SPECIAL REPORT

Earth Day at 40: Finite Limits With Endless Possibilities

By Bart Brodsky

Earth Day is "the largest secular holiday in the world, celebrated by more than a half billion people every year" in over 175 countries, according to Earth Day Network organizers.

Everybody loves Mother Earth, right? Pushback from global warming deniers notwithstanding, ecology has become as American as motherhood and green apple pie. And everybody wants a piece of the pie! Dirty coal is being scrubbed "clean," nuclear energy in now "green," and even the Pentagon is installing solar panels on military bases. Greenwashing? Perhaps, but Earth Day is supposed to be a celebration, so let's rock on!

	SUDDENLY HUMANS HAD A PLANET TO TEND TO: Inspired by Stewart Brand, NASA shared the first photos of Earth shot by Apollo 8 astronauts in 1968.

Why We Celebrate

Earth Day was founded by U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson (D-Wisconsin) in 1970 and promoted brilliantly by grassroots organizer Denis Hayes. Earth Day is celebrated in most countries on or about April 22, but there is also an Equinox celebration in late March hosted by the United Nations. Wide-ranging activities include green parties and beach patrols, noisy protests and solemn meditations, satellite conferences, Facebooks and Tweets.

Why celebrate Earth Day? Anthropologist Margaret Mead may have said it most eloquently:

"Earth Day is the first holy day which transcends all national borders, yet preserves all geographical integrities, spans mountains and oceans and time belts, and yet brings people all over the world into one resonating accord, is devoted to the preservation of the harmony in nature and yet draws upon the triumphs of technology, the measurement of time, and instantaneous communication through space."

What is the significance of Earth Day? Earth Day is all about understanding humanity's place in nature. A clean, wholesome environment is everyone's birthright! Unchecked growth is unhealthy, and technological culture has reached, if not surpassed, sustainable limits. The environmental movement catalogs many deep concerns, including overpopulation, pollution, resource depletion, species extinction, desertification, topsoil erosion, and most recently, climate change.

Estimates vary, but we would need the natural resources of perhaps four Earths if all 6.8 billion people on the planet were to adopt the typical American lifestyle. Blogger David Ng estimates that we'd need as many as 2,700 Earths if everyone lived like Tom Cruise. 2,700 Earths? Talk about high maintenance!

The solution isn't necessarily about doing with less, but doing things better, smarter, and in ways that protect the natural world. It turns out that we'd probably be happier and healthier in the process: Finite limits but with endless possibilities.

Connecting The Dots

Yes, everybody loves Mother Earth, but some of us literally love her to death. FOX New's Sarah Palin routinely fought environmental legislation during her aborted term as governor of Alaska, "Drill baby drill!" Palin has probably logged more wilderness time than most of us city dwellers ever will, but she still doesn't seem to "get it." Away from the cities and isolated from consequences, nature may indeed seem limitless and indestructible. But it's not just the yellow snow that will make you sick. Arctic snow is turning gray from Russian smoke stacks, causing it to absorb more solar heat and thus accelerate global warming. Not to pick on Russians, but the point is that everything is interconnected and we all have an impact. The Palins of the world, unfortunately, never connect the dots.

Fortunately, many of us do. In 1968 Stewart Brand of "Whole Earth Catalog" fame helped a generation to become environmentally aware by prodding NASA to share the first images of Mother Earth photographed from outer space.

Brand writes, "It is no accident of history that the first Earth Day, in April 1970, came so soon after color photographs of the whole earth from space were made by homesick astronauts on the Apollo 8 mission to the moon in December 1968. Those riveting Earth photos reframed everything. For the first time humanity saw itself from outside. The visible features from space were living blue ocean, living green–brown continents, dazzling polar ice and a busy atmosphere, all set like a delicate jewel in vast immensities of hard–vacuum space. Humanity's habitat looked tiny, fragile and rare. Suddenly humans had a planet to tend to."

Parable for A Small Planet

This begs the question: How fragile is our planet, and how close are we to destroying our niche? Alas, too close for comfort.

