Earth Day And Personal Responsibility

The environmental movement in this country, which came of age 38 years ago on the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970, has matured right along with the baby boomers who gave that first great exercise in environmental consciousness raising its energy and enthusiasm. Those first teach-ins and demonstrations, which drew 20 million people across the country, were initially viewed with a measure of bemusement and suspicion in a culture built on the exploitation of this nation’s vast store of natural resources. There was a distinctly counterculture feel to the suggestion that the earth had to be somehow “saved” from the depredations of humankind. The idea was dismissed by many as so much hippie talk.

The conversation has changed in the intervening decades. We no longer are talking about saving the earth. We are discussing strategies for saving ourselves. The earth, of course, will continue its evolution with or without our species or any of the other more vulnerable species standing closer than we do to the line between survival and extinction. The human impact on this planet is no longer considered the delusion of tree-huggers. Only those on the extreme margins of the scientific discourse on this issue still believe that humankind has nothing to do with global warming and the threats, known and unknown, it poses for our future.

The emphasis of Earth Day has also changed from mass action to individual action. Newtown’s Earth Day celebration this year is Saturday, April 26, from 10 am to 4 pm at the Newtown Middle School (see gogreennewtown.com), and the message of the day will be that the big solutions to our environmental challenges will grow out of little, everyday decisions about the products we use and how efficiently we use them. Some Newtown residents are leading the way by choosing to pay a few dollars more each month to purchase their power from clean energy providers, and local citizens on the Clean Energy Task Force are calling on town officials to secure 26 percent of its electricity from renewable resources by 2010 — more than any other town in the state. On the state level, the governor’s One Thing campaign (onethingct.com) challenges us to look at our lifestyles to see the possibilities for doing more with less. Even in stores and retail outlets, where self-indulgence is the mantra of marketing, we are now exhorted as shoppers to Go Green by purchasing products designed to reduce our impact on the environment and our draw on finite natural resources.

Much has happened since 1970 to convince us that government does not have the solutions to every big problem — indeed, sometimes it is the problem. Accepting personal responsibility for even a small part of our long-term survival and success on this planet shows that we have matured in our thinking over the years. Don’t let another year go by in your own personal growth before you join the effort.