34 is young to die

Well, Thursday was Earth Day and you may be wondering why I didn't say anything about it.

What is there to say? Earth Day doesn't exist anymore. It hasn't existed for a number of years. What we have now is Greenwash Day, the annual event where corporate America parades its devotion to the environment by supporting Clean Up The Park events and It's All Your Fault seminars while continuing to dump swill in the water and spread crud in the air.

I remember the very first Earth Day in 1970. I spent a good portion of it with a few college buddies on 14th Street in southern Manhattan - the street was closed for the day - enjoying the displays, the booths, the balloons, the energy, and most of all the joyous intensity of people who knew what they were about, who knew who the villains were, and who were determined to do something about it.

Those were the days when environmental activists were called "communists" who were "out to destroy the American way of life" by some of the same corporations that now kick in a few thousand dollars to get called "official sponsors" of some Earth Day event or another and to place their logo on "official" posters and brochures. (Which is a lot cheaper - i.e., more profitable - than cleaning up their act.)

But early on we would not be silenced or seduced, and environmentalism became a force too strong to be ignored.

So instead it was co-opted with the passive agreement of the environmental hierarchy - the Big Green groups - who eagerly accepted first corporate money and then corporate influence, fantasizing it was a sign of their own importance, stupidly being bought off by PR firms and their greenwashing clients.

As Geoffrey Johnson, program coordinator of the Green Life, a nonprofit environmental group, put it in the New York Times on Thursday,

[t]hrough concerted marketing and public relations campaigns, these "greenwashers" attract eco-conscious consumers and push the notion that they don't need environmental regulations because they are already environmentally responsible. Greenwashing appears in misleading product labels like "all natural" and "eco-friendly"; in television commercials showing S.U.V.'s rolling peacefully through the wilderness; and in the co-opting of environmental buzzwords like "sound science" and "sustainability" - which corporate executives render meaningless through relentless repetition.

The result has been, not at all surprisingly, "Earth" Days that equate environmentalism with reducing litter in parks and put all the blame for environmental problems - and all the burden for their resolution - on individuals, while corporations are ignored, their crimes and pollution forgotten.

Yes, the air and water are on the whole cleaner - in some noted cases, such as Lake Erie and Boston Harbor, much cleaner - than they were those 34 years ago. But such progress has come in spite of corporations, not because of them.

And yes, there is still good, solid, clear-eyed environmental activism, activism that is not afraid to point fingers: locally, around such issues as (for example) power plants and greenfielding versus brownfielding; nationally, looking at, among other things, water quality, mercury pollution, and wetlands; internationally, pressing on climate change, resource depletion, and more.

And yes, again, there are those who have not forgotten that environmental justice is connected to economic justice, that for some the most important environmental issues are rats and municipal trash pickup, that environmental rights must embrace human rights, that the deaths of villagers in Nigeria is one end of a string that reaches to your local Chevron station, and that NIMBY is too often a cover for racism.

But those people, those organizations, those efforts, will not be found in the "official" Earth Day celebrations.

Earth Day is dead. All that's left is a rotting, twitching corpse. We should let it decompose in silence.