In my perfect world, every day would be Earth Day! But if the world was perfect, OCR would not be doing the work we do – trying to make our collective habitat better for all of us that live in it.
The first “Earth Day” was established 53 years ago, and millions of people came out into the streets together to celebrate. It was a heady time – and Earth Day served as the onramp for a flood of environmental laws and initiatives. The founding of the Environmental Protection Agency, the consolidation of the Departments of Fisheries, Weather, and Geodetic Surveys into the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the passing of the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the founding of the Marine Mammal Commission, codifying the Clean Water Act, and the Clean Air Act, and a raft of other “Earth Friendly” environmental laws.
And all of these efforts were supported almost unanimously by the House and Senate, and signed into law by Republican President Richard Nixon.
So what went wrong? The simple answer is that this love and appreciation for the Earth 50 years ago was brought on by watching our living habitat be despoiled by unfettered industry, which was grinding up the Earth, turning it into money, and dumping what they couldn’t use into our living world. In urban areas most water was unsafe – even deadly; open land was often loaded with questionable materials, and people just got tired of it.
A huge public uprising reigned in the corporate polluters in a movement that over the years, has been really successful. Bodies of water that were once dead are now teaming with life, fishes and marine mammals on their way to extinction have been successfully recovering. And our own health and life expectancies have risen.
But as I mentioned, we would not be doing the work we do if all was rosy. The very industries that were constrained back in the 1970s have found clever ways to conceal their practices, thwart regulation, and confuse the public about it.
Also – back in the 1970s, the success metric for the public was ‘quality of life.’ On this yardstick, clean water and air, healthy lakes and rivers, and abundant forests and fields were easy to measure through the value of public health and enjoyment. But it was not to last, and through the Reagan Years, the success metric was simplified down to “wealth” – and Government Regulation became an impediment to achieving that wealth.
And those accumulating the wealth have had the resources to sow confusion and drive wedges between all of us, fearing that our collective public power may usher in constraint again. But we have come together before – albeit galvanized by settings that were not pretty. I know we can do it again!
And we may be coming to an inflection point – but we’ll need to start treating every day as “Earth Day.”
Please help support this Earth Day objective!
