Earthday at 40

I remember my parents not allowing me to attend the first Earthday. They said it was part of the conspiracy to placate the masses and distract the public from what was really going on. The river in our backyard was a colloidal suspension, (like mixing milk and orange juice, but it was green) After forty years, dredging toxic compounds that accumulated all those years ago has begun. The fish are still not safe to eat, nor the waters to swim. I have seen a vast improvement in the look, but not the smell of our river. As a child I wondered how large must the Great Lakes be, to be able to handle the incredible volume of toxic waste that flowed past our door.

In 1987, I got a chance to ride bicycle around all five Great Lakes and all I can say is that they are not very big! Even now the water that we drink contains prescription drugs. We didn't even know about the possibility of these contaminants being able to "make it" into the environment back then. I was able to get the message of sustainability , though we called it living better for less back then, to about ten million people. Six million on a single day through CBC radio during a morning commute. Cheap and simple ways to "Go Green" like substituting baking soda for chlorine tainted cleansers, combining trips, carpooling or bicycling rather than firing up the old fossil fuel burner unnecessarily. Back then, a family could save about seven thousand dollars per year by going from two cars down to one.

The air when I was a child was terrible, and is no better today, in spite of effectively cutting new lead emissions, sulfur dioxide and dry cleaning compounds many other contaminants have increased. We did score a noteworthy victory when the local electric generating station wanted to raise their smoke stack to "protect local air quality". Public interest groups said in court that the air farther away should not be negatively impacted to keep our air cleaner, so the stack raising project was put on hold. The courts interpreted the clean air act rules to mean that pollution should be reduced, not just diluted and to this day, the stack remains unfinished.

Burning of fossil fuels has increased exponentially at times in the last forty years. Each time we increase mileage standards, we increase the fleet size to offset any ecological gains. Infrastructure improvements have created millions more miles upon which people can now drive. Current government incentives go to larger and larger interests who more and more people drive farther to patronize.

Soils are still under attack. Mega-farm agribusiness is not concerned at all about naturally stable and ecologically diverse micro-climates. Drive through any agricultural land and you will see the stark reality that nearly every farmer has sterilized the soils and tilled wet and /or erosion prone areas to the point of having only dirt where a complex relationship of organisms once existed.

I truly hope that in forty more years my children won't say "Things are as bad as they ever were." At least when the first Earthday happened, there were still old timers who had not given up the old ways of farming that respected the earth, understood stewardship and at least rotated crops and left fallow land that "needed a rest." Farmers are under such pressure today that they can't possibly do what is best for their land. It would cost billions to reestablish hedgerows, intersperse forest cover to protect the fields from the ravages of wind and extremes of hot and cold as well as wet and dry.

We have had forty years to make a difference, but have mostly chosen to look the other way. If you are a child reading this, hold your parents to a higher standard. If nothing changes, protest like we did against the Vietnam War. If you are adults, hold your elected officials to the task of cleaning up the mess, stabilizing the cities and allowing local areas to support themselves. No one is served when the cities collapse. Before the next Wal-mart is subsidized, we need to make sure the urban core has decent food, water, shelter and air. If that means mass transit, so be it. If that means high speed rail, lets step up. We are living in a country whose people were told that the Erie Canal was just a pipe dream, The Mississippi could not be tamed, that they would never be able to lay railroad track over the Rockies, that a Trans-Atlantic cable was impossible, and other things that could have limited us, or what we could do. If anyone can reclaim a mutually beneficial relationship with Earth, it only makes sense that it should be us.

We have been lucky to have people looking out for us through the last forty years, but the lack of effective action to reign in the destruction of our planet has been staggering. Our efforts need to be more than redoubled. Effective action is much more than fair-trade coffee and reuse-able shopping bags. It lies in a complex matrix of relationships with one another, with community and with resources. As we learned as children about the water cycle, we need to look at the cycles of capital, of energy, of nutrients and of all the gifts that the natural world provides each discreet location. The give back needs to be reintegrated into our daily lives. That is what enriches community and raises our quality of life while reducing costs.