Everyday is Earth Day. But Let's Be Realistic...
Your Solar Alarm clock rings, and you stumble to the bathroom and take a three minute soak under a water-saving showerhead. After dressing in a hemp sack, you head to the breakfast table where you make a cup of shade grown coffee (20% of all proceeds going to re-foresting the Brazilian rainforest) and chow a natural bran cereal with organic strawberries. Ya carpool to work in the Hybrid van where your non-profit attempts to save the planet over the Internet. It's Gardenburgers for lunch, educational outreach in the afternoon, followed by meditation, a workshop on conservation, P-Patch gardening and a jog in the greenspace you and your neighbors created through driveway easements. At night you dream about your upcoming vacation to the Great Barrier Reef where you'll work with scientists to try and communicate with the last remaining school of Giant Turtles.
Not.
No matter how crunchy granola you may be, regardless of your PC-Yuppified address, your two-sided copies, your compost pile and your pack-it-out mentality, you will not become an eco-warrior in the next few weeks, months or years. You are entrenched in your current life, committing your time, energy and money to things that make you happy, feel good, or seem necessary. A procreating consumer, you're generally PC, you recycle, volunteer for your kid's athletic endeavors and "give at the office" - and that's nice. But it's not nearly enough. The Children's Hospital and NARAL and the United Way are not on the front lines of the most important fight of all - the survival of OTHER species that cannot defend themselves. (Yep, I'm talkin' about the baby seals, Redwoods, gorillas in the mist and the spotted flippin' owl.) The bottom line is, if you're not doing your part to save the planet, you're fucking it.
Like many liberals, my own ecological activism has dwindled over the years. Graduating from UC Berkeley, I went from canvassing door-to-door for Greenpeace, to becoming an environmental lobbyist for the PIRGs, to organizing work groups for the 20th Anniversary of EarthDay, to inventing EARTHALERT, The Active Environmental Game, to sitting on my fat ass and talking about how the temperature seems to be getting warmer. (Sometimes I take stray spiders outside and set them free, and my garden is an official Backyard Wildlife Sanctuary, but that's about it.) Sadly, even when I was putting in 20 hour days to fight polluters and build neighborhood coalitions, it was never enough. There are far too many people on the planet, too many greedy corporations, too many mouths to feed, too many global crimes ignored. Luckily, for almost every atrocitiy, there's a small band of dedicated radicals devoted to changing the (red) tide. That's where we come in.
The good news is, you don't have to jump into a rubber dingy and put yourself between a whale and a harpoon to raise hell. EarthDay activities are as varied as garbage along the interstate: Over the years, I've petitioned folks in front of Thriftway to sign the Earthday Pledge ("That doesn't look like you're buying organic!"), biked to work (in LA, no less), picked up trash in Paradise with the Forest Service, dug out the Duwamish of invasive plants - hell, we made dolls from recycled materials at a pre-school one year and the kids ATE it up (literally). The worst EarthDay gig I ever had: sorting recylables at the dump; in retrospect, a few extra tons of landfill just isn't that bad. Regardless of how you pitch in, it's as invigorating as a quadruple espresso, and most importantly, puts you in contact with the groups that slave on these issues day in and day out.
Like National Secretaries Day, buying Mother Earth a bouquet of flowers on EarthDay is not the end all and be all (she'd prefer a $10,000 raise). So in addition to planting trees or going carless on April 22nd, become a lifetime member of a few of your favorite environmental groups (if you're clueless, start with Greepeace and the Rainforest Action Network). Congressmen pay attention to the numbers - how many constituents in their districts are spending hard earned cash to join organizations that mail out newsletters telling their members what a shithead he/she is on the issues. It makes a huge difference, and it's the least we can do.
Michael A. Stusser
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