Earth Day 2011

I spent my first Earth Day in 1970 working with a group to remove refuse from the banks of Coney Island Creek. It was the dawning of the environmental movement in the US, ignited by the iconic "Earthrise" photos taken by Bill Anders and Gene Borman during the Apollo 8 mission. We had our first glimpse of what Carl Sagan would later call "The Pale Blue Dot" and it made us realize how small and isolated our home planet is. Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" had awakened us to the dangers of pesticides and Jacques Cousteau was documenting the collapse of the Mediterranean ecosystem.

Environmentalism grew through the 70's as Richard Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency and legislation tumbled forth from Congress with idealistic names like the "Clean Water Act", the "Safe Drinking Water Act" and the "Clean Air Act". Woodsy the Owl exhorted us to "Give a Hoot, Don't Pollute" and a crying Native American reminded us daily to "Keep America Beautiful". We learned to reuse and recycle, and vowed that never again would the Cuyahoga River catch fire. Mile-long gas lines taught us how fragile our fossil fuel supply chain is, and made us resolve to seek alternative fuels.

As I survey the landscape some 40 odd years later, on the eve of Earth Day 2011, I fear that we have once again lost our way. We have done little to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and our growing addiction combined with dwindling reserves has driven us to destructive extraction methods like mountaintop-removal coal mining, hydraulic fracturing for natural gas and processing tar sands for oil. Legislative wrangling, administrative loopholes and creative judicial interpretations allow these operations to circumvent the environmental protection intended by the Clean acts of the 70's. We've endured two massive crude oil spills in the most productive marine regions this country has to offer and we've over-harvested our seafood to the point of extirpating and nearly extincting several key species. What we haven't over-fished, we've poisoned with uncontrolled runoff and smothered in dead zones caused by eutrophied waters.

Our ceaseless combustion of coal dumps tons of mercury into our coastal waters which rapidly methylates and amplifies up the food chain, rendering the remaining large fish unfit to eat more than once a month. The multi-billion dollar fossil fuel industries, with the cooperation of some large media outlets, have waged a large-scale misinformation campaign and succeeded in tarring environmentalists as Socialist loons out to destroy America. All while they themselves are literally poisoning the air, water and land that we need to live. What is more frightening, nearly half of the population views research on climate change, ocean acidification and sea-level rise as an academic entitlement program designed to make scientists wealthy.

We are in deep trouble. Read more!