Is Earth Day Taken Seriously - Anywhere?

Question

Hi - I am all for having a day to celebrate the Earth and to remind us that we have a vital interest in preserving it. But, I haven't seen it taken seriously since it first came out back when I was a kid.

Answer 1

Well I guess environmentalists take it seriously...

Answer 2

Totally agree with Kelli M. What happend to pasting a URL?? Earth day my toe. Sounds like the Martian celebration day for when the come defeat the earth in that great battle to come.

Answer 3

Honestly it's the first time me hearing about such a day. So thats a good question. Does anybody take it seriously?

Answer 4

Yea, the green folks go pick up garbage, and plant a few trees. It is not a huge big deal, though. One group sells trees through the year to finance things.

Answer 5

There is an earth day....
pffftt AHAHHAAHAHA
I see your point.

Answer 6

Earth Day
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Earth Day Flag. The Earth flag is unofficial and includes a photo of a NASA image
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Earth Day Flag. The Earth flag is unofficial and includes a photo of a NASA image

Earth Day is a name used by two different observances held annually in the (northern) spring, both intended to inspire awareness of and appreciation for the Earth's environment. Earth Day is in the public domain and open to all persons to shape. Some grassroots Earth Day organizers seek to move the date of the observance to the Summer Solstice, to take advantage of the warm temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere (where most people live) to create greater participation. [1][2]

"May there only be peaceful and cheerful Earth Days to come for our beautiful Spaceship Earth as it continues to spin and circle in frigid space with its warm and fragile cargo of animate life."

--United Nations Secretary-General U Thant
March 21, 1971. [3]

Contents
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* 1 The Equinoctial Earth Day
* 2 The April 22 Earth Day
* 3 Mixed Reactions
* 4 Growing Eco-activism before Earth Day 1970
* 5 The Aftermath of Earth Day 1970
* 6 The significance, or not, of the date
* 7 Earth Day in the Seventies
* 8 Earth Day 1980
* 9 Miscellaneous facts
* 10 References
* 11 External links

[edit] The Equinoctial Earth Day

The equinoctial Earth Day, also International Earth Day, is celebrated on the vernal equinox to mark the precise moment that spring begins in the Northern Hemisphere and autumn in the Southern Hemisphere. On equinox, night and day are in equal length anywhere on Earth. Therefore, a perfectly vertical pole standing on the equator at noon during equinox will not cast a shadow. At the South Pole, the sun sets and ends a six-month-long day while at the North Pole, the sun rises and hence ending six months of continuous darkness.

The United Nations celebrates Earth Day each year on the vernal equinox (around March 21). On February 26, 1971, UN Secretary-General U Thant signed a proclamation to that effect. At the moment of the equinox, it is traditional to observe the day by ringing the Japanese Peace Bell, a bell donated by Japan to the United Nations. [4]

John McConnell first introduced the idea of a global holiday called Earth Day at a UNESCO Conference on the Environment in 1969, the same year that he designed the Earth flag. The first Earth Day proclamation was issued by San Francisco Mayor Joseph Alioto on March 21, 1970. U Thant supported John McConnell’s global initiative to celebrate this annual spring equinox event. Secretary General Waldheim observed Earth Day with similar ceremonies in 1972. The United Nations Earth Day ceremony continued each year on the day of the March equinox (20th or 21st), with the ringing of the U.N. Peace Bell at the very moment of the equinox. In 1975 the U.S. Congress and President Gerald Ford proclaimed and urged observance of Earth Day on the March equinox.

