Earth Day was founded on April 22, 1970, to raise awareness about the natural world with the hope that educating people would lead to a cleaner environment. Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin originated the concept of Earth Day while visiting a polluted beach in Santa Barbara, California, after a major oil spill in 1969. He believed that educating people could avert future disasters and tapped into the social activism of the time by promoting "teach-ins," a common tool used by anti-Vietnam War activists.
Since then, Earth Day has become recognized around the world, and in some places has been expanded to week-long events.
There has been much progress in the last four decades. The Environmental Protection Agency, created later that same year, now enforces regulations to protect the air, water, land and endangered species. The United States has mileage requirements in vehicles, which now burn much cleaner, unleaded fuel. Heavy industry has been forced to put scrubbers on their smokestacks so they emit less sulfur dioxide, curbing the problem of acid rain. The Superfund was created to clean up toxic waste sites. The first Earth Day was observed less than a year after the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught fire. Lake Erie, into which the Cuyahoga flows, was declared "dead" in the 1960s. Both of those bodies of water are now much cleaner. Environmental regulations were virtually nonexistent four decades ago, but have since become an integral -- and vital -- part of our government framework.
So, we must ask ourselves, on Earth Day's 41st anniversary, why do some extremists want to gut the EPA's enforcement authority, de-fund it, even dismantle it? How would that improve life for anyone? They assert that during a recession, and with such high government debt, we can't afford to protect the environment.
But this simplistic argument makes a terrible -- and wholly inaccurate -- assumption. It assumes that the economy and the environment can be separated, that environmental protection is an economic burden and even some kind of luxury that stands in the way of progress. Nothing could be further from the truth. The environment is the core foundation of economics.
If environmental regulations are such a burden to economic growth, why do the countries with the strictest environmental regulations tend to be the wealthiest and most stable? We might also look at the states of the union, where environmental protection is not correlated with poverty and unemployment, but rather with prosperity.
Take West Virginia, the heart of coal country, as an example. The "mountain state" may need to change its name to the "plateau state" if mountaintop removal mining continues unabated. It has some of our most polluted land and waterways, with the highest incidences of industry-related accidents and illnesses. Forbes magazine recently rated West Virginia as the least green state of the union. No wonder the state's slogan "Almost Heaven" was replaced with "Open for Business" (since changed to "Wild and Wonderful"). This Faustian bargain should come as no surprise in a state with some of the weakest environmental regulations in the union.
Has avoidance of environmental responsibility contributed to prosperity in West Virginia? The right-wing extremists should surely expect West Virginia to enjoy an environmentally unfettered economic boom, but that is not the case. West Virginia has the 49th lowest per-capita income in the nation and unemployment more than a point higher than the national average. Yet, states like West Virginia have some of the loudest anti-environment voices. Many rally around the coal companies, which claim that stronger environmental regulations will cost jobs, impede their state and hurt their people. Nothing could be further from the truth.
As we mark the 41st anniversary of Earth Day this week, it would be wise to ask whether we are better or worse off than we were in 1970. What would Senator Nelson, who died in 2005, think about the state of our world today? We think he would be pleased with the progress that has been made but concerned by some current trends: environmental protection is under siege by two powerful forces.
The first force is a floundering economy and the erroneous belief that environmental regulation is one of its enemies. The second force is a looming energy crisis. We demand more and more energy, but must dig and drill deeper and deeper to find it: deeper into the mountains of West Virginia to mine coal, deeper under the backyards of Pennsylvania to extract natural gas from shales, and deeper under the waters of the fragile Gulf of Mexico to find our oil. These difficulties increase the risks of environmental damage. What is needed now is not a weakening of environmental regulations, but a tightening. The question is not, "can we still afford to protect the environment?" but, "can we afford not to?"
Steve Hallett is the author, with John Wright, of Life Without Oil: Why We Must Shift to a New Energy Future (March, Prometheus Books). Wright is also the author of The Obama Haters: Behind the Right-Wing Campagin of Lies, Innuendo & Racism (April, Potomac Books).
Urging people to learn how to produce their own food again while they have the luxury of time to prepare is tough. It SOUNDS nice to a lot of them but getting them to take the 1st steps is another story. It's as if they don't fully comprehend that those grocery stores are but a few days away from having bare shelves. One only has to look at the interruptions in food when Japan had their trifecta of disasters to see a blip in being able to import can disrupt millions of lives.
And I believe, as you, that are oceans are past the tipping point. But again, till the headlines scream 'no more fish', good luck trying to convince the masses there's a problem and what it means to humanity.
What I mean is, if we talk about economics, they only see medicare. or taxes. or wealth distribution. which then gets translated into socialism. or Communism in their minds. as opposed to seeing how the system works as a whole and how every singular entity effects another. its just a very shallow way to see the problem.
The environment, which is the most complicated and all encompassing system that humans will ever know, is hard for someone who thinks like that to wrap their minds around. So they hear "Global warming" and they say well its gotten colder in MI. or they hear CO2 and they think well CO2 is good for trees. we say climate change and they say "you can't change the weather"
They miss it. because of the fundamental framework, wether caused by nature or nurture or both, in their cognitive abilities.
the question really becomes, when you have a democracy, which requires a respect of everybody's voice, how do you save ourselves from destroying ourselves when 40 some % of the population suffers from an ultra limited and shallow cognition of complex systemic problems like the environment.
"These people [conservationists] are trying to battle the state agencies and the government of West Virginia. Virtually all of the relevant officials have been corrupted - including the judges - have been corrupted by the industry, but one of the most effective tools that the industries have been able to martial is that they've been able to disable the press in West Virginia, and across the country. They don't cover these issues"
"You have to participate for democracy to work. And if we don't participate, our democracy is going to end up in a place which is just like the kind of corporate kleptocracy, a feudal system that our ancestors fled to the U.S. from Europe to escape. And, that's what's happening in West Virginia. If you want to see a glimpse of the future...go to West Virginia and see how the corporations are running that state and running it into the ground."
"Coal has not brought prosperity to West Virginia, coal has brought poverty..."
"...the most recent study shows that for every dollar that coal brings to the state of West Virginia, the state loses five dollars in subsidies and through other losses"
"West Virginia, my father used to say, ought to be the richest state in the country because of the amount of resources in the state, but instead it's the 49th poorest state in the country. It has some of the worst health, and the closer you get to the coal fields, the poorer the people get. Ninety five percent of the coal in West Virginia is owned by out-of-state interests, and they have broken the unions, so they're leaving nothing in that state except for denuded landscapes that will promise nothing but permanent poverty for the people of West Virginia."
"One of the big issues that we talk about is the subversion of democracy in the state, that goes hand-in-hand with the destruction of the environment. That the democracy is destroyed at the local level, that citizen participation is eroded, [as is] the transparency of government, that the agencies that are supposed to protect the public from pollution, from big industries are captured by those industries, and are essentially sock puppets for those industries.(continued)