Inaction equals death

By Weekly Archive On Apr 25, 2012

I write this on Earth Day, Sunday, April 22, 2012, the forty-second anniversary of the date that has come to symbolize the birth of the environmental movement.

Did you catch all the celebrations, read the numerous headlines in the paper and watch all the television specials?

Not likely. In Miami as in most of the nation, Earth Day events were sparse. National media coverage was minimal.

I spent part of the day at Bill Baggs state park, a historical, recreational and environmental site. But there was nothing there to indicate this was a special day. And there was the normal amount of plastic – a whole lot – of every description, plus other debris washed up on the shore, discarded in the sand and beneath the water.

What happened to Earth Day? I would bet that if you took a poll in August or December – any month but this one – more than 95 percent of Americans would not be able to come up with the correct date. Many would not know there still is such a day.

It’s not as if that the initial Earth Day impelled us and the rest of the world to solve the environmental problems that motivated the movement. Yes, there has been progress on a number of fronts and in many places. Some rivers and bays have been partially cleaned, and the air in some cities is more breathable. In the 1970s the United States created the Environmental Protection Agency, the first such agency in the world, and today almost every country has some sort of environmental authority, laws, and regulations.

There are environmental organizations of every stripe, from those that have become business-friendly to a fault, to militant groups like Greenpeace and beyond to the miniscule lunatic fringe of the movement that practices eco-terrorism. And that’s not counting all the fake groups that fly the green flag but are really corporate fronts.

Yet the very low profile that increasingly has characterized Earth Day isn’t just the result of the institutionalization of environmentalism, much less a sign of success. The fact is that overall and on the really big questions things have gotten worse – much worse in some cases – since 1970.

Emissions of greenhouse gases have risen dramatically. Consequently, we are on a path of disaster when it comes to global climate change. The overwhelming consensus among the experts is that we have little time to avert a climate catastrophe and that only radical change, not only in fossil fuels consumption but in the economy and the society as a whole, has any hope of success.

Of course, in some areas we already have done irreversible damage: we are killing off species at a rate surpassed only a few times in the long history of life on the planet. And those extinctions were caused by catastrophic natural events, such as the collision of Earth with a comet. But the bell does not toll only for the polar bear; it tolls for thee.
On issues such as global warming, there might still be barely enough time to make a difference. What is absent is will, personal and political.

At the individual level, for decades American consumers opted en masse for huge gas-guzzling trucks and SUVs, eschewing smaller, more fuel-efficient cars. Only the steep rise in the price of gasoline has been able to effect a significant change in consumer choices. Don’t look for these people to remember Earth Day.

Now the Chinese economic boom also has produced a sharp increase in car ownership in that huge country. Next in line in the car-buying spree is another giant – India. The trend toward the car as the preferred form of transportation in emerging economies seems unstoppable. Yet three billion Chinese and Indians with cars would be an environmental nightmare and an unsustainable proposition.

At the global, political level, the United States, once the leader in environmental protection, and by far the biggest per-capita polluter in the world, has for the last two decades assumed the role of spoiler, not only failing to agree to international attempts to do something about climate change such as Kyoto, it has actively worked to sabotage any serious global plan.

The bad example has given further ammunition to cases like China who argue that the West developed unimpaired by environmental concerns and that they should be allowed to do it too. This has set up a game of “you first, no, you first” which has led to inaction. What we are talking about now is not just the fate of Earth Day but that of Earth itself, very much including that of its homo sapiens population.

You don’t have to be a neo-Malthusian to know that the nub of the problem is and has always been that our economic and social system, capitalism, which now for the first time in history spans the globe, depends on infinite growth. The planet’s resources and capacity to withstand environmental aggression, however, are finite.

But no one in authority in the spheres of politics or business wants to talk about this fundamental dilemma. It’s political poison.

So, why bother to write about the pathetic observation of Earth Day when there are much bigger fish to fry? Why it matters is that the path to ecological, environmental, and ultimately systemic ruination is so deeply ingrained in the most fundamental institutions, backed by such powerful economic and political interests, grounded in so many consumer preferences and habits of mind, that only a new burst of consciousness and a wave of massive mobilization can overcome the inherent resistance to change. And Earth Day is a useful predictor of the prospects for such an explosion of consciousness and collective action.

In the early days of the AIDS pandemic, the gay community adopted the saying “silence equals death.” On the future of Earth, we can say that inertia equals death, apathy equals death, impasse equals death, and inaction equals death.