San Diegans have been celebrating “Earth Day” since 1970. What has it gotten us? A large festival in Balboa Park where goer’s leave a mountain of non-biodegradable trash.
It’s a nice day where we celebrate our home base, giving credit to this incredible life form that allows us to live, breathe and flourish. We buy shirts with slogans like “Protect Your Mother” and brands offer discounts and run campaigns for limited edition Earth Day products celebrating nature, animals, and Earth of course.
It’s a nice gesture to the home that has given us everything, without question.
But this day is a joke. It’s too much of a nice, “cute” kind of thing. It’s a celebration of our minuscule efforts in the grand scheme to take care of it. It’s entitled, like an individual that pats themselves on the back for thinking of doing a good deed, without even carrying out the action itself. The fact that we have a singular day celebrating the entity that sustains our life is a testament to this entitlement. (You could definitely say the same about Mother’s Day!)
The planet is worse off now that it was 52 years ago.
So, calling today “Earth Day” without addressing the absolute crisis we’re in is hypocritical and downright shameful.
Two months ago, on February 28, 2022, scientists reported that human-induced climate change is causing dangerous and widespread disruption in nature and affecting the lives of billions of people around the world, despite efforts to reduce the risks. People and ecosystems least able to cope are being hardest hit, said scientists in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report.
“This report is a dire warning about the consequences of inaction,” said Hoesung Lee, Chair of the IPCC. “It shows that climate change is a grave and mounting threat to our wellbeing and a healthy planet. Our actions today will shape how people adapt and nature responds to increasing climate risks.”
Back to “Earth Day.”
We act as if we are destroying the Earth, a classic human-centered view of the world where we think we are the almighty powerful. The human ego really is unprecedented in terms of its pompousness. Earth will survive and adapt. It will embrace a new wave of evolutionary experimentation. We on the other hand, may not make it if we refuse to radically transform our civilization.
Our first picture of the whole round Earth, captured by the NASA crew on Apollo 17 (December 1972).
“A new consciousness is developing which sees the earth as a single organism and recognizes that an organism at war with itself is doomed. We are one planet. One of the great revelations of the age of space exploration is the image of the earth finite and lonely, somehow vulnerable, bearing the entire human species through the oceans of space and time.” — Carl Sagan
In the period between now and then, if we don’t face the music and make profound changes to our institutions and way of thinking, the world will be characterized by turbulence, instability, conflict and turmoil the likes of which we have never seen. There will be hundreds of millions, if not billions, of climate refugees over the next century. The warming of our climate will continue to wreak havoc and accelerate in its speed in a vicious cycle. The release of nitrous oxide previously trapped for millions of years in the permafrost of the Arctic is just one potent example.
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Hear hear!! Mother Nature’s warnings have been getting stronger. Pretty soon she’s going to throw up her hands and just let us destroy our dumb selves. Hopefully we won’t take all the flora and fauna with us.
Another icon of the 60’s era.
Dr. Paul Ehrlich’s book is showing credibility.
The instability and turmoil has already begun. The divisions in the world are obvious to all, from the Ukraine war, the political divisions here and in other countries. Food will get harder to obtain and as the world burns.
Divisions have existed for as long as there’s been people. That will never change.
The major problem on our planet is overpopulation . It is not the major danger ( That is all things nuclear ) , but it is the major problem and is the root cause of many of our other problems . The real joke is the leadership vacuum that our planet Earth has with regard to this issue .
I would point out that the earth day celebration in Balboa Park is essentially a commercial endeavor, with corporate sponsors and booths taken up by commercial interests selling or promoting products and services, many not directly or indirectly connected to the environment or climate change, including the numerous cannabis companies that participate. Even legitimate not-for-profit environmental organizations must pay a not inconsiderable rent for a booth at the event. Some one is making money off of this event, and I don’t know how much, if any, of this money returns to actual environmental activism or action.
