Every Day Is Earth Day

It’s hard to believe that Earth Day has been around for almost 40 years. That’s right. 40 years, 4 decades… almost half a century! First launched in 1970 as a “grassroots” environmental awareness event in the United States, Earth Day was created to focus concern on broad environmental problems (global warming was not well established at the time).

Earth Day is celebrated as the birth of the environmental movement and is now the world’s most widely observed secular holiday. Originally founded by U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, and coordinated by Dennis Hayes, the original Earth Day saw some 20 million Americans participate – thousands of colleges, universities, primary and secondary schools, and hundreds of communities.

Yet, sitting here writing this blog post I find it equally hard to believe that we still find ourselves in such dire ecological straits.

Earth Day comes and goes, inciting numerous campaigns and “marketing events” seemingly cast towards a fleeting moment of public awareness that generates little inertia, but lots of greenwash. The critical issue of sustainability has taken root in the popular media only recently, spearheaded by the call to reduce Global Warming.

Meanwhile, our habitual mode of living, consuming and wasting, has not really changed. As Michael Pollan once observed in an article for the Sunday New York Times Magazine, “for us to wait for legislation or technology to solve the problem of how we’re living our lives suggests we’re not really serious about changing — something our politicians cannot fail to notice.”

Maybe we are looking at these environmental issues from the wrong perspective, and perhaps that's why initiatives to create lasting change fail to take root with the majority of people in a meaningful way. Global Warming, for instance, is still regarded as a scientific and environmental issue. Many scientists believe that this is a major mistake and that climate change is more a symptom of “dysfunctional social and economic practices and policies”.

As hard as we might wish to virtually transport ourselves out of these issues, it isn’t likely to happen. Especially now that we are in the midst of a world economic downturn.

Earth day is every day. If it isn’t, it should be.

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With Earth Day fresh in my brain, I am going to add the Rainforest Foundation to our e.a.t.List list of links to the right of our page, and urge you to visit.

Originally founded in 1989 by Sting and Trudie Styler in response to a request for help from an Amazonian Kayapo Indian tribal leader in Brazil, the Rainforest Foundation has grown into a network of organizations working in a dozen countries around the globe helping indigenous communities gain fundamental human rights, territorial ownership and sustainable local development, among other initiatives.

Everyone knows Sting as an accomplished solo musical artist, actor, and former member of the Police. However, not many people will know that his wife, Trudy Styler, is also a film producer. Her latest project is Crude, a critically acclaimed documentary film that tells the story of one of the most controversial environmental lawsuits in recent history. Check it out.

We Are A Test Tube

Here is a short video of David Suzuki offering an interesting analogy regarding our relationship to this planet at a recent speaking engagement in London. In this analogy the Earth is a test tube and we are bacteria. One bacteria is dropped into the test tube and it begins to divide every minute - exponentially. At "time zero" there is one bacteria, at one minute there are two, at two minutes there are four, at three minutes there are eight, etc. At sixty minutes the test tube is completely packed with bacteria and there's no food left! When was the test tube half full? At fifty-nine minutes...

A big "Thank You" to "canadianironwoman" who took the time to take and upload this video to YouTube.

Delay is No Longer an Option

Jesus just left Chicago and he's bound for New Orleans.
Well now, Jesus just left Chicago and he's bound for New Orleans.
Workin from one end to the other and all points in between.
- ZZ Top

Let's pretend for a second that we don't really know there is global warming. We don't have access to newspapers. No internet, no scientific consensus, no coalitions, no Eleventh Hour. We're not aware that the average surface temperature of the earth has increased by more than 1 degree Fahrenheit since 1900, or that the molecular structure of organic matter in soil is changing because of global warming. Imagine that we've eliminated the pretext for environmental stewardship based on radical geophysical concepts, embraced sustainability as a matter of common sense (respect for nature?) and have become profoundly aware of our actions and their consequences on each other and our surroundings. What would happen? Would our present mode of living be sustainable? Would it even be desirable?

Of course, I am oversimplifying to make a point: We know the difference between right and wrong behavior. Why wait for a call to action? We've been lulled into complacency by the sheer momentum and convenience of modern living where we're used to sweeping "stuff" under the proverbial matt, into toxic pits, somebody else's back yard, or our water.... out of site, out of mind. We've known the secret history of lead for quite some time, yet continue to sell this same legacy to our children. Like the saying "garbage in, garbage out" referring to the incorrect input of computer data, we consume and waste mindlessly.

To paraphrase Dr. David Suzuki from a lecture at the University of Western Ontario earlier this month, "before man came along, there was no future. The future is a concept that man created". Why then, Dr. Suzuki seems to be asking, among all of the possible futures we could have envisioned, have we created this one for ourselves... and our progeny. It is as if some forgotten crime, neatly perpetrated by the masters of our industrial miracle, has propelled us into an uncertain destiny without any meaningful direction, where an unrecognizable and horrific ending awaits us.

“Few challenges facing America — and the world — are more urgent than combating climate change,” U.S. President-elect Barak Obama told the recent Governors' Global Climate Summit in California via a taped address. “Now is the time to confront this challenge once and for all. Delay is no longer an option. Denial is no longer an acceptable response. The stakes are too high. The consequences, too serious.”

Indeed, Jesus just left Chicago.

What Does "Sustainable" Mean?

The media is telling us uncertain times are ahead. The polar ice cap is melting, the economy is collapsing, the stock market is crashing, we're not sure what's going to happen next. We've screwed up above and below. Even the shrimp seem to be running from all of this. We're at a turning point that's hard to figure out, and even harder to articulate.

Welcome to e.a.t.Blog^TM. An oasis of communication in a sea of noise. The middle ground, between the extreme and the apathetic, inhabited by most of us.

e.a.t.^® stands for environmental and tasty, which really sums up what we're going to talk about in this blog. Along with my regular posts and the help of occasional guest bloggers, my hope is to create a conversation with you, the consumer, on a full range of topics that relate to issues of sustainability, health, the food we eat, social and corporate responsibility and responsible consumption, among other things, and how these issues impact our daily lives.

Perhaps we can explore the 'idea' of sustainability using a little ancient wisdom which tells us that our 'tragedy' is that we must fit into a world not of our own making, yet must care more what we do to it than what it does to us... wisdom which says how we choose to live our lives expresses a fundamental choice about the kind of world we want to live in.