Yet Another Earth Day

Every April 22 since 1970, we have had a worldwide Earth Day celebration. Back in the early days, there seemed to be a lot of enthusiasm for it, but today it goes almost unnoticed in most places.

To a certain extent my view is influenced by the fact that back in 1970 I was just having my environmental awakening. I began to learn about nature, its details and its big picture, and about environmental problems such as pollution and the population explosion. In 1971, I gave the junior high graduation speech, “The Overcrowded Spaceship Earth.” It was actually not a cliché back then. Today, after a career as a scientific and environmental educator, author, and scientist, I have lost much of my enthusiasm, largely because I am now old and tired.

I was also enthusiastic about ecological issues when I was younger because I was a passionate Christian. God made the world, and He expected me to help take care of it. One way to show Him respect was to respect and love His creation.

But there seems to be less enthusiasm even in the younger people around me for environmental issues. This has occurred for bad reasons, but also for a good one.

• Bad reason: People have become overwhelmed by how many challenges there are just to get by from one day to the next. If you expect people to “get involved” with something other than mere survival, they may not have much time and energy left, especially if they have to work two jobs just to pay rent. On most days, here in Tulsa, there is a fatal shooting. At the end of the day, I breathe a sigh of relief: I didn’t get shot today.
• Bad reason: People today are overwhelmed with currents of selfishness. Marketers have convinced them that every moment of every day they should experience intense pleasure and that no task should be difficult. To a greater extent now than in the past people don’t care—sometimes because they are overwhelmed, and sometimes because they don’t want to.
• Good reason: Some of our problems are ecological being solved. The average fuel efficiency of vehicles is improving, because people aren’t stupid: most of them don’t want to waste gasoline. People actually want electric and other zero-emission vehicles. People are using less water per activity because they want to save water. People don’t want to live in toxic environments, and they will buy goods and services that are less toxic. Even the population explosion is cooling off a bit because people, especially women, don’t want to have a huge number of kids who are all sick and starving. A lot of people want to recycle.

Another change that has occurred is that the most common conservative Christian view now is not to take care of God’s good green Earth but to help destroy it. The more Christian you are, the more likely you are to have a big pickup truck, for example. True Christians, from the conservative view, means people who have guns, not people who recycle. Hiking in the woods is for wimps, they think. And why not? God is going to destroy it all anyway, and take His True Followers to a Heaven filled with endless barbecue roasts and truck racing. What about the Christians who do care about God’s Earth? You cannot see or hear them in the blasting din of Televangelist Churches. The answer to the question below, should Christians go green, is usually no.

The general attitude of people—a little bit more openness to environmental responsibility—probably would not have occurred without the environmental activism of earlier decades. I am glad to see these changes. Even in my extremely right-wing neighborhood, I see that most houses have a blue recycling bin in addition to the gray trash bin. But will these changes, which are sometimes minimal, be enough to save Earth from catastrophe?

Each year, most of us produce less carbon than we did in the past for similar activities. But each year we fall short of the carbon reduction targets that we know are absolutely necessary to avoid ecological crisis. If the Earth survives long enough for a history of Earth Day to be written, it might be entitled, One Step Forward and Two Steps Back.