As I noted on Shitter, and in comment to a good piece of snark on Substack by friend Lyle Lewis?
Earth Day is the day when pseudoenvironmentalists and environmentalists lite pretend to deeply care about environmental issues.
But, it's true?
Look at Jared Huffman, claiming to be an environmentalist, except when it comes to letting cows continue to shit in Point Reyes. Result? Cows drive away tule elk. Ravens eat plover eggs when they run out of worms in cow shit. Park Service ignores the former and ropes off a section of Drake's Beach as critical nesting habitat for the latter rather than addressing the actual problem.
Per a piece I heard on NPR this morning, asking listeners what they saw as the biggest problem?
For me, No. 1 is the climate crisis. And, we're past "climate change." The Colorado River is drying up and will continue to do so the rest of this century. We're on target for 4°C, maybe 5°C, of increased heat from pre-industrial times within 100 years. That's 7-9°F. That latter faces neoliberal climate change Obamiacs like Michael Mann, perhaps worse at times for the cause than climate change deniers.
That said, the climate change deniers don't help. And, in the western US, that means increased wildfires, like the KNP Complex Fire in Sequoia five years ago:
Or the Dixie Fire blowing up in Lassen the same year. I was there the day it blew up.
No. 2 is the Sixth Mass Extinction. Besides megafauna and lesser fauna, globalization and related issues threatens a lot of flora. So does mass monocrop agriculture. The chemicals behind that threaten many birds.
No. 3, as Lyle talks about in that piece and elsewhere, is "overshoot," the overextraction of vital resources. Beyond petroleum, water is an obvious one. Overusing the Colorado River is a clear example. Another, as I said in calling out Suzanne Bellsnyder over Proposition 4, is groundwater — in her case, the Ogallala Aquifer.
No. 4 is what's behind all of this — neoliberal capitalism. That's the bottom line.
So, with Earth Day now 56 years old, we can celebrate accomplishments, like the Endangered Species Act in the US, while at the same time note failures, such as US politicians of both duopoly parties, not just Republicans, undercutting it and other environmental issues when they get in the way of capitalist economics. We can globally note Dear Leader conspiring with Xi Jinping to keep the Paris climate accords entirely voluntary. And, we can note climate change Obamiac scientists overselling Paris in the past.
Don't be fooled again.
That said, a side note or two, riffing on my Earth Day 2016 piece.
National parks not only can get loved to death, they do. This has gotten worse in our COVID and post-COVID world, abetted not only by Trump slashes to federal nature funding, but death by a thousand paper cuts or stasis from Obama and Biden.
Second, Earth Day was founded about urban environmentalism. The record there since 1970 isn't perfect either. But, to be better? Start at home. In cities and towns, pick up trash. Homeowners, businesses and apartment complex owners? Stop overwatering and overfertilizing lawns. Plant native plants. Stop using petroleum-wasting Amazon so much.
Third, lets note that "wilderness" areas don't stay wilderness without management, and at least since not the development of agriculture, but organized pastoral nomads and even large-scale hunter-gatherers, "natural" environments have been managed by humans. Stop calling American Indians "Roussellian noble savages." It tain't so.
Am I perfect on this? No. I just took a big old jet airplane on vacation, per the Sequoia photo. But, I have a reasonable amount of striving. I boycott a few companies over environmental issues, just like others over Israel. I fight the temptation to use artificial intelligence, and its electricity consumption, beyond already being here on the Net. I stay attuned to local nature.
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