Earth Day must inspire more than awareness
Earth Day, in its 49th iteration, remains a useful idea to thoughtful people who stubbornly insist awareness leads to change.
It’s hard not to wonder, however, if over time the annual April outpouring of fealty for the planet’s good health hasn’t devolved into a ritual observances — such as Groundhog Day — that produces noise but no impact.
Millions of people around the world today will remind national and corporate leaders that our planet is the only one they have. Leaders will nod, smile and point to something green other than money. Life will go on, though to what future extent remains a troubling question.
Awareness looks nothing like a solution, which requires the power to effect a different outcome. However, saving the planet from ruin isn’t necessarily in the best interest of every powerful organization or individual.
A Dutch journalist recently uncovered a company-produced Shell Oil report, titled “The Greenhouse Effect,” from 1988. The document shows Shell knew about its contribution toward global warming through the production of fossil fuels and speculated on the cost of lawsuits for causing environmental damage.
The scientific perspective, though to some not recognized as valid or reliable as select ancient texts, suggests that the ascent of humanity as a force is making the future survival of numerous species tenuous if not unlikely.
The first day of spring, for instance, brought the death of the world’s last male northern white rhino, age 45 and infirm, his subspecies a victim of human impact on habitat and other irrationality.
As was the case with the western black rhino, its numbers finally poached to extinction seven years ago, white rhinos have been killed for imagined medicinal properties of their horns, which are made of the same stuff as human fingernails.
All five remaining rhino subspecies are considered threatened.
Also dwindling, apparently toward a vanishing point, are giraffes, African lions, elephants, mountain gorillas, orangutans, various lemurs, Siberian tigers, snow leopards, porpoises, tunas, sharks, corals and whales. That’s an abbreviated list. A recent report said about one-third of the world’s plants and animals face a heightened threat of extinction.
Atlantic right whales, once iconic denizens of the waters off Canadian and U.S. coasts and now endangered, failed to produce a single calf during the most recent breeding season. Their population has entered a spiral in which more are dying than are being born. A sperm whale recently found dead off the coast of Spain had 64 pounds of plastics in its digestive system.
The vortex of floating, degrading plastic in the Pacific Ocean covers as much area as Texas. Microplastics have been found in 90 percent of bottled drinking water.
Monarch butterflies, whose numbers have decreased 80 percent during the past 20 years, had another shrinking year as measured at their Mexican wintering spot.
The Atlantic Ocean current, which helps smooth temperature extremes in the Northern Hemisphere, is moving more slowly than any time in the past 1,600 years. The Arctic had its warmest winter on record. Researchers at Rutgers linked a warm Arctic to prolonged winters in the eastern United States and Canada.
A north-south line marking the boundary between the arid American West and the rainier, lusher East has shifted 140 miles eastward because of climate change, researchers at Columbia University announced this month.
The National Park Service so far has withheld an 87-page report, commissioned in 2016 and submitted for review in February, about the projected impact of rising seas at 118 coastal parks. During the review, all mention of the human role in climate change was deleted.
Scott Pruitt, who heads the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, announced that he alone would decide what science is or isn’t applicable in developing policies affecting clean air, water and toxic sites.
Fifty-six U.S. senators voted last week to strip ballast water, the source of scores of invasive species dumped into the Great Lakes, from Clean Water Act oversight.
The current federal farm bill released by U.S. House Republicans contains a provision, pushed by Dow Chemical, allowing the EPA to approve pesticides without determining whether they harm endangered species.