Green Is Good
Twenty years after the original Earth Day, the list of threats to the planet has grown dramatically— and the event has turned into a global affair
April 22, 1970. Twenty million A men cans from sea to polluted sea participate in the biggest nationwide festival since the end of World Wanil. ~Earth Day" launches the modern environmentalist movement. The US. Congress stands in recess because most lawmakers are busy appearing at rallies across the country. The mayor of New York City bans cars along Fifth Avenue, forcing TV crews covering the event to use horse-drawn buggies. California high-school students wear gas masks to press calls for a government agency on environmental standards. At the University of Texas at Austin, the campus newspaper prints a mock edition dated April 22, 1990. The headline: NOXIOUS SMOG HITS HOUSTON; 6,000 DEAD.
Luckily, it hasn’t quite come to that. But 20 years after the original Earth Day, the list of threats to the planet has grown: toxic waste, acid rain, ozone holes and the greenhouse effect now command newspaper headlines and spark international conferences. Environmental worries have launched a worldwide political movement, and Earth Day has turned into a global affair. This Sunday at least 100 million people around the world will flock to teach-ins and sit-ins, bike-ins and trash-ins, seed-ins and sew-ins—all to show that yes, they love Mother Nature.
They plan to say that in myriad ways. French enthusiasts dressed in blue and green will form an 835-kilometer human chain along the Loire River. Pursers on Cathay Pacific Airways flights will supplement their usual welcome-aboard litanies with environmental messages. Lithuanians will temporarily set aside their struggle for independence and launch a campaign to save the Volga. A procession of elephants adorned with flower garlands will lead an anti-deforestation protest by the Karen indigenes in Myanmar (Burma). Cars will be banned from the business district of Manila. The Hong Kong Hilton will put green chocolates on sale. Environmentalists hope that all the events—earnest or larky, cosmetic or practical—will alert a complacent planet to what they regard as clear and present dangers. There is a long way to go. The first Earth Day so galvanized America’s ecological consciousness that it forced the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and inspired Congress to pass the Clean Air Act, which led to car-emission standards and paved the way for mountains of ecological legislation. In the years that followed, the United States, while continuing to pollute massively, undertook many small steps to repair the situation. But the mass enthusiasm soon waned; subsequent Earth Days, by and large, were flops. Although the 1980s saw the rise of "green" politics in many parts of the world, environmentalists complain that greed often came before green. "There’s plenty of green awareness, but not the political will that goes with it," says Petra Kelly, one of the founders of West Germany’s Green Party. "That’s been the tragedy of the ‘80s." Now, say Earth Day organizers, it is time to launch the next phase of the ecology movement.
Symbolically, at least, virtually no spot of the planet will be left untouched on April 22. Pollution experts will educate farmers in remote Nepalese villages. Divers will collect garbage from the bottom of the sea off Japan. There will be tree-planting ceremonies in Mauritius, Thailand, Fiji and Rwanda. Perhaps most impressive, a Sino-Soviet-American mountaineering expedition plans to reach the 29,028-foot summit of Mount Everest on Earth Day.
None of this will do any good, ecologists warn, if the globe’s industrial polluters don’t start riding the green wave. So far, industrialists have been emitting mixed signals. A recent survey of environmental attitudes among European companies conducted by the management consultancy Touche Ross Europe Services, for example, found that 72 percent of West German firms had modified or were planning to modify their products for ecological reasons—yet Volkswagen infuriated ecologists last week when it announced plans to start producing the Polo model in East Germany without catalytic converters. "There’s a collision of interests between industry and the need for environmentally sound production," says Greenpeace spokeswoman Ariane Gottberg in Hamburg. "But consumers are increasingly becoming aware of their power—and they will use it." Other experts stress that consumer power has already brought along significant changes. Just last week the three largest U.S. tuna canners announced that they would no longer buy or sell tuna fish captured along with dolphins. Many of the world’s most powerful corporations, from MTV to Mitsubishi, have in some way climbed aboard the environmental bandwagon.
Eastern Europe will come under special ecological scrutiny this year. Now that the world has learned the dirty secrets of Bitterfeld, East Germany, Copsa Mica, Romania and a host of other disaster zones behind the old Iron Curtain, environmentalists East and West are scrambling to start the cleanup. Aware that ecological disasters the East bloc spill over into Western Europe, the European Community has already begun to figure the cost. Of the $600 million the EC plans to set aside for reform projects in Eastern Europe this year, $88.8 million will go to environmental programs.
list of infamy: The Eastern Europeans aren’t sitting around waiting for help. In Poland, public pressure has led the government to crack down on the 80 polluting factories it has placed on a "list of infamy"; ecologists plan Earth Day celebrations throughout the country. So does East Germany’s Green League, which will meet with counterparts from Czechoslovakia along the ecologically devastated border area between the two countries.
Despite the seriousness of their agenda, organizers from South Dakota to South Africa say that, first and foremost, Earth Day should be fun. In many parts of the world, Sunday isto be a day for kids and this, the organizers trust, helps get the green message across more effectively than speeches and demonstrations could. "When you get out into the countryside and see how beautiful it is," says Giles Clotworthy of the Cornish National Trust, "you can’t help but want to preserve it for future generations."
-PASCAL Privat with RUTH Marshall in Paris, KAREN Breslau in Bonn, Russ Dallen in London, ROBINA Gibb in HongKong and bureau reports
Source : NEWSWEEK, 23 April, 1990
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