40 Years of Earth Day

Mindful Metropolis, April edition

Despite setbacks, and failure in Copenhagen, the modern environmental movement has reached a critical mass — especially here in Chicago.

Last Oct. 17, cabin ministers of the Maldives, an archipelago of 1,200 low-lying islands and atolls located in the Indian Ocean, took the unusual step of donning scuba gear and holding a meeting 20 feet underwater. They were led by the nation's dynamic young president, Mohamed Nasheed — a former political prisoner who was elected to office a month before Barack Obama.

The act was brilliant political theater. Communicating through hand signals, the ministers signed a document calling on world nation’s to drastically reduce their greenhouse gas emissions within the next decade, to save the Maldives from disappearing under rising sea levels as a consequence of global climate change (80 percent of the country sits less than 4 feet above sea level).

Nasheed used that image — and the threat of a sovereign nation disappearing forever — as a rallying cry on behalf of those on the front lines of global climate change, particular African and low-lying island nations, during the United Nations’ COP15 Global Climate Summit in Copenhagen in December.

World leaders were supposed to come together in the Danish capital and agree on cutting greenhouse gas emissions in order to stop global climate change—the greatest challenge facing our generation, if not all generations of mankind. But for anyone who hoped for a groundbreaking deal, Copenhagen was a humiliating disaster. Political squabbling between Washington, D.C., and Beijing (the world’s two biggest polluters), enormous rifts between rich nations and poor nations, disagreements over the concept of “climate debt,” Denmark’s inability to effectively mediate between sides, and ultimately the banning of civil society from the Bella Center where the meetings took place, doomed the much anticipated summit and sent environmentalists home for the holidays pessimistic about our future and with little faith in government.

Since then we’ve suffered a winter of discontent — full of gray skies, unemployment, tragic earthquakes, Tea Party spectacles, and nasty East Coast storms (which are absolutely compatible with climate change and, thus, more extreme weather). What to make, then, of another spring, and the 40th anniversary of Earth Day later this month?

We’ve come a long way, baby

Commonly observed on April 22, though its events often spill into the weekend, Earth Day was founded in 1970 by U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson, a Democrat from Wisconsin. Nelson announced his idea for a nationwide teach-in day on the environment in speeches the previous September to a fledgling conservation group in Seattle and to a meeting of United Auto Workers. He sought to spark a grassroots outcry about environmental issues — parallel to the growing movement against the Vietnam War — that would force the Nixon administration to act.

That spring, approximately 20 million Americans rang in a new decade by gathering to protest the deterioration of the environment, oil spills, polluting factories and power plants, raw sewage, toxic dumps, pesticides, freeways, the loss of wilderness and the extinction of wildlife. The U.S. Congress passed important legislation in the wake of the first Earth Day, including the Clean Air Act and the creation of the United States Environmental Protection Agency.

By 1990, Earth Day had mobilized 200 million people in 141 countries and elevated environmental issues onto the world’s stage. Considered fringe in 1970, recycling was now a household term, if not yet a household chore. The 20th Earth Day also paved the way for the 1992 United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. Then, 10 years ago, the emergence of the Internet linked activists around the world and brought together 5,000 environmental groups to celebrate the millennial Earth Day. A talking drum chain traveled from village to village in Gabon, Africa, and hundreds of thousands gathered on the National Mall in our nation’s capital.

But by 2000, the environmental community was talking in earnest about a new and dangerous phenomenon—global climate change, the human industry-induced emissions of carbon gasses into the earth’s atmosphere, which cause a gradual warming of the planet, melting glaciers and polar ice caps, rising sea levels, shifting ocean currents, stronger storms, desertification of once arable lands and disappearing fresh water supplies.

Today, scientists, and most world leaders, have coalesced around the recognition that global climate change is real, and dangerous. Yet here in the United States our government has yet to legally guarantee that we will reduce emissions by 2020 or put a price on carbon — an act that would help the green energy economy grow.

A truly grassroots movement

You wouldn’t know it from watching CSPAN, or from the dismal headlines that emerged from Copenhagen in December, but the environmental movement is actually booming in American states, cities and communities, including right here in Chicago. And the Windy City’s green activists don’t expect change to come from the top (even if the commander in chief once lived amongst us), but from the bottom.

“Reducing our overall carbon footprint will require a very grassroots approach,” said Carlos Chavez, CEO of the Logan Square-based sustainability, energy and environmental consultant Green Dot Environmental. “We can’t wait for countries and organizations to come around.”

Green Dot Environmental is teaming with Conscious Planet Media to hold an Earth Day 5K Run/Walk (earthday5kchicago.com) on Saturday, April 24, which will begin at 8:30 a.m. at the northwest corner of Humboldt Park on Chicago’s northwest side, move north to Logan Square and then return through Palmer Square to the Humboldt Park boathouse. A Green Living Expo in the park will ensue, featuring music, entertainment, food, vendors and environmental education, with appearances by City Councilmen Robert Maldonado and Rey Colon, respectively, of the 26th and 35th wards.

