Earth Day: Color It Green

A saying from the Talmud aptly describes the contemporary American situation: “If you don’t know where you are going, then any road will lead you there.” A consensus is emerging, though, that we had better get moving and begin to do something about the environment. As a recent Gallup Poll indicates, 76% of American consumers consider themselves environmentalists, and even the First Consumer, President Bush, is counted among the ecologically aware.

For today--Earth Day--at least, the roads all are paved with green intentions. In anticipation of this occasion, the 20th anniversary of the first Earth Day, and capitalizing on mounting concern for the health of the planet, authors and publishers have filled bookstores with a diverse collection of “road maps” and “travel guides.”

The most common, and predictably the best-selling, are those that suggest that through personal action--each of us doing our own “green” thing--the despoliation of nature can be arrested: By adopting a green life style (walking more softly on the Earth), becoming a green consumer (buying ecologically as well as economically) and by doing some simple and easy things, we can stop the spread of the ozone hole, prevent acid rain, and reduce the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the accumulation of solid waste, and the pollution of soil and ground water by hazardous substances.

The choices of things you can do personally escalate from a modest 50 to more than 1,000. Fairly representative of the available titles is 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth by the Earth Works Group (Earth Works Press. Its remedies are good common sense and are, indeed, easy to do. Included are: stopping junk mail (each person doing so saves one-and-a-half trees); using phosphate-free detergents; disposing properly of old paint; taking short showers; planting trees; taking a mug to work to use in place of Styrofoam cups; recycling cans, bottles and newspapers; using cloth diapers instead of disposables, etc.

The appeal is understandable: Two decades of environmental activism and governmental regulation have achieved about as much progress as would a midday drive from downtown to Los Angeles International Airport. It is also consistent with the current retreat into privatism and the prevailing ethos, inherited from the ‘60s, that “the personal is political.” And it’s all very convenient: No action is compulsory, no sacrifice need be made, nor is any significant expenditure of time required--one forthcoming title even advertises 2 Minutes a Day for a Greener Planet (Harper & Row).

To be sure, practicing good “Earth hygiene” is worthwhile and, no doubt, will raise your sense of environmental self-esteem. But thinking you’re doing enough to restore environmental balance is an illusion.

The premise on which such thought is based--that we, as consumers, can direct the economy by the signals that our purchases (and our lack oif them) communicate to firms--must surely bring a smile to Milton Friedman’s face. The idea falters on several accounts.

First, there are many millions of people who, even if they were so inclined, do not have the means to adopt a green life style (the economist would say they do not have “effective demand”). Included among them are all those trapped in the squalid conditions of urban ghettos who have no place to compost or garden, and the harried parents, with three jobs between them, for whom packaged foods and disposable diapers are virtual necessities.

Then there are those with the means to live green, but who, in the absence of assurances that others will do likewise, believe that benefits of personally recycling and conserving are too limited to be worth the effort (the “public goods” dilemma). Moreover, even if we all do recycle, that does not insure that there will be a market for the materials. Indeed, many municipalities with curbside recycling programs have glutted markets and, in some cases, do not know what to do with the mountains of cans, bottles and newspapers that they have accumulated.

A third difficulty is that even when we follow the good guidance of The Green Lifestyle Hand- book (Henry Holt & Co.) and The Green Consumer (Penguin, 1990) and take care to purchase biodegradeable products and patronize enterprises that conserve resources and minimally pollute, the effects of such decisions do not penetrate very deeply into the fabric of our economy. A modern economy is a seamless web in which all processes and products are interrelated. A firm may be environmentally responsible--conserve energy and materials, take care that its operations produce negligible quantities of pollutants, properly dispose of hazardous substances, manufacture goods that are biodegradeable or recycleable. Nonetheless, it may still use tools, machines or other inputs whose production by a different firm are not nearly so kind to nature.

