Celebrating Earth Day 2021

By Professor Emeritus Bill Moomaw

Imagine you are a 25 years old graduate student, and a U.S. Senator calls to ask you to organize a nationwide event.  He wants you to encourage college students to demonstrate for the protection of the environment. That is the call that graduate student Dennis Hayes received 52 years ago from Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson. Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring had alerted Americans to growing degradation and pollution, and the public was increasingly concerned, but national political leaders were not interested. Nelson’s insight was to go to the people by mobilizing the campus activism on behalf of Civil Rights and the ant-Vietnam War movements with “campus teach-ins.” Hayes pulled together a team, in which he was the oldest member, and they managed to create a distributed organization that lead to the first Earth Day in 1970.

The idea was so popular that it spilled over into demonstrations by the general public. On April 22nd, Earth Day 1, 20 million people – 10% of the US population - participated. Thus began The Environmental Decade. Earth Day built upon gathering momentum and the passage of the innovative National Environmental Policy Act that required an Environmental Impact Assessment for all major government funded projects.  Establishment of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency followed in December. Some have claimed that the ensuing decade of environmental legislation did more to alter business practices than at any time in American history. Corporations could no longer dump the waste from their mining and manufacturing into the land, air and water, and became financially liable for any environmental destruction they might cause.  The idea spread  globally, and in 1972, the Stockholm Conference on The Human Environment called for the universal creation of environmental ministries, and began a process that culminated in many multinational environmental agreements.

I agreed to teach a new course in environmental science in the spring of 1970 because just two students had signed up for my course in advanced Thermodynamics. I had just two months to prepare a course in an interdisciplinary field that had not yet been invented. In that pre-digital age, I had accumulated two large boxes of news and research articles on the emerging science of smog in Los Angeles, acid rain, pesticide bio-concentration causing near extinction of bird species, water pollution, fires in oil and chemical soaked rivers, and the health and environmental implications of Agent Orange in Vietnam. I had collected these studies out of fascination with the systemic thinking required while attending graduate school, even though they had nothing to do with my reductionist chemistry research. They formed the basis for the course. I was stunned when I walked into the first class on February 1st and 75 students were eagerly waiting. That moment began a career shift that eventually led this chemist to a faculty position at the Fletcher School.

While we have not fully addressed all the issues from half a century ago, we have made some progress and identified new environmental issues, reframing them in the context of sustainability. This has expanded the scope beyond environmental sustainability to include social and economic sustainability as well. The current focus on Environmental Justice is now a critical component of this shift.

Local and national issues have been joined by challenges at the global scale. The result is nearly 1000 treaties addressing climate and stratospheric ozone protection, biodiversity, transboundary air pollution, trade in toxic substances, and a Law of the Sea. The devastating fires, intensification of storms, the loss of 60% of all non-human vertebrates from fish and birds to elephants since 1970, vast plastic filled areas in the ocean, massive oil spills, and the extinction of important fish species from commercial fishing remind us that there is still much work to be done.

In fact, we are facing irreversible changes that could exacerbate climate change and biodiversity loss irreversibly, unless we act in the next few decades. We must move beyond empty promises by political leaders and CEOs to halt climate change by becoming carbon neutral by 2050. These leaders of today know they will not be here in 30 years to carry put their pledges. It is critically important that we act to implement real solutions now! We cannot hope to address either climate change or biodiversity loss by planting trees to offset our fossil fuel emissions or simply call for no net loss of species or ecosystems. Neutrality does not solve the problem. At best, it keeps us in our current decidedly unsatisfactory state. This is the UN Decade on Restoration. Let us embrace restorative development to reverse our losses in the natural world.

On this 51st Earth Day, 2021, you are not being asked as was Dennis Hayes to mobilize everyone to demonstrate. Instead, we are all being asked to take a leadership role and change the destructive trajectory we are on. We must each commit ourselves to use energy and materials more productively with much less waste, halt the use of all fossil fuels long before 2050, end the destruction of forests, wetlands and other natural systems that prevent an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide by one-third each year. We need these natural systems to increase their accumulation of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to “avoid dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system” as the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change requires.

We must find the most effective points for action, beginning with our own personal choices.  We must work with our local and national governments, use our purchasing power to demand that corporations provide us with sustainable goods and services, and work internationally to avoid the current race to the bottom.

Acting on this “modest request” is essential to ensure the future integrity of this planet and all who dwell upon it. Dennis Hayes has spent the past 51 years working to achieve these goals. On Earth Day 51, I invite you to join Dennis, me and countless others to help achieve these goals.

Professor Emeritus Bill Moomaw is the founder of the Center for International Environment and Resource Policy at The Fletcher School.