There’s a lot to be said for Earth Day, which we celebrate tomorrow, April 22. When I was a child, Earth Day events fostered my awareness of the environment. In elementary school, the focus was on oil spills and endangered species such as the Right Whale or the giant panda. In middle school, rainforests ruled on Earth Day. By the time I got to college, recycling programs—from bottles to tires—were in vogue.
In recent years, however, Earth Day has been hijacked by climate change alarmists. The specter of global warming has overshadowed all other environmental goals, as alarmists issue dire warnings about catastrophic climate change and push for stringent regulation. Endangered species, rainforests and conservation, if present at all, have been largely absorbed under the global warming umbrella.
When Earth Day began in 1970, scientists were more concerned about global cooling than warming, and the focus was on direct, visible harms to the air, water and land. Earth Day was conceived by Senator Gaylord Nelson in 1969 after he saw the results of an oil spill off the coast of California at Santa Barbara. The event was intended to inspire awareness of and appreciation for all the aspects of Earth’s environment.
But in 2004, leaders in the environmental movement deemed global warming a “global crisis.” Analysts at the skeptical Heartland Institute, writing on their Global Warming Facts Web site, allege that activists chose the issue for reasons that had nothing to do with the environment. Rather, they wanted to “save their reputations, create an excuse for a full assault on businesses and capitalism, increase their influence over the Democrat Party, and fund their organizations in perpetuity.”
Whatever its cause, the push to reduce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions now eclipses other environmental issues. Saving species, the argument goes, won’t matter if they’re wiped out by catastrophic climate change in the long run. Rainforests and old-growth American forests are now most valued for their ability to sequester CO2.
You can see this imbalance at Chapel Hill, where Earth Day festivities began more than a week ago. Various groups around campus—from the Student Environmental Affairs Committee to the Morehead Planetarium and Science Center—are joining forces to create a schedule packed with environmental activities. With a few exceptions, it’s all about global warming.
The week-long celebration at Carolina includes a talk titled “Break Through: Overcoming the Global Warming Technology Gap,” by Michael Shellenberger, co-author of the controversial essay The Death of Environmentalism and co-founder of the Breakthrough Institute, a New York-based think tank. It also includes a showing of The 11th Hour, a feature-length documentary about the global environment narrated by actor Leonardo DiCaprio, and an environmental social justice panel sponsored by the Student Environmental Affairs Committee. On April 22, dozens of groups will set up booths and tables in Carolina’s central quad, most of them alerting visitors to the threat of climate change.
The myopic emphasis on global climate change blinds environmental activists to serious environmental problems and solutions that don’t involve climate. Yet Earth Day, at UNC and across the nation, should introduce citizens to earth’s diversity, highlighting both its destruction and beauty, its problems and solutions. Focusing solely on any one issue masks the wondrous variety that the earth has to offer.
If you look carefully, you can see the remnants of the original idea, even at Chapel Hill. For example, one event this past week was a tour of the North Carolina Botanical Garden’s new Visitor Education Center. The center emphasizes energy efficiency, pollutant-free construction practices, and conservation of plants in gardens and natural areas. The Center’s mission, to “celebrate relationships between humans and nature,” seems perfectly in keeping with Earth Day’s historical goals.
Another event, Students Working in the Environment for Active Transformation’s (SWEAT’s) Earth Day 5K run, benefits a worthy, and green, cause. Proceeds from the run will send ten student members of SWEAT to the Anzaldo region of Bolivia, one of the poorest countries in the world. Students will work directly with local citizens to complete efficiency repairs and to build a series of greenhouses for providing fruit and vegetables at a Bolivian boarding school.
Such activities should be at the center, not the periphery, of environmental awareness. After all, global warming may not even occur and, if it does, it’s likely to be so gradual that people can easily adapt.
I have some additional suggestions for young people truly concerned about environmental problems. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, close to 40 percent of the waters surveyed by state governments are too polluted for basic public uses like fishing or swimming. One local solution is the Neuse Riverkeeper program, sponsored by the Neuse River Foundation, a grassroots non-profit organization based in New Bern, North Carolina.
This organization aims to keep the Neuse River healthy and clean by patrolling the entire watershed by water, air and ground in an effort to eliminate sources of pollution. The foundation also holds annual paddling days, festivals, and a cleanup of the Neuse. Approximately 1200 volunteers have removed more than 85,000 pounds of trash in the past six years.
Internationally, deforestation is a serious problem. In many developing countries, urban expansion, agriculture, development, ranching, and illegal logging have denuded forests. One solution is the Nature Conservancy’s Plant a Billion Trees project. The Nature Conservancy accomplishes its mission of saving endangered plants, animals, and natural communities by buying lands and preserving them in their natural state. In the Atlantic Forest of Brazil, one of the world’s most endangered tropical forests, the Conservancy will restore 2.5 million acres of land and plant 1 billion trees over the next 10 years. The Atlantic Forest is home to 23 species of primates, 1000 species of birds and over 20,000 species of plants—an extraordinary array of biodiversity. Many of these species are found nowhere else on Earth.
Instead of wrapping everything into the global warming package, environmentalists should create awareness of and appreciation for all aspects of Earth’s environment. They should start with the next Earth Day.