Happy (and Hopeful) Earth Day

It is hard to believe that it has been only 49 years since the first Earth Day. I was pretty young at the time and living in California, where the idea was not alien – particularly giving that the 1969 Santa Barbara Oil Spill was one of the initiating events that ushered in the age of Federal Environmentalism.

There was plenty of shame to go around then; the oil spill, the poisoning of Love Canal, the chemical death of Lake Erie, the Cuyahoga River fire, and the thousands of other little insults to our own local habitats. From acid streams to smelter skies, everywhere we looked (of smelled, or listened) we found the toxic artifacts of unbridled industry.

And then there was the Ocean, which was systematically being used by industry and the military as bottomless cesspool. Radioactive, chemical, and urban sludge was just dumped into the sea under the widely espoused rubric of “dilution is the solution to pollution.”

But when underwater lakes of ambiguous black muck started creeping up on recreational beaches, and smog in urban skies was burning the lungs and eyes of school kids (and of course the oil spills and river fires) the citizens of the Great Nation said “Enough!”

Given all the evidence, this place where we all lived – the Earth – was not large enough to absorb the detritus of the industrial economy we created. So with enormous public sentiment, an overwhelmingly bi-partisan congress and a Republican President crafted and signed into law the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act. They established the Environmental Protection Agency, and brought together three of the longest-standing federal departments – Fisheries, Weather Sciences, and the Geodetic Survey, under the single roof of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA); the first-ever systematic Federal agency approach to The Environment.

Of course the “losers” of this movement were the industries that previously had unregulated access to convert our earth, sky, ocean, and waterways into money. So naturally they were disappointed. And they also did not take this sitting down.

It took industry’s corporatists a number of years to re-calibrate and figure out how to free themselves from “government over-regulation.” And admittedly, while Jimmy Carter was the most honest broker of conservation consciousness, with his “cardigans in the Oval Office,” he was not the most persuasive.

The corporatists strategy was not to attack the widely popular idea of environmentalism, rather it was to attack government competency. The first volley was when, in one of his most seminal acting roles, President Ronald Regan stated his nine “most terrifying words”  “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

This turned out to be a pretty brilliant self-fulfilling strategy inasmuch as every governmental blunder afterwards confirmed the assertion – advancing the argument that the only way forward was to privatize government services (heath, education, and warfare) thus allowing the regulated to chip away at their fetters.

So we arrive at this Earth Day, 49 years after its founding, where the environmental regulating agencies are being run by the agents of the very industries they are entrusted to regulate.

Fortunately, with 49 years of regulatory legacy (and over 200 years of Constitutional Law), the legal precedence cannot be just eliminated with the stroke of an executive pen. But in my business it is pretty easy to recognize that the system is under stress. And it will break.

The question is whether it will break towards regulatory and environmental failure, or whether we will be celebrating the 50^th anniversary of Earth Day with renewed commitment to save this glorious place we all inhabit, The Earth.

Happy, and hopeful Earth Day!