Does Earth Day Matter?
The teach-in organizers wanted to avoid the polarizing politics of confrontation. But despite efforts to distance themselves from the activist movements of the 1960s, the new environmentalism was largely seen as an extension of them.” We didn’t want to alienate the middle class…” said Denis Hays, the 25 year old Harvard Law Student and teach-in organizer. And for the most part, they didn’t. Estimates of the overall number of participants were as high as 10 million, and the gatherings were largely peaceful and non-confrontational.
Other events, however, maintained the oppositional flavor of the New Left and anti-war demonstrations of the 1960s. At the University of Alaska, Secretary of the Interior Hickel was booed off the stage when he laid out administration support of the Alaska pipeline. In Denver, antinuclear activists presented the Colorado Environmental Rapist of the Year award to the Atomic Energy Commission. And who could forget about the activists in Florida who presented a dead octopus at the headquarters of Florida Power and Light, a utility responsible for the thermal pollution of Biscayne Bay?
Earth Day 2008
I am not just advocating opposition for opposition’s sake. But it seems to me, for healthy debate to occur, we need to be hearing as many voices as possible – those in agreement, as well as those in dissent – and Earth Day has yet to create that forum.
With that said, I don’t consider Earth Day to be a bad thing – quite the contrary. Earth Day has the capacity to be so much more. It has the potential to be a powerful tool for education, discussion, and the mobilization of concerted political action on behalf of the environment. Earth Day could even be a national holiday, recognized with all of the rights and privileges associated with the title. Earth Day could take on greater political significance were heads of state to assemble along with heads of environmental groups, trade associations, labor unions, and indigenous populations. All of this is what Earth Day could be, but we are not there…at least not yet.
(1) Gottlieb, Robert. 1993. Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement.
(2) Gottlieb (p. 111)
Earth Day 1970 (Video) from the Butterfly Project
Photos: 1. Birmingham, AL (1972) - Courtesy of The National Archives. 2. pingnews.com
Everybody’s Irish on St. Patty’s day. Everybody’s an environmentalist on Earth Day. On St. Patrick’s we get drunk- I’m fine with that.
On Earth Day we get marketed “green” wares (mostly)-I’m not ok with that.
I’m Irish, but being Irish doesn’t mean much to me. Being an environmentalist does.
[...] Friedman Gets a Pie in the Face (w/video)”;As if on cue, the kind of oppositional tactics used by radical environmentalists at a few Earth Day 1970 events that I just wrote about, emerged on Earth Day 2008 when Thomas Friedman took a pie in the face at [...]
earth matter is good