TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/042390/0423330.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.0 KB | 118 lines

                                                                                ENVIRONMENT, Page 86

EARTH DAY

Will the Ballyhoo Go Bust?


By EUGENE LINDEN


    As the marketing monster called Earth Day lumbers toward
April 22, hapless journalists in its path are desperately
dodging a barrage of press kits, news releases and alerts.
Thousands of Earth Day happenings, from ladybug releases and the
building of garbage monuments to corporate "We love the
environment too" advertising campaigns, have become an
undifferentiated blur as everyone tries to wave the green flag
at once. Nobody is against Earth Day, but the very breadth of
this looming mega-event raises the question: What's the point?

    Certainly demonstrations and mass events have an honored
role in history. Sheer, chanting force of numbers has served
notice to dictators from Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines to
Nicolae Ceausescu in Romania that their time was up. Back in
1970, activists capitalized on an outpouring of environmental
sentiment during the first Earth Day to unseat seven of a
targeted "dirty dozen" politicians and spur the passage of
clean-air-and-water legislation. Today Eastern Europe, perhaps
the grimiest industrial region on earth, could use Earth Day to
focus newly aroused democratic forces on their poisoned air and
land. So could much of the Third World, where billions of
people grievously stretch the capacity of forests and other
resources.

    In the U.S., though, Earth Day 1990 comes at a time when
environment is a motherhood issue. Since polls show that
Americans want environmental protection regardless of costs, the
problem is not so much awakening the nation to ecological
threats as it is getting people to face the difficult choices
entailed in dealing with those threats. For a number of reasons,
Earth Day might actually thwart that end.

    Mass events are crude instruments, useful for delivering
slogans and chants but not well suited to deciding subtle issues
that confront environmental converts who are trying to translate
their concerns into practice. Whether people should buy
biodegradable or recyclable plastics or switch from disposable
to cloth diapers will not be settled on April 22.

    Earth Day fits into a troubling American pattern of
responding to crises with rhetoric and theater. So far, it has
been easy to be an environmentalist: one simply has to claim to
be one. Just as middle-class voters routinely condemn "welfare"
while opposing cuts in the social programs that constitute such
spending, a good portion of the voters who claim they would pay
for environmental improvements balk when the bill is presented.
If consumers truly insisted on cleaner air in their individual
buying and voting decisions, Detroit and Japan would vie to
deliver less polluting cars, and it would not take ten years of
struggle to amend the Clean Air Act.

    Instead of making hard choices, it is easier to blow off
steam. April 22 will offer people an opportunity to purge
accumulated anxiety over wounds to earth's life-support systems.
Worn out by weeks of buildup and an accompanying media blitz,
many people will return to business as usual on Monday, hoping
not to hear the E word again for weeks. It is possible that the
environment might be better served if consumers had no such
outlet, and were forced to do some quiet soul searching about
how their individual choices contribute to the world's
environmental problems.

    In the past, raucous demonstrations have sometimes polarized
the nation, shifting attention from the issues to the rowdy
behavior and unpopular politics -- Stalinists for Solidarity
with the Viet Cong! -- of protesters. Since support for
environmental protection spans the political spectrum,
polarization should not plague Earth Day unless fringe groups
seize the occasion to sabotage a steel mill or stage other
"ecotage" attacks on perceived corporate villains. Earth Day's
organizers more likely face the opposite problem: the
possibility that the hype and the numbing array of events will
cause people to throw up their hands and stay home.

    Proponents argue that Earth Day 1990 will both challenge
individuals and mobilize new constituencies such as minorities,
the religious community and organized labor. The event's
disciplined chairman and mastermind, San Francisco lawyer Denis
Hayes, hopes to saturate the public consciousness and create
what he calls a "tilt point" in attitudes, refocusing the
passions of the cold war on ecological issues. Hayes hopes that
Earth Day will help make sound environmental behavior as
accepted in daily life as wearing a seat belt. Democratic
Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts believes Earth Day will help
recruit an army of voters to hold slippery politicians truly
accountable for environmental problems in coming elections.

    This will be no easy task. One of America's more dubious
achievements during the past two decades is the perfecting of
techniques that enable politicians and corporations to
capitalize on discontents without threatening the status quo.
Unlike the world's oppressed, Americans have many ways of
expressing their frustrations through votes, opinion surveys and
boycotts, as well as demonstrations. Legislators and companies
have fine-tuned their ability to respond to expressions of
public anxiety with promises of legislative and private
initiatives, reassuring people that problems are being
addressed, if not solved. When things don't change for the
better, people take to the streets again, and the cycle repeats
itself, as it has with Earth Day 1990.

    The net effect of this intricate dance is that most
environmental problems in the U.S. are more pressing today than
they were 20 years ago. Insults to air, water and living things
can no longer be dismissed as life-style and recreational issues
for the middle class, but now must be seen as economic, social
and even geopolitical crises. The question is whether the
environment will allow the U.S. the luxury of Earth Day 2010.