I like to invoke the parable of "The Lily Pad, The Frog Pond, and the Magic of Geometric Progression." Froggy and his friends live in an idyllic pond, but there's trouble on the water. Every day a lily pad doubles in size, and left unchecked in 30 days it will cover the entire surface of the pond, choking off oxygen to the critters below and killing all life in the pond. For the first couple weeks the lily pad is barely visible, hiding in a remote corner of the pond. On the 26^th day the lily pad covers barely one sixteenth of the pond, still looking pretty innocent. Doubling again and again, by the 28^th day the pad covers a fourth of the pond, a cause for concern, but apparently not an imminent threat. By the 29^th day the pond is half-obstructed, clearly a cause for alarm. But now there's just one day remaining before Froggy and his friends are smothered. How close are we humans to our own day of reckoning? Froggy would say, "It's later than you think!"

Let's put mankind's plight into biological perspective. Among the oldest species in existence are single celled organisms living at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean in the Mariana Trench. These "extremophiles" have found their niche and are essentially unchanged since evolving to their present forms some three plus billion years ago.

On land, dinosaurs were a dominant life form for about 200 million years, less than one tenth the time of extremophiles. Dinosaurs might still be here today had they not suffered apocalyptic climate change brought about by the impact of a gigantic asteroid.

Homo Sapiens is a relatively young species, only about 300,000 years old. Modern man's technological triumph, the Industrial Revolution, is only about 230 years old, roughly one millionth of the time that dinosaurs roamed the earth. Since the start of the Industrial Revolution we've increased our population tenfold, denuded continents, emptied ocean fisheries, precipitated mass species extinction, increased atmospheric carbon by 30%, and generally fouled our nests with thousands of unnatural chemical brews.

In the blink of an eye by cosmic measure, we have sorely tested Mother Earth's ability to sustain us in the style to which we've grown accustomed. Western civilization may be the ultimate Ponzi scheme, and as we all know, Ponzi schemes never end well.

Environmental Roots

The history of environmentalism is rooted in good science. In the early 1800s Thomas Malthus wrote that "population increases in a geometric ratio, while the means of subsistence increases in an arithmetic ratio." Any species that outgrows its niche threatens its own survival, and mankind is no exception.

One of the first New World environmentalists was Benjamin Franklin, who speculated that the vibrant health of colonists (as opposed to sickly Europeans) could be attributed to life-giving oxygen supplied by the dense forests surrounding the colonies. Alas, most of North America's verdant forests have since been replaced by suburban sprawl.

The modern conservation movement dates back to 1899, when charismatic naturalist John Muir inspired Congress to pass the National Parks Bill, saving vast tracts of wilderness in perpetuity. Otherwise Yosemite might well have become just another private gated community for the exclusive enjoyment of the superrich.

Still, conservation alone didn't go far enough. Ecology got serious in 1962, when Rachael Carson declared a "Silent Spring" because pesticides were killing the songbirds—and us, too. In 1968 biologist Paul Ehrlich warned of a human "Population Bomb" which threatened to overwhelm the planet. Despite charges of fear mongering, the Bangladesh disasters in the 1970s lent credence to some of Ehrlich's most dire predictions.

The first comprehensive study of resource availability was conducted by the Club of Rome, an international think tank, which published "The Limits to Growth" in 1972. It seems we were running out of almost everything, from oil and water to a vast array of precious metals vital to industrial production. The Club of Rome's grim projections were not uniformly accurate but did encourage massive recycling efforts and the development of alternative energy.

Political and economic prescriptions have been many and varied. Barry Commoner's "The Closing Circle" (1971) posited a socialist response to environmental challenges. Frances Moore Lappé's "Diet for a Small Planet" (1971) prescribed going vegetarian to cure world hunger. E. F. Schumacher encouraged local self-sufficiency in "Small Is Beautiful" (1973). Ernest Callenbach's "Ecotopia" (1975) envisioned a post-materialist utopia where people lived in harmony with nature. Paul Hawkin's "The Ecology of Commerce" (1997) factored environmental costs into market-based solutions. Which of these approaches is best? There may be no wrong answers. Does it matter whether pollution comes from a capitalist or a socialist smokestack? In this regard I'm a confirmed pragmatist, "neither left nor right, but green."

As a student at UC Berkeley in the 70s, I wrote a political science paper about how resource scarcity would impact the course of industrialization, life after "peak oil," to borrow M. King Hubbert's term. I naively envisioned self-sufficient wind and solar-powered communities living in geodesic domes designed by Buckminster Fuller. My prof, an old right-wing European, thought this so strange he asked me point blank, "Are you a communist?" Right there I had a Joe McCarthy flashback! Undeterred, I wrote an expanded version of my thesis for the Environmental Sciences department. There they liked the paper so much they offered me a teaching gig. I learned that if you sow enough seeds, some of them eventually take root.

