiate into space to be trapped on earth .  This warming is causing the glaciers and the icecaps at the poles to melt causing sea levels to rise.  If we don’t stop this rise in temperature by curtailing our emissions of global warming chemicals grave consequences are forecast, such as: inundated coastal cities, more furious storms and accentuated climatic patterns. The problem we have with this issue is singular yet complex – we are a carbon based society.  We depend on copious amounts of fuel to power our cars, generate electricity, heat our houses and drive our industry.  There is no technology that can remedy this problem that is now sufficiently available.  Nor is there one that will not lead to phenomenal disruption of the industrial order as is known today.  So this time the United States political classes are split.  One side agrees there is a problem that needs to be solved, albeit a solution that will be much more painful and perplexing that anything we have done before.  The other side seems not to be convinced that this is truly a man-made problem but rather nothing more than the natural variations of our earthly climate and thus there is nothing to do but ride it out.

I believe that we have evolved in our Earth Day approach to an “us or them” stance.  Where there once was bipartisan agreement with front page headlines on  environmental issues we now have a much more muted approach.  Take for instance yesterday’s Earth Day activities.  Yes there were many college campuses that celebrated the day with all kinds of activities and yes the Earth Day movement has a program to plant a billion trees around the world.  But in order to find out about these things takes a search of the internet.   President Obama celebrated Earth Day at the Everglades by designating a national historic landmark at the Miami home of the environmentalist Marjory Stoneman Douglas.  She lead efforts to rescue this vast area of grasses and forests. He also spoke about his efforts to confront the effects of climate change. This news was reported on page 18 of the New York Times.  It was stated that the President spoke before a small crowd of community leaders and Park Service employees.  The Governor of Florida didn’t even bother to attend.

I am afraid we are losing the momentum that brought us so much in the way of clean air, clean water and non-contaminated earth.  Maybe it is because the current problems are so difficult to solve or maybe it is because most people alive today did not see the rivers burn or the smog so thick or the birth defects caused by breathing toxic chemicals.

Whatever the reasons we have to find a way to regain the can-do attitude that gave new life to our planet because it is now more necessary than ever.