"The earth will continue to regenerate its life sources only as long as we and all the peoples of the world do our part to conserve its natural resources. It is a responsibility which every human being shares. Through voluntary action, each of us can join in building a productive land in harmony with nature." President Gerald Ford Proclaiming March 21st as Earth Day[5]

[edit] The April 22 Earth Day
Gaylord Nelson
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Gaylord Nelson

In January 1970, the Environmental Teach-In decided to call their one-off event held on April 22nd, Earth Day. The day's success led to it becoming a regular event. Senator Gaylord Nelson, an environmental activist in the U.S. Senate, took a leading role in organizing the celebration, to demonstrate popular political support for an environmental agenda. He modeled it on the highly effective Vietnam War protests of the time. [6] Senator Nelson staffed the office with college students and selected Denis Hayes (a Harvard student and Stanford graduate) as the National Coordinator of activities. It was the era of student political activism and outdoor protests that attracted news cameras. The nationwide event included opposition to the Vietnam War on the agenda. Pete Seeger was a keynote speaker and performer at the event held in Washington DC. Paul Newman and Ali McGraw attended the event held in New York City. [7]

According to Santa Barbara Community Environmental Council:

"The story goes that Earth Day was conceived by Senator Gaylord Nelson after a trip he took to Santa Barbara right after that horrific oil spill off our coast in 1969. He was so outraged by what he saw that he went back to Washington and passed a bill designating April 22 as a national day to celebrate the earth." [8]

Senator Nelson stated that Earth Day "worked" because of the spontaneous response at the grassroots level. Though he felt his committee had neither the time nor resources to organize the 20 million demonstrators and the thousands of schools and local communities that participated, these things did happen. According to the Senator, "It organized itself." [9]

The "holiday" proved extremely popular in the United States. The first Earth Day, in 1970, had participants and celebrants in two thousand colleges and universities, roughly ten thousand primary and secondary schools, and hundreds of communities across the United States. More importantly, it "brought 20 million Americans out into the spring sunshine for peaceful demonstrations in favor of environmental reform." [10]

Senator Nelson directly credited the first Earth Day with persuading U.S. politicians that environmental legislation had a substantial, lasting constituency. Many important laws were passed by the Congress in the wake of the 1970 Earth Day, including the Clean Air Act, laws to protect drinking water, wild lands and the ocean. The EPA was created within three years of the first Earth Day. [11] In 1971 Senator Gaylord Nelson announced an 'Earth Week' — for the third week of April — as a yearly event. [citation needed]

[edit] Mixed Reactions

Not all reactions were positive. The event caused a backlash in some quarters, particlarly among black activists. "To some critics, the environmental movement resembles a children's crusade of opportunistic politicians, zealous Ivy Leaguers, longhaired ecoactivists and scientists who speak too sweepingly and too gloomily." [12] Even among those committed to saving the Earth, there is some skepticism about Earth Day rituals.

[edit] Growing Eco-activism before Earth Day 1970

The 1960s had been a very dynamic period for ecology in the US, in both theory and practice. It was in the mid-1960s that Congress passed the sweeping Wilderness Act, and Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas asked, "Who speaks for the trees?" Pre-1960 grassroots activism against DDT in Nassau County, NY, had inspired Rachel Carson to write her shocking bestseller Silent Spring (1962).

A later grassroots group, at Yaphank Long Island, revived the anti-DDT campaign under the leadership of local attorney Victor Yannacone and his family in the mid-1960s, and it was this group, the core of the Environmental Defense Fund, that eventually succeeded in having the chemical banned in the US. The Odum brothers had produced their groundbreaking Fundamentals of Ecology in 1953, and by the 1960s Howard T. Odum was making waves with his very radical, and thoroughly scientific, demand that economic decisions be based on ecological evaluations.

Other contributions to ecological thinking included Barry Commoner's 1966 Science and Survival, various writings of Jane Jacobs and Paul Goodman, and Murray Bookchin's eco-anarchist essays in Rat Subterranean News. The "Archdruid" David Brower's uncompromising, visionary campaigns for the Sierra Club set a high standard in both style and content; he was fired in 1969 by the Sierra board for his opposition to nuclear power. (Anti-nuclear demonstrations had been going on since the 1950s, for example against ConEd's plan to build its Ravenwood reactor in Queens, New York City.)

In June, 1969, ecology lept onto the agenda of America's underground newspapers with the story of Gov. Ronald Reagan's orders to open fire on demonstrators attempting to defend the gardens of Berkeley's People's Park, killing one and wounding others. It has been argued (e.g., in the Earth Island Journal, 1990) that the ecology movement was born in blood, with Reagan its midwife, almost a year before Earth Day.

