Earth Day

April 22 is Earth Day, a time that people around the world officially celebrate the planet we all call home. It’s also the anniversary of the birth of what is believed to be the modern day environmental movement, with the first Earth Day taking place in 1970. The impact of climate change on food production figured prominently in the many speeches and articles.

FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva referred to a report released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which forecasts serious disruptions to agriculture due to shifting weather patterns. “We need to step up our efforts to mitigate, to adapt and, most importantly, to shift to more sustainable food systems,” he said. “This is one of our core responsibilities.” The world’s poorest are particularly vulnerable to climate change, he said, because the impact on agricultural production will be felt harder in the already marginal production areas in which they live.
On April 22, 1970, when Earth Day was born, it generated more than 12,000 Earth Day events all across the country. Two-thirds of the members of Congress made speeches at Earth Day events as millions upon millions of people participated in a celebration of the environment, including liberal Republicans, and most active members of environmental groups were hunters and fishermen. Earth Day bolstered Congress to pass: (1) the Clean Air Act of 1970 (2) the Clean Water Act of 1972 (3) Coastal Zone Management Act of 1972 (4) Fisheries Conservation and Management Act of 1976 (5) Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 (6) National Environmental Policy Act of 1970 (7) Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974 (8) Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976 (9) Endangered Species Act of 1973, most of which became the law of the land under Republican administrations.

Fast forward....

Today, it is embarrassing to even mention Earth Day in the context of a celebration because it is so hypocritical. Everybody knows all about how dangerous excessive CO2 is to the planet. The entire world has buried its head in the sand regarding the issue of life-threatening self-destruction.

 The power of capitalist society to destroy has reached an unprecedented scale in the history of humanity. Everywhere, air is befouled, waterways polluted, soil washed away, the land poisoned, and wildlife decimated. More significantly, basic biological cycles  upon which all living things  depend for the maintenance and renewal of life, are at the point of irreversible damage. This environmental destruction is literally undoing the work of evolution. It is a truism to say that humanity is part of the rich tapestry of life.  Human beings depends  upon the complexity and variety of life,our well-being and survival rest upon a long evolution of organisms into complex and interdependent forms. The development of life into a web, the elaboration of animals and plants into highly varied forms, has been the precondition for the evolution and survival of humanity itself and for a harmonized relationship between humanity and nature.

We now witness the despoilation of the planet that exceeds all the damage inflicted by earlier generations. Time is running out and the next decade or two may well be the last opportunity we will have to restore the balance between humanity and nature.

Technology has become a convenient target for bypassing the deep-seated social conditions that make machines and technical processes harmful. It is convenient to forget that technology has served not only to subvert the environment but also to improve it. True there are techniques and technological attitudes that are entirely destructive of the balance between humanity and nature. Our responsibilities are to separate the promise of technology - its creative potential - from the capacity of technology to destroy. There are different technologies and attitudes toward technology, some of which are indispensable to restoring the balance, others of which have contributed profoundly to its destruction. What humanity needs is not a wholesale discarding of advanced technologies, but a sifting, indeed a further development of technology along ecological principles that will contribute to a new harmonization of society and the natural world.

The basic conception that humanity must dominate and exploit nature stems from the domination and exploitation of man by man. Indeed, this conception goes back earlier to a time when men began to dominate and exploit women in the patriarchal family. From that point onward, human beings were increasingly regarded as mere resources, as objects instead of subjects. Humans are not only turned into objects; they are turned into commodities; into objects explicitly designed for sale on the market place. Competition between human beings becomes an end in itself, together with the production of utterly useless goods. Quality is turned into quantity, individual culture into mass culture, personal communication into mass communication. The natural environment is turned into a gigantic factory, the city into an immense market place; everything from a redwood forest to a woman's body has "a price."

Is it surprising, then, that this exploitative, degrading, quantified society pits humanity against itself and against nature on a more awesome scale than any other in the past? The hierarchies, classes, propertied forms, and statist institutions that emerged with social domination were carried over conceptually into humanity's relationship with nature. Nature too became increasingly regarded as a mere resource, an object, a raw material to be exploited ruthlessly. Man should subdue the Earth, Genesis dictated, ''and have dominion ... over every living thing.''

 The enormous productivity of modern technology has opened a new vision: the possibility of material abundance, an end to scarcity, and an era of free time (so-called "leisure time") with minimum toil. Our society has the choice between "what-is" and "what-could-be,"  irrational, inhuman exploitation and destruction of the earth and its inhabitants or a new world of harmony. we need change, but change fundamental and far-reaching. We must treat the Earth communally,  without the trammels of private property that have distorted humanity's vision of life and nature since the break-up of tribal society.

 The environmental movement’s most conscious elements are involved in a creative movement to totally revolutionize the social relations of humans to each other and of humanity to nature The require  to increase the awareness that the most destructive and pressing consequences of our alienating, exploitative society is the environmental crisis, and that a truly revolutionary society must be built upon ecological precepts, to create, in the minds of the millions  who are concerned with the destruction of our environment, the consciousness that the principles of the environment’s protection demand radical changes in our society and our way of looking at the world. Socialism will produce politically independent communities whose boundaries and populations will be defined by a new consciousness; communities whose inhabitants will determine for themselves within the framework of this new consciousness the nature and level of their technologies, the forms taken by their social structures, world views, life styles, expressive arts, and all other aspects of their daily lives.  An effective Earth Day celebration today would involve global massive street protests demanding renewable energy sources to be made freely available. Earth Day would be demanding a socialist world.