Earth Month!

cPPittsburgh, PA 10AM – 1940s

I’m not sure who makes these decisions – if they are deliberated by anyone in particular, or are just like a cozy dog making itself more comfortable on your bed; but somehow “Earth Day” has expanded into “Earth Month.”

I’ve always been a little cynical about punctuating our “good relationship” with the only home we have by setting aside a day to honor that relationship, and then just as ceremoniously, find ourselves returning to our usual consumptive ways. Maybe if we have a whole month to celebrate, we might find ourselves throttling back a bit as the beautiful greens of Spring return to our earthly surroundings.

Earth Day sprung out of concern – driven by a lot of environmental disasters leading up to what congealed into the environmental movement of 1970. In the 1960s, “Air Pollution was the smell of Prosperity.” But in Pomona Valley, west of Los Angeles where I grew up, this air pollution was burning my eyes and throat so much that in the summer I could not be outside after noon.

Pomona Valley only had a Kaiser Steel plant nearby (and the millions of cars that plied the Los Angeles freeways). In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, their relatively small fleet of maybe 100,000 cars had to use headlights during the middle of the day because the skies of “Steel City” were so clouded with soot and smoke, the sky was too dark to drive without them.

Enough was enough. From my town, dozens of mothers showed up in front of the Fontana Kaiser Steel offices in protest. Kaiser kindly responded by piping perfume into the air in front of their Headquarters.

This was not the solution that the moms were seeking, and almost soon enough – with a lot of corporate indigestion and hand-wringing, Kaiser pulled up their stakes, and moved offshore – leaving 5000 unemployed steel workers and a huge slag pile behind.

This was soon accompanied by the California Department of Motor Vehicles setting up “air pollution check points” on major urban roads where technicians would reach into our engine boxes and tweak our carburetors and distributors, optimizing our engines to minimize our tailpipe emissions.

 And they would seal their adjustments with bright green silicon glue to assure that we – the owners of our own cars, would not ditz with the adjustments to return our cars to our preferred performances(!).

I need to confess that this was happening as I was developing my relationship with my first car, and I was not pleased to have a stranger reach under her skirts and tweak her performance…

But it didn’t take long. Popular endorsement of Earth Day – along with the whole suite of National Environmental Regulations that followed, rapidly cleaned up our air and waterways, making it quite clear that unregulated corporate priorities were not beneficial to our common good.

But now that the skies are clear and the waters are drinkable, our habitat baseline does not include the choked-up skies and filthy waterways of my youth. So industry is now advancing the idea that regulations are “unnecessarily expensive” and need to be rolled back.

I hope that the expansion of “Earth Day” into “Earth Month” is – and will be a bulwark against this corporate anti-regulatory creep.

Happy Earth Month!