Happy Earth Day, or something?
The natural world deserves protecting, but I'm not sure a holiday helps.
My family just returned from a week spent hiking in Yosemite National Park. It was restorative, and a true joy to watch my family thrive in nature. My girls climbed rocks, watched sticks float in the water, and hiked their longest trails to date (with, of course, the obligatory twelve dozen snack breaks). But I also thought about what it means to truly protect nature.
To mark something as a national park is, on the one hand, to protect it: to save it from commercial development and oil drilling (at least theoretically— in practice there are exceptions), to minimize our human impact on irreplaceable natural beauty.
But to mark something as a national park is also to make it a tourist attraction. I, too, am a tourist in these spaces, so I have no room to judge. But I am cognizant that the roads, campsites, and eateries dotting a national parks landscape (not to mention the 3.5 million people annually who visit Yosemite National Park alone) have a detrimental impact on the natural environment.
I’m an optimistic believer that time spent in nature by millions of people will foster a love of the natural world, and a desire to protect it. But what I see doesn’t always reflect that reality: Plastic water bottles littering trails, single-use packaging galore, hikers who haven’t connected the drilling in their favorite wilderness hideaway to gas guzzling cars and 2-day shipping.
I think this reflects one of the broader issues of the climate crisis, where even when we see the problem, we don’t see ourselves as part of the problem.
We are, though. Lloyd Alter of
recently wrote a brilliant— and deeply controversial— piece that asked us to “stop blaming 57 companies for greenhouse gas emissions and look in the mirror.” The argument here is simple: We want to blame corporations and oil drillers (many of whom are actually national entities, like Saudi Arabia) for carbon emissions. But as Alter notes, “Burning fossil fuels causes all these problems, but these companies and entities don’t burn fossil fuels; they produce and sell them.” We buy the fossil fuels, when we put gas in our cars, select 2-day shipping at checkout, or purchase plastic of any form (whether it’s water bottles, children’s light-up toys, or polyester clothing).Please know, I think there are also policy issues at play. Local policy failures when your favorite trails aren’t equipped with recycling and composting stations. Corporate failures when it’s impossible to find produce not wrapped in plastic at your local grocery store. National failures when we use public tax dollars to subsidize oil and gas drilling, when we let plastics companies spend millions marketing their products as recyclable (when most plastics really aren’t).
But the shareholder model of corporations (the same one that most of us rely on to fund our eventual retirement, via the stock market) means they, unfortunately, have little incentive to change without consumer pressure. We have to put pressure on corporations profitability to see a change, and that means voting with your dollars (to the extent you are able).
And the volatile state of politics means that even hard-won policies, including important consumer and environmental protections, can be hung up by a grumpy judge in an appeals court or lost in the next election cycle. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t important to vote and advocate for policy changes. It’s critically important, for everything from improving availability of electric vehicle charging stations to ditching the phthalates in our food. But we can’t sit back and wait for policy alone.
I struggle with Earth Day, because, as
cheekily noted, it feels like an arbitrary demand along the lines of, “It’s mid-April, which means now that I’m done worrying about paying my taxes, I can start worrying about the environment.” It compartmentalizes the environmental issues that actually surround us every single day, artificially packaging them up into something to consider for only a few weeks a year. And worse, as with every holiday, Earth Day feels rather… corporate.This Earth Day, we are inundated with messages telling us to to buy more. Sure, sometimes these are sales from legitimately eco-conscious shops (Hi, Package Free Shop), but most of these sales are from corporations who are nothing short of destructive in their production and shipping policies. I hate to be the one to break the news that fast fashion and vinyl dolls will never be environmentally sustainable, no matter what promo code “EARTHDAY” may suggest.
But the message I actually want to take away from all the loud Internet noise on Earth Day is this: The natural world matters.
It matters to our souls that we have green spaces in urban centers, beautiful hiking trails in every town, and nationally protected sites with minimal human disruption. It matters that this world is protected, both because the natural world matters in its own right, and because future generations deserve to inherit something better than the destruction we have created.
Activist Eddie Ndopu once said, “I think that another word for activism is imagination.” I’m actively choosing to hope for a better future, and do my best— in a wildly imperfect way— to take responsibility for making that world happen. I know so many people in this community are doing the same, and that makes all the difference. That is something I can celebrate.
Etc.
This morning, Vox published a beautiful piece by Tracy Ross about the disconnect for kids between technology and the natural world. “My 12-year-old daughter will inherit a warmer world — and, I fear, a lonelier one.” It was such an impactful— and heartbreaking— story to read.
Love this, Jennifer! But I disagree with Lloyd. Maybe we have some choice with things like two-day shipping and how much we consume but in general the decks are stacked against consumers. Yes, we can make better decisions as individuals but we also need to be pushing back against the corporations. It can’t be an individual pursuit! It needs to be community driven! Power in numbers!❤️