Ziptrek Ecotours

The People, Politics & Earth Day

June 2009

It has been thirty-nine years since the first celebration of Earth Day, on April 22, 1970. The first Earth Day had twenty million U.S. participants alone, many engaging in lively demonstrations: In New York, Fifth Avenue was closed to traffic. People picnicked on the sidewalk; dead fish were dragged through midtown. Students in Richmond, Virginia, handed out bags of dirt (to represent the “good earth”); demonstrators in Washington poured oil onto the sidewalk in front of the Interior Department (to protest recent oil spills); and in Bloomington, Indiana, women dressed as witches threw birth-control pills into the crowd (no one was quite sure why). In 1970, Earth day took seemed to spring directly from the will of the people. (Who remembers the  man who actually thought it up, Senator Gaylord Nelson, of Wisconsin?)

The President, Richard Nixon, was noticeably absent from the festivities, and made no public comment on them. Insensitive and unprepared as the administration was to environmental concerns, the grassroots movement appears to have spurred political action. Three months afterward, Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and five months after that he signed the Clean Air Act. The Clean Water Act, the Pesticide Control Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the Safe Drinking Water Act all became law by the end of 1974. That’s a lot of legislation, and since then, it can be argued that most efforts in environmentalism have been directed at simply defending these early achievements.

At the time of the first earth day, the term, “global warming” was barely in circulation. The small group of scientists concerned about the rising CO2 levels used the phrase “inadvertent climate modification”- and actual warming had yet to be clearly detected.

Now that we are well aware of the consequences of unabated CO2 emissions, meaningful action will require legislation even more far-reaching than the Acts of the 1970s, and there are encouraging signs that the administration in the United States understands this. But does the public? Polls show American voters regard the environment in general, and climate change, in particular, as middling concerns at best.  One recent survey by the Pew Research Center ranked “dealing with global warming” at the bottom of a list of twenty choices, far below “strengthening the nations economy” and “reducing health care costs” and even below unspecified “global trade issues”. The recession is eroding the enthusiasm of the public for enacting measures to deal with climate change, just when an administration seems willing to pay attention. Earth Day will celebrate its fortieth anniversary next year, and will likely not be fuelled by the public vigour from which it sprang. Regardless, we should note, the planet is not waiting for the political and public will to allign.