EARTH DAY AT MIDDLE AGE: RESPECTABLE BUT MORE NECESSARY THAN EVER

 (SUMMARY:  After two generations, Earth Day has become as respectable as sensible shoes and droopy cardigans.  Still, at a time when extremists on the right are seeking to undo all the progress we have made on environmental protection and sustainability in the last half century, Earth Day remains as important as ever.)


By:  Paul S. Marchand

It’s funny how something that started almost as a countercultural act of defiance has become a staid, establishment event.

Today is Earth Day.

Time was, Earth Day was associated with hippies, love beads, and the whole exploratory ethos of the latter part of the 1960s.

Of course it’s also funny how so many of the cultural references of the 60s have themselves become almost hopelessly respectable.  You know the 60s have become well and truly domesticated when the music of our youth that our parents yelled at us to turn down or turn off has become the elevator music of our middle age.  The love beads of yesteryear have become museum pieces, and many in my own Boomer generation now gravitate toward sensible flats and slightly droopy cardigans.

But if Earth Day has settled into its own kind of middle-aged respectability, it has not been because the Earth Day ethos failed, but perhaps ironically because it has been altogether successful.

40 years ago, for example, the idea of separating one’s household refuse was regarded as coming close to communism.  When he ran for mayor  in 1961, Los Angeles's Sam Yorty railed against requiring households to separate out their garbage, as had been the case under prior Los Angeles mayors.  While political wags joked that Sam Yorty had been “swept into office on a wave of garbage,” his appeal garnered him landslide support among San Fernando Valley housewives.

Today, the idea of not segregating one’s household waste has come to be well-nigh universally regarded as environmentally unsound.  We recycle almost as second nature; aluminum cans in one container, glass in another, plastic in a third, and paper in a fourth.  More and more of us have replaced incandescent light bulbs with the squiggly, spaghettilike compact fluorescent numbers that, mirabile dictu, actually do last longer (at least in my house).

Yet if many of us have internalized large parts of the Earth Day ethos, and have become more sensitive over the years to the importance of such things as sustainability, recycling, and mitigating the carbon footprint, it appears as if an ever-growing number of our neighbors would like nothing more than to return to those halcyon days when nobody worried about sustainability, recycling, or climate change.

Sadly, the American right has been astonishingly successful in fabricating a narrative in which environmentalism is a dirty word, recycling is for Commies, climate change is a socialist hoax, and the very idea of trying to walk more lightly in the world smacks of the dangerous seductions of Antichrist.  To hear some of our friends on the other side of the aisle tell it, recycling your aluminum cans is almost the equivalent, so to speak, of a comprehensive blasphemy that both denies the existence of God and the virginity of His mother.

Indeed, in the overheated climate of Obamanation that has come to dominate our political discourse, we seem to reach a point at which anything the President or First Lady may say calls forth reflexive disagreement from the GOP.  If President Obama expresses concern about fracking, right-wing columnists and bloggers immediately gush forth with paeans of praise for the process. 

If Michelle Obama takes up the cudgels against childhood obesity, and encourages parents and children to make better food choices, people like Sarah Palin wax wroth, as if to say “you’re not the boss of me; just to spite you I’m going to go and eat an entire can of Crisco, right now.”

And so it is on Earth Day.  As with such issues as contraception, the American right seems engaged in a frantic, if futile, effort to undo all the progress that has been made in terms of environmental consciousness in the last two generations, as if to repeal the 1960s.  It is as if, by trying to deny self-evident truth, or to relitigate matters that had already been considered settled and closed, America’s right wing might avoid having to face the very real challenges confronting the world at the beginning of the 21st century.

But you cannot avoid facing the realities of the 21st century by trying to retreat into the 19th.  As long as long as a large portion of America’s body politic doesn’t get that basic and simple truth, we will still need Earth Day more than ever, even if it has begun to show signs of staid, middle-aged respectability.

-xxx-

Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, California.   The views expressed herein are his own, and not those of any entity or organization with which he is associated, and are not intended as, and should not be construed as, legal advice. And yes, he does separate out his trash.