An Earth Day Greeting Card

I was never a big fan of Hallmark holidays, and today feels like another one of them. Earth Day was not always like that. The first one in 1970 had real significance.

45 years ago the world seemed to be changing for the good. The actions of the baby boomer, flower power generation were nudging industrial civilization away from the abyss.

The early 1970s would see a Republican (!) President establish the Environmental Protection Agency, giving the environment near Cabinet-level importance. We also saw passage of two most important environmental laws, The Clean Water Act and The Clean Air Act.

But then something happened. Industrial civilization fought back both politically and culturally. The environmental activists who helped win us those early victories were drawn into the political economy they were out to change.

I had opted to work within the system at the Natural Resources Defense Council, but I believed that our legal advocacy was on the path to deeper changes to our economic and societal systems... the Clean Air and Clean Water acts created major opportunities for lawyers and others, but in pursuing them we were drawn ever more completely into the system. ...We opted to work within the system of political economy that we found, and we neglected to seek the transformation of the system itself.

-- James Gustave Speth

Enter the era of greenwashing. Greenwashing provides the appearance of action without meaningful results. It also is a clever blame-shifting maneuver.

Remember, pollution is your fault, not the fault of those who profit from it.

In these and other ways industrial civilization co-opted the environmental movement and placed it at heel, where it has remained until today.

When viewed on a broad, planetary scale, humanity has never seen the Earth in greater peril. We place our faith in science and technology to solve our environmental problems, in hopes that we may avoid making inconvenient changes to our living arrangements.

In service to these hopes the term “sustainability” has become unavoidable in business, governmental and academic sectors, but with little context. Now get a load of this: none of the world’s top industrial sectors would be profitable if they were paying the full cost of their activities, if they fully paid for the Earth's finite resources they rely on such as clean air, fresh water and healthy soil.

They take what is a birthright for us all, and then privatize the economic gains. This is why our neoliberal, materialist economy is consuming the planet. It assumes that growth (in population, material wealth, consumption) must and will continue indefinitely. It is the very definition of unsustainable.

This makes the whole notion of “sustainability” as currently practiced a bad joke. If you are not in the business of changing the way we value and measure “progress”, you are not in the sustainability business. It's like bailing out the Titanic with teacups.

So go ahead. Celebrate the day. Send the Earth a card, one printed on 50% recycled-content paper.

Or for true inspiration, read the Blue River Declaration and celebrate a greenwash-free Earth Day.