Earth Day is next Wednesday. Check your local listings to
find out how you can celebrate the bountiful beauty of Mother Earth,
the sacredness of all her life and living systems, right here in Hali.
Then we can go back to beating the shit out of her on Thursday.
Earth Day has always reminded me of an abused woman’s birthday.
Hubby (or our culture of exploitative control freakism) gives his
knuckles a rest, takes her (or the planet) to dinner at a fancy
restaurant (or a litter pickup at a local elementary school), and
graciously toasts her splendour (or makes a speech about aggressive
greenhouse gas emission targets). Maybe when they get home he lovingly
seduces her (or we watch ourselves on the news). Next day he realizes
she forgot to feed the cat (or has some uranium left in her ground),
and BAM! She’s back in traction.
So what was the point of the fancy dinner/litter pickup? Answer: to
make those of us living in this culture of exploitative control
freakism feel good about ourselves. OK, we’re not perfect, but things
are on track. We’re raising awareness here. We’re teaching the children
well and letting them lead the way. Once we get a few more nuclear
power plants up and running, and improve the efficiency of our
technology a bit, maybe find another planet out there somewhere to move
to, everything will be fine. And we’ll treat that other planet better,
because with a fresh start, we can change.
BAM! Back in traction.
As an environmentalist, it’s hard for me to bash Earth Day like
this. So many good, brilliant people get excited about it, and invest a
lot of energy organizing events for it. And the events are
fine—great, even. This year there will be a walk for water in Point
Pleasant Park to raise money for Nova Scotia Nature Trust. Staff from
Aveda salons will volunteer their personal time and abundant energy to
raise money for land and water protection. Nothing wrong with that at
all.
But as a writer, I have to be honest and say that the current
concept of Earth Day is dishonest. Its origins are admirable. It
started in 1970 as a massive environmental education forum in the
States, with full recognition of the enormous complexity and scale of
the challenge of moving toward a healthy, sustainable environment. Its
organizer, US senator Gaylord Nelson, was radically pushing for an
activist movement, and in doing so rallied diverse groups working on
what had until then seemed like disparate issues, from saving the
whales to ending nuclear proliferation to smarter waste disposal.
That unity was inspiring, and catalyzed numerous American
regulations and institutions designed to protect the environment.
Whether these regulations and institutions are effective or not is
another difficult discussion, but to me they are far preferable to the
millions of one-off events now being held each year in 170 countries,
because they at least attempt to have a lasting, positive impact. Earth
Day events pretend we can change if we spend a couple hours a year
picking up trash that shouldn’t be there in the first place, that will
return sure as the sun the very next day anyway.
Sadly, a little litter is among the least of our problems. Here are
but a few of the abuses we have recently hurled at the same Mother
Earth we celebrate on April 22:
Last November, the Irving-owned vessel Shovel Master, which was
being towed from Saint John in a storm, sank in choppy waters off
Yarmouth, with its 70,000 litres of diesel. After it settled underwater
for five months an Environment Canada committee got around to ordering
Irving to keep an eye on it. BAM! Traction.
Suncor, soon to be merged with former crown corporation Petro
Canada, recently received a tap on the wrist for its ongoing bitch-slap
of the Athabasca River in Alberta. Specifically the fine it received
was for 90 counts of dumping under-treated chemical wastewater, then
lying about it to regulators. Those 90 counts are but a toxic drop in
what Andrew Nikiforuk calls “raised toxic lakes,” 60 square kilometres
of waste taking a long toxic leak over Northern Alberta’s once pretty
face. Traction.
Also: 90 percent of large predator fish are gone. And: the oceans
are filling up with massive dead-zones where nothing can live, and
islands made of plastic refuse. Oh right: climate change.
Earth Day, National Aboriginal Day, Family Day, International
Women’s Day, all are well-intentioned efforts to educate and, thus, to
change. All come and go, once a year, without changing the abuser, the
culture of exploitative control freakism. The culture of us.
What do you think of Earth Day? Let me know at
chrisb@thecoast.ca.
This article appears in Apr 16-22, 2009.
At least Earth Day is better than that Earth Hour bullshit, and I love the comparison Mr. Benjamin. Although I’d like to note that despite the fact that the Earth is still in terrible danger (and will continue to be as India and China become more and more industrialized) many strides have been made in a relatively short period of time, thanks to the awareness that Earth Day brought in the early years of it’s inception.
Kudos to you for this piece.
