Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumWhy Climate Journalists Hate Earth Day
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The celebration on April 22 started with the best of intentions in 1970part of a radical, nationwide movement that also helped establish the Environmental Protection Agency and extend the Clean Air Act. In recent decades, though, Earth Day has felt a bit more nebulousand susceptible to cliché, pablum, window dressing, and corporate greenwashing. Reliably, at least one oil major each year uses the day to release some bonkers ad copy suggesting theyre environmentalists.
TNR has published several pieces about this long-running trend, from Bradford Plumers short post in 2008 comparing the corporate co-opting of Earth Day to Christmas to Emily Atkins 2017 classic about Earth Day having become a corny celebration of green living mostly for white and privileged people, while low-income and minority populations face toxic air and water every day. Going forward, she wrote, the onus is on the more privileged classes to change Earth Day from a feel-good exercise for well-off liberals to a day of mass activism to help the underprivileged, who have more immediate concerns than environmental injustice (let alone global warming).
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Denis Hayes, the original organizer of Earth Day in 1970, offered five suggestions to Outside magazines Heather Hansman last year: Focus on the biggest, and ideally the most discrete, issue (that would be emissions); name a clear enemy; pinpoint specific political changes (as when Earth Day activists identified the dirty dozen congressmen in flippable districts who were blocking environmental policy); take the imperfect, passable policy over no policy at all; and give people a goal that doesnt feel hopeless.
Notably, none of these sound much like the program youll see if you visit EarthDay.orgs rundown for 2023. The official theme is Invest in Our Planeta word choice evoking start-up culture, business-led solutionism, and so-called sustainable investment, none of which have performed all that well in recent years when it comes to reducing emissions. (In any event, the right is now engaged in all-out war on the entire idea that investment should be sustainable.) Under the heading How to Do Earth Day 2023, visitors are offered six ideas: Climate Literacy, End Plastics, Plant Trees, Vote Earth, Global Cleanup, and Sustainable Fashion. If Hayes is right, then for Earth Day to be effective again, it might need to choose one issue. It might need to be more explicitly political and less universally inoffensive. A useful Earth Day might not look like a product you can buy but a fight you can sign up forand an affirmative vision of what winning the battle might look like.
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https://newrepublic.com/post/171840/climate-journalists-hate-earth-day
CoopersDad
(2,200 posts)...a marketing opportunity.
"start-up culture, business-led solutionism, and so-called sustainable investment"
Ironic, given the reality that it's this very economic model that has created the crisis, profit > planet, or:
"How can we be less bad without giving up all the goodies we love?" And the answer is, "We can't".
Far too many of us are using far too many resources and all trends are in the wrong direction.
NNadir
(33,586 posts)...an oxymoron.
Of course, that might be because I have a hard time believing that someone like, say, Joe Romm or Bill McKibben, would qualify as such.