Earth Day Past, Earth Future

I was in upstate New York on the first Earth Day, fifty years ago.  I heard Ralph Nader speak at SUNY Buffalo.  There were speeches and marches and huge gatherings everywhere. Some 20 million marched that first Earth Day, about one in ten Americans. "This is the major thing that turned Nixon around, scared the hell out of him," Ralph Nader said recently, quoted in the New York Times.

  I had a conversation with an auto mechanic, about a national civil conservation corps to turn anti-pollution, recycling and other environmental efforts into new jobs and careers.  "Now you're getting me interested," he said.

We were young and angry and idealistic, sometimes ridiculous and worse, and we were right.

Five years before Earth Day 1970, the word "ecology" as it is now used was mostly unknown. After that Earth Day, the US got a cabinet department devoted to the "environment," another new concept, followed by state level departments that had to take into account that "environment" was more than natural resources for industrial exploitation and profit.  The first major environmental legislation, like the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, were enacted, and the states followed with their new laws.

I've marked Earth Days on this and a couple of other blogs nearly every year since 2004.  (I've gone back and added an Earth Day label to the ones on this blog.) That first essay in 2004 quoted another enviro veteran, James Speth, co-founder on the National Resource Council in his then-new book Red Sky At Morning, on the climate crisis: "If I were a young person being handed this problem by indulgent predecessors, I would be angry."

The young of 1970 are old, and the young of 2004 are middle-aged. The young of today are angry, and are again at the forefront of agitating for action to address the climate crisis effectively.  One of the latest protest themes is holding a "Funeral for Our Future."

It's familiar in that it's dramatic and eye-catching and involves dressing up.  It also seems to me to be both realistic and defeatist.  The young of the past did what we could against power we underestimated.  But now 7 in 10 Americans, the last holdouts on the planet, know the climate crisis is a serious threat to civilization and the planet.

Yes, it may well be too late.  It almost certainly is too late to prevent some substantial damage to the planet as a whole, as well as many terrible effects that have happened, are happening and will happen, from fires and floods to massive species extinctions.

So a funeral is warranted, in a couple of ways.  If people expected a future much like the present, with current levels of consumption and an unlimited capitalistic economy, that was never going to survive.  If the future that people expected involved the natural world as it is today--or perhaps as it was a few decades ago--then that, very sadly, even horribly, is unlikely.

But there is likely to be some sort of future for the younger generation, and it is time to get ahead of what it might be like.  Yes, absolutely, they must advocate for policies that might forestall the worse consequences of a deformed climate, which include the end of human civilization and the Earth as we know it.  But that's only one important task.

At this late date change on the scale necessary is unlikely, but possible.  This historical moment, during which there will be no demonstrations but which shows how quickly everything can be transformed (in this case by a virus pandemic), suggests that bigger and faster change can happen, and that bigger and more change could be quickly on the way.

There are pitfalls and gambles.  Incremental changes have been made, a lot of things are better (air and water got cleaner, we saved the whales) but things also got more complicated, and lots of things got way, way worse.  Big change usually takes a long time, and comes after many defeats, and I still believe that it's better not to make the perfect the enemy of the good.

President Obama took a chance, after his proposal for cap and trade on carbon emissions failed in Congress, to concentrate on securing the Paris Agreements, the first global commitment, not just to address the climate crisis, but to do anything on a planetary scale.  But with Trump's election, that gamble failed, at least for the moment.  President Obama knew it was just a foot in the door for what was truly needed.  Now we've slipped back instead of moving forward, and lost perhaps crucial years.

On the other hand, President Obama gambled on investing in clean energy technology as part of the Great Recession's Recovery Act, and that has paid off spectacularly.  Now clean energy is economically healthier than fossil fuel, and poised for greater growth.

I'd been deeply interested in the climate crisis since 1989, and I've been researching it and writing about it--in print and on the Internet--for at least 30 years.  For many of those years, the consensus was that it was not too late to successfully stop it, but urgent action was required.  But by 2010--and you can see this reflected in my Earth Day post of that year on this blog--I sensed a change, summarized by Bill McKibben's book Eaarth that the planet wasn't going to escape destructive change.  But urgent action could prevent worse.

Ten years later some things have been done and are planned, but mostly that action hasn't happened.  In a 2017 essay and a 2019 book (The Uninhabitable Earth), David Wallace-Wells wrote of the acceleration of climate crisis causing emissions and other phenomena.  He expressed his shock at learning that more than half the CO2 that humans have deposited in the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels was emitted not just in the past 50 years but in the last 25.  "That means we have burned more fossil fuels since the UN established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change than in all the centuries before," he said in an interview.  "So we have done more damage knowingly than we ever managed in ignorance."

  Now some are saying it's still possible to avert the worst in the far future, but the change has to be much larger and faster.The energy of the young can be the tip of the advocacy for that.  They must also advocate for closing the gap between the rich and the poor, so-called income inequality, as key to any future.

 But the young need also to prepare for their own future, and the climate governing the world in which they live will not be much affected by any changes now.  Their climate is already in the cards.  (A less polluted world however would certainly help, as well as a re-wilding one.)

What they can be doing for their future now is investigating what occupations and careers are going to be most needed and most useful in dealing with that climate and its effects, from research to public health, and seeing where their talents and passions lie, while they also advocate for change.  If they dwell on not being able to consume as much, or to be as likely to live as they've been told is the good life or the American Dream, then their lives will be awful, and they may wind up feeling like many of those attracted to Trump today.

But if they shift into seeing life as service, as being useful, as expressing love, and protecting and nurturing what life they can as their personal commitment, then they don't need to feel either despair or hope.  If they see their life's work as a vocation and not a career, they can enact hope, by what they do and how they do it.

"Hope is a state of mind, not of the world," said Vaclav Havel. It is "an ability to work for something because it is good."

And I would go farther: Hope is not a feeling. Hope is a commitment.  It isn't about the future.  It is about the present moment.

So perhaps on this Earth Day, instead of only a funeral for their future, and the mourning that comes with it, there might be the outlines of a rebirth.  The young are going to have to live in the world as it will be.  They can change some things about it, but mostly they can change how they will be within the world.  There may be temptations to overwhelming anger and despair, as well as to factionalism, scapegoating, discrimination and violence in a harder world.  It will not be an easier world, though perhaps in some ways a simpler one. Perhaps they will be given the opportunity for a greater nobility.