Finally, however responsibly we may act in our homes, gardens, garages, supermarkets, etc., it will not at all affect what occurs outside the domestic economy: Choosing not to use toxic chemicals in our back-yard gardens does not prevent these substances from being exported to the Third World, only to return as residues on imported fruits and vegetables. Nor will personal action stop desperate people, living on the edge of survival in Third World nations, from cutting down trees for use as tools and fuel, and farming margin lands to eke out a minimal existence. These people live outside the global monetary economy, but the consequences of their actions--deforestation and desertification--must be a concern to us all.

The depletion of resources and the fouling of the environment, as Barry Commoner points out in his new book, Making Peace With the Planet (Pantheon), are deeply embedded in the technologies that we use to produce and transport the things that make up our economy. As he puts it: “Our air, water and land weren’t polluted by some evil demon. The destruction of our environment begins in our farms and factories--and that’s where we have to go to save it.” As Commoner argues, investment must be directed toward a redesign of technology and production systems.

So, for example, if we want to avert the worst consequences of global climate change we must permanently reduce the combustion of fossil fuels, and this requires the expansion of rail systems and mass transit, the redesign of motor vehicles and the development of solar-energy sources.

Citing the few examples of real environmental successes--the elimination of lead from gasoline, the banning of DDT and PCB, the removal of mercury from chlorine production--Commoner concludes that if we want clean air, water and soil, we must not make the poisons that are presently polluting them: “Once a pollutant is produced, it’s too late. Pollution control doesn’t work. Pollution prevention does.”

Thus, we must limit the use of plastics and expand the use of glass and other, more ecologically sound, materials as substitutes; substantially reduce the use of chemical fertilizers and synthetic pesticides, and adopt organic farming methods.

And, to protect rain forests and other Third World ecosystems, we must assist the people of these countries in developing the means to feed and shelter themselves without destroying their environment. The global gap in opportunity and quality of life must be narrowed between the poor of the Southern Hemisphere and the rich of the North.

These are projects of a national, even international, scope and scale and require a public as well as a personal commitment. Government, at least in the sense that Lincon conceived it, as our agency “for doing together those things which we cannot do, or do as well, by ourselves,” is essential.

A commitment to public action must mean more than writing representatives in support of current legislative proposals, most of which are the equivalent of “saying no to environmental destruction.” It is not enough to require fuel efficiency, energy conservation and banning CFC’s. If we stop there, then we do not take into account the crucial fact that one person’s pollution and depletion is another’s job.

The new Clean Air Act is a good example. In order to reduce acid rain, sulfur-dioxide emissions are to be reduced, which is certainly laudable. The catch is, the new restrictions will cost thousands of miners and other industrial workers their jobs. An amendment to provide assistance to those displaced was introduced but defeated, and so Congress has decided that, though we cannot rely on the market to protect nature, we can leave to it the task of generating all the environmentally desirable work necessary to meet the needs of those people whose jobs are eliminated.

The dilemma is that, under our “liberal” notion of democracy, in which the political arena is reduced to a marketplace where separated interests compete for goods and services, politics has become so debased that all substantive dialogue between citizens is discouraged. In response to repeated instances of official lying, corruption and malfeasance--the S&L; fiasco, the Iran-Contra and HUD scandals--Americans increasingly withdraw from public life and into the cocoon of the personal and private. In consequence, the most crucial decisions concerning our lives--from the value of our money and the regulation of nuclear power to the making of war and peace--become the exclusive domain of experts and specialists.

The inadequacy of current governmental institutions and political processes to meet the related crises of ecological imbalance, social injustice, nuclear annihilation and Third World poverty should be apparent. As Commoner says in his conclusion, we stand at a precipice because of the failure “to begin a new historic passage--toward a democracy which encompasses not only personal and political freedom but also the germinal decisions that determine how we and the planet will live.”

That kind of democracy requires a deeper and more active exercise of citizenship than we have practiced in recent times. In particular, if we are to protect the environment--the common wealth of land, forests, lakes, rivers, oceans, atmosphere, animal and plant species--then we must renew our sense of belonging to a political community composed of equal citizens who, as Benjamin Barber has said, are “bound . . . by common concerns and common participation in search of common solutions to common conflicts.”

Therein lies the ultimate challenge of the environmental crisis.