Celebrating Earth Day Every 22nd of April Is Far From Enough

Fifty-four Earth Days After The First One, We Are Edging Close to Ecological Collapse And We Need Bolder Action From Our Political Leaders and Ourselves

‘It’s too late to stop all of the beasts climate change will unleash. They’re at the gates; we can feel and hear them out there, in the unknown to come.”                                                                                              – from a 2023 cover story in Macleans Magazine titled “Canada In 2060, A Climate Change Report.”

An Earth Day Commentary by Doug Draper, Niagara At Large publisher and veteran environment reporter

Posted April 22, 2024, on Niagara At Large

During the very first Earth Day, on April 22nd, 1970, I was a high school student in Welland and I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing that day.

I and four other students from my high school received permission from a rare few of our more progressive-minded teachers to stage a protest outside a Union Carbide plant that had long been notorious for belching dark, dirty clouds of smoke over the city’s south end and onward, into the horizon.

We were greeted by workers at the plant, out for a lunch break, who threw empty pop cans at the chain-link fence between us and who shouted at us to “get back to school.” But there were also a good number of cars that passed by with drivers giving us a thumb’s up and honking their horns in support.

I can’t speak for the other students who were with me on that first Earth Day, but outside that filthy plant, I was brimming with a sense of hope that if we kept pushing like this, our air and water would one day be cleaner, and the wonderful fields, ponds and woods we enjoyed exploring as kids would still be there for the critters that inhabited them and for future generations of kids to enjoy.

Every one of us who was out there, in front of that plant that day, were members of a Baby Boomer Generation, born in the post-Second World War years from 1946 to 1962, who collectively grew up believing – perhaps naively and perhaps arrogantly too – that we were going to change the world for the better.

Yet take a damn good look at where we are now!

Last year we had the hottest summer on record, boiling over with  extreme heat waves that killed more than a thousand people in this country alone and fueled an unprecedented number of wildfires that caused billions of dollars in  damage and destruction, that sometimes made our air so unfit to breathe, it drove us indoors.

That warmest of summers was followed by the warmest winter ever recorded on this continent, leaving fields too dry for many farmers to grow the food we need and wreaking havoc on habitat for wildlife at a time when we already have alarming numbers of animals and plants in danger of joining those that have already gone extinct on this planet.

We also continue to witness -and in the case of too many of us – continue to enable those who out of ignorance or greed, are paving over of more and more of what’s left of our precious natural heritage to make way for ever more roads, highways and low-density urban sprawl.

Indeed, we continue witnessing this kind of sacking of  our natural places right  here in Niagara.

In the case of the climate crisis we are now facing, it is not as if we weren’t warned.

Going back at least as early as 1959, American physicist Edward Teller (you might remember that name if you saw the movie Oppenheimer. He was one of the more reluctant members of the team that helped develop the world’s first hydrogen bomb), warned an audience of petrochemical industry representatives at New York City’s Columbia University about the possible dangers of what he and other scientists were beginning to describe as ‘the greenhouse effect’.

“Now all of us are familiar with smoke and smog and all of us know about it as a nuisance,” Teller said. “I would like to talk to you about a more hypothetical difficulty which I think is quite probably going to turn out to be real. Whenever you burn conventional (fossil) fuel, you create carbon dioxide. ….

“Carbon dioxide’s presence in the atmosphere causes a greenhouse effect in that it will allow the solar rays to enter, but it will to some extent impede the radiation from the Earth into outer space. The result is that the Earth will continue to heat up”…. to possible “ruinous effect.”

For the first Earth Day in 1970, an “Environmental Handbook” was published for the occasion by the citizens group Friends of the Earth. It contained a number of warnings from climate experts at the time about what by then was being called “global warming.”

“Scientists are worried about increasing CO2 levels because of the greenhouse effect, with its possible repercussions on the world climate,” wrote one of the experts in that now 54-year-old handbook. “By (reducing fossil fuel use), we will have made a start toward preventing possibly disastrous climactic changes due to CO2 buildup and the greenhouse effect.”

But was any real effort made to heed these early warnings?

Tragically (or perhaps the right word to use is ‘disgustingly’, the vast majority of Baby boomers and members of generations that followed them went on buying bigger and bigger vanity houses in low-density neighbourhoods sprawling out over the countryside.

They went on driving around in bigger and bigger gas-fueled cars and trucks, and they went on consuming more and more crap made out of plastic, the particles of which are polluting are rivers, lakes and oceans and are finding their way into our bodies.

.Collectively, we just kept partying on with voracious abandon as if the record droughts, floods, wildfires, windstorms and extreme heat waves we were warned about were never going to happen or were too far off in the future to make the changes needed to avert them now.

And while the party went on, are too many of us continued to waved off repeated concerns raised by scientists like Canada’s Dr. David Suzuki, long-time host of the CBC program The Nature of Things.

Not so long ago, Dr.Suzuki responded to all this with the following words; “We are upsetting the atmosphere upon which all life depends. In the late 80s when I began to take climate change seriously, we referred to global warming as a ‘slow motion catastrophe’, one we expected to kick in perhaps generations later. Instead, the signs of change have accelerated alarmingly.”

I believe that Dr. Suzuki summed it up t well.

On this Earth Day, the feelings of hope I had 54 years ago have all but been replaced by feelings of fear and of anger.

I am fearful for what kind of future my daughter and her friends are going to face if we don’t muster up the courage and will to make bold changes now. The technology is there – solar, wind turbines, heat pumps, etc.. All we have to do is make a concerted effort to shift away from climate ravaging fossil fuels and use it.

And I am angry at far too many members of my Baby Boomer generation and others for spending so many decades letting the climate change we were warned about grow into a full-blown climate crisis.

I’m angry at our elected representatives, including those at the Niagara Regional government level, who recently said, when faced with issue of whether or not to go on subsidizing the use of climate-ravaging gas, argued that we can’t move too suddenly because it would not be affordable.

Not affordable to what, the countless billions of dollars of damage and destruction, not to mention the deaths we will suffer, if we continue dragging anchor like this.

We know what we need to do to address this crisis. We’ve known it for years.

On this Earth Day, it’s good to see groups of people out there planting trees and picking up litter along our streams and in our parks. But that is not enough.

On this Earth day, let’s make a pledge to muster up the courage, will and imagination to do what needs to be done to address this climate emergency, and to do it NOW!

In the meantime, I will leave the last word to Greta Thunberg, and internationally known voice for young people on the climate crisis who looked older generations right in the eye and said the following five years ago when she was 16 years old –

“You say you love your children above all else, and yet you are stealing their future in front of their very eyes.”

Click on the screen below to hear and watch an Earth Day song from the kids –

 

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“A Politician Thinks Of The Next Election. A Leader Thinks Of The Next Generation.” – Bernie Sanders