Plush toys made from plant-based plastic. Leggings made from used water bottles. Bento boxes made from bamboo fiber. These are just some of the advertisements that swamp the average person’s inbox every Earth Day. Elsewhere, couples will venture into a reserve for one-off hikes or sign up to collect trash at the beach for an hour. Restaurants will graciously sacrifice a percent or two of their profits in the name of “dine and donate” events. Malls will tout green shopping sprees and discounts on products with eco-friendliness of a dubious nature, but passable to the uninformed consumer. Today, 51 years after the first Earth Day, it seems that the occasion has strayed from its original purpose.
Specifically, it has evolved into a mall holiday, a feel-good event. “Right now people might take a styrofoam cup and paint a planet on it with paint that might be tainted with lead,” says Aaron Mair, first black president of the Sierra Club. “We need to make people uncomfortable, to shatter that convenience.”
Unsurprisingly, corporations have never been so eager to get onboard. After all, the occasion is ripe to capitalize on – it promises a boom in consumption. This all transpires under the guise of eco-friendliness. Soft drink behemoths pledge their dedication to reducing plastic usage, despite having lobbied in resistance to such policies for decades. Shell promotes employee beach cleanups. Chevron champions its efforts to protect the endangered El Segundo Blue Butterfly, tactfully refraining from mentioning that the building of one of its refineries was what originally destroyed the butterfly’s habitat.
In New York, anti-littering NGO Keep America Beautiful partners with PepsiCo to introduce drink container-recycling “dream machines”. Needless to say, PepsiCo products fill much of the 200 billion drink containers produced in the US each year. This reality is carefully sidelined by corporate PR. “It is tragic,” laments Denis Hayes, national coordinator of the first Earth Day, on the occasion’s commercialization and greenwashing. “This ridiculous perverted marketing has cheapened the concept of what is really green.”
Compounding the irony of the situation is that the inaugural Earth Day in 1970 was a landmark occasion. It signified a shift in environmentalists’ mentalities to ones of greater intersectionality. “The original founders of Earth Day borrowed pages from the then-happening civil rights movement to engage in righteous civil disobedience,” Mair says. They were passionate about “marrying science with social justice activism”, emphasizing that the Day’s goal was “not to clean the air while leaving slums.” In other words, Earth Day was a recognition of the overlap between the racial and environmental justice movements.
The first Earth Day also embodied the principle of citizen involvement. Organizers refused to accept money from corporations and conducted workshops whose aims couldn’t have been stated more plainly: “Challenge corporate and government leaders.” The New York Times likened the 20 million-strong turnout to a “secular revival meeting”, one that prompted the passing of the Clean Air, Clean Water, National Environmental Protection, and Endangered Species Acts. A movement previously limited to a select, upper-class few “took on a grassroots flair”. It is these truths that we ought to be centering on: Racial, gender, and disability justice as climate justice. Inequities in the carbon emissions of the wealthy and poor. Unlearning narratives about the biggest culprits of climate change, which are steeped in xenophobia. Amplifying and learning from Indigenous relationships with the land.
Today’s Earth Day is a far cry from these values. It has been co-opted by the very corporations responsible for the climate disaster, who tout themselves as leaders in climate policy and innovation. The behavior they encourage? Perfectly aligned with the status quo of consumption and materialism.
Rather than being a day of protracted consumerism, Earth Day ought to be one of solidarity with communities on the frontlines of climate change. Fun-and-games activities for the planet are hardly reflective of the trauma that these folks face; the disconnect couldn’t be more obvious. As Mair says, these folks don’t have the luxury to engage in such activities; they are more concerned about “getting food on the table”. Any activities in support of them, therefore, should encompass and recognize their historical and social realities, rather than merely involve waving generic placards reading ‘save the turtles’. For those of us in positions of privilege, we can utilize that social and political capital on behalf of suppressed voices.
Filmmaker Robert Stone once said that “every Earth Day is a reflection of where we are as a culture.” Indeed, today’s tradition of consuming green products is hardly a break from our take-make-dispose economic model and cannot be a replacement for systemic change. In one activist’s words, “we cannot consume our way to a livable climate future.”
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