[edit] The Aftermath of Earth Day 1970

The momentum of all this thought and action helped make Earth Day happen. it's generally accepted that this momentum was increased by the event itself. The first Earth Day is commonly credited with creating something called environmentalism, and/or giving a tremendous boost to the pre-existing conservation groups and the relatively new and radical grassroots ecology movement. This belief should not go unchallenged, however.

Earth Day's leading organizer Denis Hayes said he wanted Earth Day to "bypass the traditional political process," [1]. In a presumably intended strategic paradox, Earth Day's effect on that process was immediate and powerful. The passage of the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act, the creation of the EPA certainly indicate that Congress was moved to take ecological issues very seriously for a while. Even Governor Ronald Reagan of California was apparently a committed environmentalist in 1970.[2] It can be taken as a fact that Earth Day was a resounding success, if its short-term influence on politicians and legislation is the only yardstick.

But the belief that Earth Day had any positive effect on popular participation in envronmental efforts is harder to substantiate objectively. Some evidence strongly suggests the reverse. For example, C. B. Squire, in his 1974 book, Heroes of Conservation, expresses some surprise that membership figures for major conservation groups generally declined in the aftermath of Earth Day 1970, and still remained well below their pre-Earth Day peak in 1974.

Squire speculated that environmentalism had grown in other ways, such as informal community-based campaigns, perhaps more than enough to offset the big groups' losses. But as Squire pointed out, his optimistic conjecture can't be tested statistically, because the relevant statistics do not exist.

Earth Day no doubt inspired many worthy local efforts to improve the environment. There may (or may not) have been a net increase in scout troops collecting bottles and cans, mayors planting trees, schools sponsoring "don't be a litterbug!" poster contests, and important new legislation at the state and local level. All these good works don't exactly add up to a dynamic movement. But at least environmental campaigners could now expect accolades, endorsements, and appointments to committees, if they avoided controversy.

As Time's much-cited article noted, even "Earth Day organizers" feared that the loss of "a necessary adversary relationship" would lead to long-term setbacks.[3] Scientists had played a central role in building the campaigns of the Sixties, and their expertise was indispensable in difficult confrontations with corporate polluters and obtuse governmental policy-makers. But in a time of non-controversial community campaigns and "dumbed-down" messages, their rigorous arguments had less immediacy and fewer practical results; they tended to withdraw, back into academia. (This had long-term consequences.)

Thirty years later, the scientists engaged in environmental controversies had little contact with popular movements, and the most vocal were often paid advocates for the other side. Without scientists' input at their meetings and on the front lines, activists built weak arguments on shaky foundations.) The "we're all the same boat" speeches of Earth Day didn't sit well with a youth movement in the habit of confronting enemies - and young radicals were pulled another direction just eight days after Earth Day with Nixon's invasion of Cambodia and the subsequent campus shootings. (The best-known radical leader, Abbie Hoffman, returned to environmentalism. [4])

And why would the general public feel particularly motivated to join in post-Earth Day environmentalism? Its basic message seemed to be summed up in the much-repeated phrase, "people are the problem", or in Pogo's more creative variation on the same theme: "We have met the enemy, and he is us" (introduced on Walt Kelly's 1971 Earth Day poster).[5]
Pogo strip from Earth Day, 1971. Copyright 1971, 2005 OGPI
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Pogo strip from Earth Day, 1971.
Copyright 1971, 2005 OGPI

The then-widespread notion that population growth was the single root cause of all environmental ills suggested that the mere existence of people (above some random desirable number) was the essential problem.[6] Earth Day organizers of course did not set out to promote misanthropy or collective self-hatred, but they apparently failed to fire up the fighting spirit of a mass movement with strong, adversarial ideas.

In the ideological void, negativity seeped in —apocalyptic and apathetic at the same time. The quality, as well as the quantity, of public participation has not been helped by environmental organizers' ever-growing professionalism, requiring an ever-increasing emphasis on fund-raising; typically, a member is simply someone who sends money and has no other role in an organization.

