Volume
6 Science,
Technology & Society
Note: Denis Hayes,
chairman of Earth Day, practices law in San Francisco and teaches
engineering at Stanford University. Hayes also organized the first
Earth Day, April 22, 1970.
For many of my generation, involvement with serious issues---adult issues---began with some form of unconventional politics. Passive disobedience and freedom rides in support of civil rights. The endless town meetings of Vietnam Summer. Wearing gas masks down Fifth Avenue on Earth Day. Picketing a state legislature in support of the Equal Rights Amendment. Breaching the exclusion zone around the Seabrook or Diablo Canyon nuclear plants. Blocking a train carrying fissionable material to the Rocky Flats bomb factory in Colorado.
We were impatient and idealistic. The first generation with strontium--90 in our bones (from atmospheric nuclear testing), we trusted no one over thirty. Outraged over the state of the world we were inheriting, we vowed that we would pass on to our children a world that was peaceful, just, and ecologically sustainable.
Twenty years after Earth Day, those of us who set out to change the world are poised on the threshold of utter failure. Measured on virtually any scale, the world is in worse shape today than it was twenty years ago. How could we have fought so hard, and won so many battles, only to find ourselves now on the verge of losing the war? The answers are complex. But if we can understand the mistakes that led to our current dilemma, we may yet be able to redeem our youthful promises to the next generation.
The American conservation movement has a long, distinguished tradition, traceable back to such giants as Henry David Thoreau, John James Audobon, John Muir, and Aldo Leopold. However, the environmental movement is of much more recent origin. Individuals like Rachel Carson and David Brower sounded the environmental alarm in the 1960s, and events such as the Storm King fight against a power project on the Hudson River and the oil spill off Santa Barbara, California, in 1969 gave rise to local waves of concerned activists. But a full-blown national movement emerged only in 1970.
The modern environmental movement has enjoyed a string of spectacular successes---on Capitol Hill, in the courts, and in the streets. [The first] Earth Day's 25 million participants could not be ignored. Within months, the federal Environmental Protection Agency was created. Congress then swiftly passed the Clear Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and a host of other laws that fundamentally changed the rules under which American enterprise operates.
Yet dispute all these accomplishments, we are in serious trouble, and the problems are being compounded with every passing year. Environmental threats now vie with nuclear war as the preeminent peril to our species because our leaders have displayed neither the intelligence nor the integrity nor the guts to lead us into the Green Decade. Those of us who care about the earth must provide the direction and the energy for change if the world is to avoid calamity.
What went wrong during the the last twenty years? Occasionally we were blind sided. Problems snuck up on us before anyone recognized the threat they posed. We possess only a rudimentary understanding of the complex interactions of life in the biosphere and of the myriad subtle effects of human action upon long-established processes. If at the time of the first Earth Day a poll had been taken of industrial chemists, asking each to name ten triumphs of modern chemistry, most would probably have listed chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). Not until 1974---four years after Earth Day---did Prof. Sherwood Rowland and his colleagues at the University of California at Irvine discover that CFCs posed a theoretical danger to the stratospheric ozone layer that protects the earth from ultraviolet radiation. And it was not until 1985 that a British team discovered the huge seasonal thinning of the ozone layer over the Antarctic.
A common feature of all the problems we have been discussing is that none are the result of forces beyond human control. None are caused by sunspots or the gravity pull of the moon or volcanic activity. All are the result of conscious human choices. All can be cured by making other choices.
First, we need to make our lives congruent with our values. For most of us, there is room for improvement in virtually all spheres. We should conserve energy with easy things, such as replacing incandescent light bulbs with folded fluorescents, which are five times as efficient, insulating our water heaters, and doing laundry in cold water.
Integrating your values into your job and your other activities is another important step, but it still does not discharge your responsibilities.
On Earth Day---April 22, 1990---more than 100 million people around the world will make a personal affirmation of their environmental commitments. At the same time, we will send a message to our leaders that talk is no longer sufficient. Time is running out. We have, at most, ten years to embark on some undertakings if we are to avoid crossing some dire environmental thresholds. Individually, each of us can do only little.
Together, we can save the world.