Frank, I don’t think I’ve ever ‘celebrated’ Earth Day with Capitalism. When I lived at the beach I’d stay in the water all day, or on the beach at least. The next 33 years has been in the mountains.
Haven’t for a very long time as I realized way back that I can’t change the greedy wealthy, corporate oligarchs, bankers, and oil barons thinking and their needs are paramount in the society that they organized. Of course.
To shift their mindset from quarterly profits to life sustaining behaviors that just don’t pay well enough is an astronomical leap of cognition and, honestly, that thought is the antithesis of the current world-wide economic system. What can change that? Some extremely grim event? Maybe. Maybe not. Unless it directly benefits profits I’ll assume it’ll be brushed off and buried under some ‘celebrity’ scandal. Shades of Don’t Look Up, eh?
It was 65’F forty air miles from the Canadian Border in the Selkirk Range on Earth Day Friday after another lousy ‘winter’ with the sky snowing the first real dump of the winter over the first few days of January. Then it started raining. Then the sky didn’t snow for two months. My snowboarding hill had an average of 305″ a season when I moved here and it was March before it made it to 46″ of base this year. Like last year and the season before that barely cracked 100,” this season ended the 2nd week of April with less than a 100.” It used to snow in April, sometimes in May, even June when the last freeze was always expected. This place used to have a 3 month growing period between freezes…June to Sept. It’s now officially been shifted to another climate category; warmer.
The planet’s CO2 levels have passed the ‘a million years ago’ mark at 421ppm. The rest of the GHGs aren’t even hardly looked at much less added in as methane levels in the atmosphere have passed what the planet had 4.3 million years ago. Do the governments want that knowledge to become common? I don’t think so. Dr. Shakova U of Alaska Arctic expert has been freaking out for years now about that bubbling up out of the shallow Arctic Sea and melting permafrost that turns out to be not so permanent. To our detriment.
And the IPCC has always been a political body tasked with downplaying the scariest science submitted in favor of sustainable economic indicators so to see them post something like their latest was…quite a surprise. It’s amazing how many peer-reviewed papers they reject and don’t add in. Realize just how far off the cliff we already are for them to publish that.
A number of top scientists (Dr Glikson, Jem Bendell, many others you never hear about) were pretty surprised that happened as they’ve been screaming for decades while being completely ignored or dismissed as “alarmists.” I love that term don’t you?
I read Silent Spring as a teenage at PB Jr High. I don’t think any other kid there did as it wasn’t required reading. I still have a copy on the shelves. Probably banned reading in Texas and Tennessee already I’d imagine as those censorship lists grow like…a virus.
So far this Spring, after last year’s 120’F heat wave that killed the bugs and birds, it’s pretty dang silent around here even though Spring came at least a month early as the robins showed up March 22nd instead of early May…
I still need to take down the nest under the front porch roof with the 4 blue eggs in it that cooked to death before mama robin deserted it… But there just isn’t the normal bug levels, and far fewer of the birds I’m used to seeing and hearing have come back. Not one mountain bluebird yet, the forest around me is strangely silent. Uncomfortably so. I’m used to bird songs.
Earth Day is every day but we are so disconnected from the natural alive world now. I read recently 80%+ of the US population is now urban, lives on concrete and asphalt. We’ve lost our connection to the planet that we evolved from and that is to our detriment. I have no answers for this.
So outside I go to continue cleaning up the debris from two heavy windstorms of this month that broke two 100 foot ponderosa pines in half and knocked down a bunch of smaller pines fir trees in the treelines around the property. At least I’m outside, wind in my face, with large cloud masses blowing by overhead. and not standing on concrete. Yeah, Earth Day has turned into a commercial joke that only benefits corporations. Big sigh.
I leave you all with this, the true life Don’t Look Up interview that will shock the hell out of everybody. I was so impressed with this 20 year old climate activist as I don’t think I could have held my contempt in like she did. Thrown a shoe maybe. The first 46 seconds are cut from the rest so skip past that to the start of the completely interview. Absolutely appalling.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1513835066928951301
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