Whether measured by the documented evidence (membership figures of mainstream conservation groups), or by subjective impressions (suggesting reduced mass involvement in grassroots campaign, and diminished public understanding of ecological science), Earth Day 1970 seems to have been at best ineffectual, arguably even counterproductive. Furthermore, the new organizations that were emerging in the period after Earth Day all had their roots in the earlier period.

Friends of the Earth was formed in response to Brower's 1969 firing by the Sierra Club. EDF came from the Long Island DDT case. Greenpeace grew out Vancouver's Green Panthers. [7] ZPG got started in 1968.

The event's leadership fractured over the years, with Hayes and Nelson and other widely-known Earth Day leaders usually favoring more programmatic and conventional public relations approaches to the observance(s).

Grassroots groups have sought to make Earth Day into a day of action which changes human behavior and provokes policy changes. [13] (Hayes believes that automobiles should be banned.) [14]

[edit] The significance, or not, of the date

April 22 is also the birthday of Julius Sterling Morton, the founder of Arbor Day, a national tree-planting holiday started in 1872. Arbor Day is celebrated on the last Friday of April. It has since been largely eclipsed by the more widely observed Earth Day, except in Nebraska, where it originated.

April 22 1970 was the 100th birthday of Vladmir Lenin. Time reported that some suspected the date was not a coincidence, but a clue that the event was "a Communist trick" - then quoted a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution complaining that, "Subversive elements plan to make American children live in an environment that is good for them."[8] J. Edgar Hoover may have found the Lenin connection intriguing. [9] The idea that the date was chosen to celebrate Lenin's centenary still persists in some quarters (see Talk:Earth Day), although Lenin was never noted for his environmental credentials.

Another interpretation of this date is simply that it fell between college students' Spring Break and final exams. [15]. The April 22 (1970) Earth Day organizers told John McConnell they chose that day because campus events could be scheduled conveniently. [16]

One other explanation was that April 22 was chosen as a tribute to actor Eddie Albert, who was an early celebrity spokesman for environmentalism.

Finally, the date has an odd poetic significance, in that it fell just nine months and a day after the Apollo 11 astronauts set foot on the surface of the moon. This provides at least metaphoric evidence to support the creation myth of environmentalism - which says it had a sort of immaculate conception inspired by the awesome vision of the blue-green living earth rising over the dead lunar horizon, and then was born on Earth Day 1970.

[edit] Earth Day in the Seventies

Earth Day fell on hard times during the Seventies. Perhaps the 1976 celebration in the small town of Westhampton Beach NY was typical of national trends. The village fathers tried to call it off, then rescheduled it to May. The biggest display was the town dogcatcher's arsenal of dog catching tools (a public relations effort in the wake of controversy over summary executions of loose dogs), and the only excitement was provided by a physical fight between a representative of Zero Population Growth and a Right to Life advocate. (Southampton Press archives, no free online access). The only "activist" table was publicizing the first public demonstration against the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant, scheduled for June 4th. (The antinuclear movement was rapidly becoming the most dynamic branch of environmentalism, both locally and globally.)

[edit] Earth Day 1980

In 1980, there was hope of an Earth Day revival, [10] with "nationwide commemorations of a decade of environmental concern." [11] Under a headline "The Ground is Shifting Under Earth Day," The New York Times observed,"The tenth anniversary of Earth Day comes tomorrow to an America growing cool to the pursuit of clean habitats and conservation." [12]

By far the most impressive part of the New York event was the coincidental spectacle of a vast dark plume of toxic smoke rising over a chemical fire in Elizabeth, NJ, just across the Hudson River. [13]. In Washington, DC, some found inspiration in the mysterious arrival of a large turkey on the White House lawn, which flew off before it could be caught for dinner; others said it was a stunt to promote Wild Turkey whiskey, leading a Times columnist to conclude, "Omens aren't what they used to be." [14]

[edit] Miscellaneous facts
Earth Day symbol
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Earth Day symbol

* The symbol for Earth Day is a green Θ (Greek theta) on a white background.
* The alternative rock group Dramarama released a song about Earth Day called "What Are We Gonna Do".[17]
* First conception of Earth Day originally was proposed in a memo to JFK written by Fred Dutton.