Einstein said, “Problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.” Most people don’t really get this — they just continue to come up with ideas for solutions, have lots of reasons for why they sound good or will have an impact, and then they wonder later on why things don’t change as much as they hoped.
Another relevant famous quote: “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” The road to hell is paved this way not because we shouldn’t have good intentions but because they just aren’t enough. We have to get to a different level of thinking, as Einstein says, in order to find the ways to truly make good on our good intentions.
I constantly think about how even if every good idea people have for clean energy were implemented, everyone is just clueless about how this will be insufficient to achieve a sustainable human economy/culture. Clean energy can be used at a greater rate than it can be produced just as surely as dirty energy can.
When people put their eye on the right ball, everything else will work itself out somehow. As long as people keep their eye on everything else, nothing will ever really get worked out.
In reference to Mark’s comment that “when people put their eye on the right ball, everything will work itself out…”, some people need to be pushed in the right direction. The good thing about Earth Day (or at least what it used to be able to do) is provide the opportunity to give those stuck under a rock a nationalized push in the right direction. I’ve always loved the idea of Earth Day, mostly because I get to hear others talk about what I do all year long. As mentioned in Chris Benjamin’s article though, it’s just not enough, yet.
Human beings are selfish animals, and most of their actions are driven by the desire to make themselves feel good and to limit pain and inconvenience. In general, most human beings will not change a behaviour unless the result of that behaviour is somehow negatively affecting their general well-being. Case and point, the only time we started to see any really large-scale actions to reduce energy consumption was when oil and gas prices hit all-time highs. Now that energy prices have eased, we are seeing a decline in these actions. Why? Because people only really decided to change when the financial burden became too much.
Based on this premise, we can have all the Earth Days and Earth Hours that we want, but it is really just masturbation. It feels good, but nothing is really accomplished.
At the end of the day, human nature will continue to override the research and messaging on environmental degradation that we are now bombarded with. I say this as someone who has studied and worked in the environmental field for years, and who believes humans are having a terrible effect on the planet and all the other creatures and organisms that share it with us.
Ultimately I think our selfish human nature will continue to lead us down the same path until something really dramatic happens that has a significant effect on a large number of people’s well-being.
Discuss…
Yowsa! Ya hit a nerve with this one Chris, well done! I couldn’t agree more with the article and the aftershock comments. So if we all feel this way, how come…..? BAM!….Greed and individual self-servitude strikes again! Ah, the humanoid dream (often aliased as the American Dream).
Those infamous Dead Zones can actually support one form of life I heard, jelly-fish thrive in these areas, apparently. This would appear to be nature’s way of starting over again. A 600 million year old life-form that have adapted and survived it all, and they still know how to cope within such an environment, I solute them! The oceans include about 97% of the Earth’s habitable space, the jellies will get it all and we humanoids will be left with what is left of the last 3%. And ironically, jellies don’t even have a brain! Hail to the jellies!
No mystery here, the same thing has been going on forever. The big corporations who run the country are also a big part of the political fabric. Government writes policy, but politicians are heavily influenced by the corporations who support them politically $$$. One drives the other. To develop policy which would truly protect our environment would mean undue hardship $$$ for the corporations, and hence they would pull their support $$$ of the politicians who wrote the policy. I wouldn’t expect to see an earth shattering change anytime soon. However we might just shatter the earth while we’re waiting.
moosepuck: Agreed on all counts. Was only underscoring why Earth Day isn’t enough, not trying to totally invalidate it as worthwhile push that some people need.
nayer and Bruce: W/r/t selfishness and greed, if you read The Selfish Gene by Dawkins, The Evolution of Cooperation by Axelrod, Symbiotic Planet by Margulis, and if you get clear on the differences between biological evolution and cultural evolution and how they interact, it becomes clear that the notion of humans or any other living things being selfish is nowhere near the whole truth. Selfishness and selflessness blend in all dynamic systems. It’s only in civilized culture that these get fragmented and pushed to their extremes so that some people imagine people to be — or to need to be — all one or all the other. In the end, though, absolutely agreed, the key is to play to people’s well-being. Perhaps like addicts many people do need to hit rock bottom first — something really dramatic happening to wake people up to awareness of what serves their well-being. But the fact is that their well-being isn’t served now, and it is possible to bring that awareness to many without waiting for them to hit rock bottom. That, to me, is what’s most worth doing. And given human psychology and memetics, it’s likely to take a very different form than what most people imagine — and a very different form than typical Earth Day activities.