On its 36th anniversary, eco-evangelist Mike Weilbacher compares the first Earth Day to the barely-noticed present one and makes dire predictions for this century, including the inundation of Miami. Delightfully, he ends his apocalyptic vision of our imminent future if we don't stop raping Gaia with our hydrocarbons by telling us to buckle up because we're in for a bumpy ride:
While the Cuyahoga is cleaner, Lake Erie lives and eagle populations soar, today's concerns are of an entirely different scale than 1970. Global surface temperatures are rising, glaciers are melting, the ocean is warming, rainforests are burning, species are vanishing at the highest rates since the Great Extinction killed the dinosaurs, coral reefs are bleaching and dying, deserts are spreading, and forests continue to fall. For every hybrid car, there is a Hummer getting 8 miles to the gallon, and even with curbside recycling firmly entrenched, the amount of garbage each of us produces goes up, from 4 pounds daily in 1990 to 4.5 pounds today. And scientists starkly estimate we are losing 100 species every day to an unconscionable wave of extinction sweeping the world.These issues will soon conspire to radically transform the political, social and geographic landscape of the entire planet in the near future. As climates collapse, water scarcity widens, more species vanish, and sea levels rise to where whole regions fret about drowning - Bangladesh, the Nile delta, the Maldives, Miami, the Jersey Shore - a global chorus demanding change will one day soon rise in a green tsunami of outrage. And Earth Day will become a centerpiece of the change ahead.
As in 1970, when Earth Day catalyzed the comeback of bald eagles, the future Earth Day will regain its relevance in a shattered world to become the first secular holiday celebrated worldwide. This future version of Earth Day will look decidedly more like 1970. That is what we need right now: several billion activists pulling in the same direction, stitching together the threads of an increasingly tattered world.
As we mark the low-key 2006 edition of Earth Day, buckle your seat belts. The ride ahead is going to get bumpy. Earth Day is one of the strongest tools for healing a wounded world.
Happy Earth Day, Ira!
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bleh! just bleh. i saw sumpin' on the web about the flourshing of wild life at chernobyl. take that, eco-asses! i want my five gallon toliet tanks back!!! how do you save water when you have to flush a 3 gallon tank twice? (that great king of the hill episode comes to mind. hank runs for council and filibusters till all the councilmen and women have to go use the low flow privvys. amazingly, they capaitulate after that)
Posted by: richard at April 23, 2006 10:41 AMThe toilet water conservation thing works fine for urine - anything else, forget it.
Posted by: Donnah at April 23, 2006 03:07 PMEver since I've been in high school, ecological Armageddon has been 10 years down the road. I suspect when I die it still will be.
When I was a kid, it was the population bomb.
Posted by: Donnah at April 24, 2006 09:10 AM"Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to
support... the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers
will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution... by 1985
air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching
earth by one half..."
Life Magazine, January 1970
"The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years...
If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees
colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven
degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it
would take to put us into an ice age."
Kenneth Watt
Earth Day speech at Swarthmore College, 19 April 1970
"I'm scared... I'm 37 and I'd kind of like to live to be 67 in a reasonably pleasant world, and not die in some kind of holocaust in the next decade."
Paul Ehrlich, biologist, Stanford University
Look Magazine, 1970 Earth Day issue
[Fear not: As of March 2006, not only is Dr. Ehrlich (now 73) still alive, but still working. To date, none of his books have been recalled as defective products. Or moved to the ‘science fiction’ section.]
"Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim
timetable: By 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these
will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and
the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner,
South and Central America will exist under famine conditions.
...By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world,
with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and
Australia, will be in famine."
Peter Gunter, North Texas State University
The Living Wilderness Magazine, Spring 1970 issue
"Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest
cataclysm in the history of man have already been born."
Paul Ehrlich, biologist, Stanford University
"Eco-Catastrophe!" (essay), Ramparts Magazine, Earth Day Special
issue
Excellent quotes, F451. Thanks very much for sharing them.
Posted by: Donnah at April 26, 2006 12:09 PMI read a book sometime around 88, '5-5-25', I think, was the title...it referenced that date as
being the day all the planets would align (co-incidently the same angle as the great pyramid's main tunnel) tilting the earth's axis, melting
most of the icecaps..etc. etc.
Happily enough though, one of the few places in the world that would be dry land was Bok Tower, twenty minutes from my house..so I am going to be ok. Sorry about the rest of you.
I figure it will happen this year.
Posted by: csason at April 26, 2006 01:44 PMWell, you'll be sittin' pretty.
Posted by: Donnah at April 27, 2006 12:13 AM