Climate vs. Climategate

Before the 1990s climate change was barely a footnote in a vast catalog of environmental concerns. Since the Kyoto Accord in 1997 and Al Gore's 2006 release of "An Inconvenient Truth," the threat of global warming has overwhelmed all other issues. Climate scientists have long suspected that the Earth was growing warmer but didn't really know why. Faster computers have now allowed them to become more confident in their analyses.

The overwhelming consensus among climatologists is that the planet is warming in large measure because we're burning too much fossil fuel. Some politically motivated climate change deniers have grabbed headlines by asserting that there is an international conspiracy of climate scientists who falsify data for profit (climategate), a completely baseless charge.  Nevertheless, a number of skeptics do have science cred. Yes, they tend to be geologists employed by oil and coal companies, but for the sake of argument let's say that they are right, that their product isn't the problem. The planet is still warming, the ice caps melting, the oceans dying, a billion people starving--and we're fighting wars for oil. Going green helps solve all these problems, no matter what the cause.

The multitude of environmental challenges requires a coordinated response unprecedented in human history. Al Gore brilliantly summarized the issues at stake in "Earth In the Balance" (1992):

"[W]e now face the prospect of a kind of global civil war between those who refuse to consider the consequences of civilization's relentless advance and those who refuse to be silent partners in the destruction. The time has come to make this struggle the central organizing principle of world civilization."

The international climate meeting in Copenhagen in 2009 elicited vague promises but no firm timetables from world leaders to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Collective inaction probably has more to do with short-term economic considerations rather than doubting the merits of climate science. As Deep Throat said to Bob Woodward in Watergate, "Follow the money." Oil and coal are still the main engines of prosperity, and renewables such as wind and solar, for all their promise, aren't always practical and cost-effective alternatives.

Getting from where we are to where we need to be with respect to energy production will require unprecedented political leadership as well as massive capital investments. The most direct way to fund this effort would be to tax the production of fossil fuels and use the revenue steam to develop renewables. The more dinosaur fuel you burn, the faster the windmills get built. James Hansen, NASA's chief climate scientist, supports this approach. Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman prefers "cap and trade," placing a ceiling on total emissions while allowing businesses to sell their pollution allowances to each other. Oil lobbyists and conservative politicians will give you a long list of reasons why they think both are terrible ideas. Meanwhile sea levels are rising and time is running short.

Environmental Heroes and You, Too!

Who are your environmental heroes? You can choose from scientists, celebrities, corporate CEO's, politicians, community organizers—you name it! In addition to names already mentioned, consider Michelle Obama with her White House vegetable garden; climate change crusader Bill McKibben; "green jobs" champion Van Jones; gutsy lawyer Erin Brockovich; radical activist David Brower; Zipcar ride share CEO Scott Griffith; Ed Begley Jr. with his bicycle-powered toaster; East Indian organizer Vandana Shiva; green physicist Fritjof Capra; animal advocate Jane Goodall; "No Impact Man," who erased his carbon footprint in New York City; Pierce Brosnan, the "James Bond" who fights to "Save The Whales." And here's an unlikely candidate: Ronald Reagan, who despite everything else, dined on family farm, hormone-free beef. Wow, organic Ronnie! Who else? How about YOU?

For Earth Day 2010, Earth Day Network is championing the Billion Acts of Green Campaign. The goal of the campaign is to aggregate the millions of environmental service commitments that individuals and organizations around the world make each year, sending a powerful message that people from all walks of life are committed to solving climate change.

And here are some ideas for making "Every Day Earth Day":

1) LIVE GREENER: From fluorescent lights to house cleaners, from carpooling to shopping at farmers' markets, consider the myriad of ways to green your lifestyle.

2) VOTE GREENER: Wherever there's a choice, vote for the greener candidates and ballot measures.

3) BUILD GREENER: Whether building new or retrofitting, select energy efficient appliances and natural building materials.

4) PLAY GREENER: Connect to your environment with nature walks, park visits, and eco-tours. Revitalize your spirit!

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