At 33, Earth Day is suffering from middle age, trading its youthful aspirations as a protest against pollution for corporate marketing opportunities.
There's the coffee mug bearing the Earth Day and Waste Management logos. Then there are the flowers being sold by Organic Bouquet Inc. And, of course, what would the day be without the ubiquitous T-shirt?
"I think what's going on, what we've seen, is all sorts of people celebrate Earth Day and some are doing it for cynical reasons and some are doing it because they love clean air and clean water," Sierra Club spokesman Allen Mattison said. "You've seen it with politicians for years. They plant a tree on Earth Day and the other 364 days they're voting against the clean air and clean water protections they mouthed support for. Corporations, like politicians, must be held accountable. They've got to walk the walk, not just talk the talk."
The annual rite of spring, where we pay homage to the environment, got its start in 1970, the brainchild of former Sen. Gaylord Nelson, D-Wis. Now 86, Nelson still is trumpeting his environmental agenda, focusing attention now on population issues.
"If you double the population or quadruple it, then the infrastructure has to double or quadruple," Nelson said. "One hundred million more cars would be added to the roads. What does that mean? The public has a right to know where the policies are leading the country.
"A national dialogue over sustainability will clarify the major issues that we must address and provide a political roadmap to the goal of sustainability," Nelson told a Washington rally. He also called on President George W. Bush to deliver an annual state of the environment speech.
The first Earth Day saw 20 million people staging peaceful demonstrations to call attention to environmental problems. Nelson, who sponsored the first legislation to outlaw the pesticide DDT, and activist Denis Hayes organized a nationwide teach-in. It led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and a slew of laws including the Endangered Species Act, the Federal Clean Air Act, the Federal Water Pollution Control Act and the Toxic Substances Control Act.
"If 33 years had gone by and nobody wanted to be identified with Earth Day, it would have been a complete flop," Nelson told the Houston Chronicle. "Now everybody, even polluters, wants to be identified with Earth Day and that means the whole idea has been a success."
Environmentalists have challenged Bush administration policies, accusing Washington of rolling back many of the gains of the past quarter-century.
Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe agrees: "In the last two years, the Bush White House has weakened the Clean Air Act, removed millions of acres of wetlands from protection, exempted the oil and gas industry from pollution rules, opened wilderness areas to roads and traffic and pushed to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling.
"There is no issue on which President Bush is further out of the mainstream than the environment. His administration has gutted environmental protections and allowed polluters to rewrite the laws of the land, endangering our clean air and clean water and putting America's families at risk."
Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. John F. Kerry used Earth Day to criticize Bush for breaking campaign promises to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and for repudiating the Kyoto treaty on global warming.
"Under President Bush, America's environment has become endangered, imperiled, and weaker," the Massachusetts senator said in a speech prepared for the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests in Concord, N.H., according to the Boston Globe.
In the speech, Kerry called for the establishment of "environmental empowerment zones" modeled after economic empowerment zones, and a new environmental justice position at the Environmental Protection Agency.
Mattison said the real purpose of Earth Day is to remind people they care about clean air and water and beautiful landscapes.
"Things are getting cleaner," Mattison said.
Mattison, however, criticized the practice of utilities trading energy credits.
"Every American wants and deserves clean air. By allowing energy trading you're saying if we have cleaner power plants in California, Californians have cleaner air and can trade off credits to plants in Ohio so people in Cleveland can choke on dirtier air," Mattison said. "It doesn't seem fair."
Mattison hailed the recent Evangelical Environmental Network campaign targeting gas-guzzling sport-utility vehicles with the query, "What would Jesus drive?"
"It got people talking. It certainly raised awareness of the issue that what you drive matters," he said.
But Lexington Institute fellow Bonner R. Cohen argues the environmental movement, particularly groups like Greenpeace and the Natural Resources Defense Council, actually do more harm to the environment than good by arguing against the use of chemicals that have led to improved life expectancy in the United States and elsewhere.
"Environmental activists demanding reductions in man-made emissions of greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels because of their alleged effect on 'global warming' threaten to deny Americans continued access to affordable energy," Cohen said, noting that some of the worst pollution is in developing nations where people lack access to affordable energy and are forced to burn dirtier fuels.
