Earth Day

By EUGENE LINDEN

As the marketing monster called Earth Day lumbers toward April 22, hapless journalists in its path are desperately dodging a barrage of press kits, news ( releases and alerts. Thousands of Earth Day happenings, from ladybug releases and the building of garbage monuments to corporate "We love the environment too" advertising campaigns, have become an undifferentiated blur as everyone tries to wave the green flag at once. Nobody is against Earth Day, but the very breadth of this looming mega-event raises the question: What's the point?

Certainly demonstrations and mass events have an honored role in history. Sheer, chanting force of numbers has served notice to dictators from Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines to Nicolae Ceausescu in Romania that their time was up. Back in 1970, activists capitalized on an outpouring of environmental sentiment during the first Earth Day to unseat seven of a targeted "dirty dozen" politicians and spur the passage of clean-air-and-water legislation. Today Eastern Europe, perhaps the grimiest industrial region on earth, could use Earth Day to focus newly aroused democratic forces on their poisoned air and land. So could much of the Third World, where billions of people grievously stretch the capacity of forests and other resources.

In the U.S., though, Earth Day 1990 comes at a time when environment is a motherhood issue. Since polls show that Americans want environmental protection regardless of costs, the problem is not so much awakening the nation to ecological threats as it is getting people to face the difficult choices entailed in dealing with those threats. For a number of reasons, Earth Day might actually thwart that end.

Mass events are crude instruments, useful for delivering slogans and chants but not well suited to deciding subtle issues that confront environmental converts who are trying to translate their concerns into practice. Whether people should buy biodegradable or recyclable plastics or switch from disposable to cloth diapers will not be settled on April 22.

Earth Day fits into a troubling American pattern of responding to crises with rhetoric and theater. So far, it has been easy to be an environmentalist: one simply has to claim to be one. Just as middle-class voters routinely condemn "welfare" while opposing cuts in the social programs that constitute such spending, a good portion of the voters who claim they would pay for environmental improvements balk when the bill is presented. If consumers truly insisted on cleaner air in their individual buying and voting decisions, Detroit and Japan would vie to deliver less polluting cars, and it would not take ten years of struggle to amend the Clean Air Act.

Instead of making hard choices, it is easier to blow off steam. April 22 will offer people an opportunity to purge accumulated anxiety over wounds to earth's life-support systems. Worn out by weeks of buildup and an accompanying media blitz, many people will return to business as usual on Monday, hoping not to hear the E word again for weeks. It is possible that the environment might be better served if consumers had no such outlet, and were forced to do some quiet soul searching about how their individual choices contribute to the world's environmental problems.

In the past, raucous demonstrations have sometimes polarized the nation, shifting attention from the issues to the rowdy behavior and unpopular politics -- Stalinists for Solidarity with the Viet Cong! -- of protesters. Since support for environmental protection spans the political spectrum, polarization should not plague Earth Day unless fringe groups seize the occasion to sabotage a steel mill or stage other "ecotage" attacks on perceived corporate villains. Earth Day's organizers more likely face the opposite problem: the possibility that the hype and the numbing array of events will cause people to throw up their hands and stay home.

Proponents argue that Earth Day 1990 will both challenge individuals and mobilize new constituencies such as minorities, the religious community and organized labor. The event's disciplined chairman and mastermind, San Francisco lawyer Denis Hayes, hopes to saturate the public consciousness and create what he calls a "tilt point" in attitudes, refocusing the passions of the cold war on ecological issues. Hayes hopes that Earth Day will help make sound environmental behavior as accepted in daily life as wearing a seat belt. Democratic Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts believes Earth Day will help recruit an army of voters to hold slippery politicians truly accountable for environmental problems in coming elections.

This will be no easy task. One of America's more dubious achievements during the past two decades is the perfecting of techniques that enable politicians and corporations to capitalize on discontents without threatening the status quo. Unlike the world's oppressed, Americans have many ways of expressing their frustrations through votes, opinion surveys and boycotts, as well as demonstrations. Legislators and companies have fine-tuned their ability to respond to expressions of public anxiety with promises of legislative and private initiatives, reassuring people that problems are being addressed, if not solved. When things don't change for the better, people take to the streets again, and the cycle repeats itself, as it has with Earth Day 1990.

The net effect of this intricate dance is that most environmental problems in the U.S. are more pressing today than they were 20 years ago. Insults to air, water and living things can no longer be dismissed as life-style and recreational issues for the middle class, but now must be seen as economic, social and even geopolitical crises. The question is whether the environment will allow the U.S. the luxury of Earth Day 2010.