“We created this event to bring under one roof all the elements of a healthy lifestyle—running, farmers markets, eating health and shopping locally,” summarized Chavez.

While Peter Nicholson, executive director of Foresight Design (foresightdesign.org) and founder of the Chicago Sustainable Business Alliance, appreciates the fact that hundreds of millions will officially celebrate the planet this month, he looks forward to the day when we don’t need an Earth Day: “I’m in this year-round, I don’t just drop in and drop out. It’s almost a sign of distress that we actually need to have an Earth Day.”

Nicholson hopes that, instead of merely inventing greener consumer products, we’ll undergo a culture shift in our relationship to the planet. “One of the things we talked about 10 years ago was the backlash effect. When you create something that’s more efficient, your impulse is to use it more. You might say, ‘I have a hybrid car, I can drive it twice as far’. Instead of just touting green products, we need to deal with the behavior behind them.”

For Dr. Clare Butterfield, executive director of Faith in Place (faithinplace.org), our compromised relationship to the planet represents a “human inability to see ourselves in a larger system, a part of history, the heirs of our ancestors, and the benefactors of our grandchildren. Because we aren’t willing to set limits, we take up as much space as we can.

As an “environmental concierge service,” Faith in Place helps religious organizations make connections between what their theology teaches them and their relationship to the planet. “If your faith requires that you love your brothers and sisters, that means you must reduce your carbon footprint,” said Butterfield. For example, Faith in Place helped a mosque in Bridgeview include a solar water system in its Friday prayers—the first solar-powered mosque in the country.

Veronica Kyle is Faith in Place’s liaison to African-American communities in areas ravaged by high unemployment and foreclosed homes that are in survival mode. For them, global climate change is a distant concept. “Our language is around green opportunities in the community,” said Kyle. “People aren’t making the connection between Styrofoam and the environment. But we talk about keeping materials from going into the landfill, so that another builder can take advantage of them.”

Faith in Place recently collaborated with the City of Chicago and the Delta Institute on a major weatherization project that involved local youth on the city’s west side installing weatherization kits (doorstoppers, draft stoppers, irrigated faucets) in over 400 households. Rev. Marshall Hatch from New Mt. Pilgrim Missionary Baptist Church addressed the youth and called them “the first generation of new environmentalists in our community. Let this begin a journey toward conservation and understanding.”

Greener schools

No Foam Chicago (nofoamchicago.org), is pushing schools to change their wasteful habits, and seeking legislation to prod them along. Students and teachers at Chicago Public Schools still eat their lunches on harmful Styrofoam that ends up in landfills. In fact, 300,000 Styrofoam trays are wasted every day, an amount that, if stacked one on top of another, would surpass the height of the Sears Tower. No Foam Chicago is encouraging the City Council to approve a ban on Styrofoam in schools, which was proposed on Feb. 10.

No Foam Chicago’s Stacy Pfingsten pointed out that 41 Styrofoam bans have already been enacted in California, and 100 nationwide. New York City has not yet followed through on its proposed ordinance, giving Mayor Daley an opportunity to beat the Big Apple. (Daley takes pride in calling Chicago the greenest city in the nation.) No Foam Chicago will reach out to area high schools and colleges the week of Earth Day to spread information about the harmful effects of Styrofoam.

Speaking of public schools, Joey Feinstein of Climate Cycle (climatecycle.org) sees our public learning spaces as the ideal spots to install solar panels, which his organization does through funds raised during the annual Solar Schools Ride, to be held this year on May 15 at the green space adjacent to Soldier Field. Last year’s inaugural event raised nearly $70,000 through pledges. The first solar panels were installed nine months ago at the Perspectives/IIT Math & Science Academy charter school on Chicago’s South Side. More solar installations will follow at Curie Metro High School (where Climate Cycle will hold a “solarbration” on the day before Earth Day), Polaris Charter Academy and Lindblom Math and Science Academy.

“Schools give us high-visibility centerpieces,” said Feinstein. “There’s lots of traffic at schools—students, teachers and parents. And it’s about empowering youth and employing educational tools. … Additionally, schools spend more money on energy costs than they do on textbooks and computers.”

In the midst of a painful economic recession, reusing and recycling are back in style. Money is especially tight for schools, and the Glen Ellyn-based SCARCE (School Community Assistance Recycling Composting Education) program’s book rescue initiative (bookrescue.org) collects millions of books that libraries and families no longer need, just in case a needy school comes calling. Last year, SCARCE installed 18 pianos in Chicago-area schools that didn’t have them, and gave an Aurora school 130 biology books that would have cost $87 a piece, says Kay McKeen. SCARCE has even helped a local church group send books to schools in Uganda and Ghana.

Good for the environment, good for business

Even as we act locally, we shouldn’t be afraid to think globally, believes Erik Lukas, co-founder of the Rainforest Chicago Project (www.rainforestchicago.org), an effort to preserve 6,400 acres of South American rainforest — equal in size to the City of Chicago. Lukas will take the microphone after the 5K run in Humboldt Park this Earth Day weekend, and launch Rainforest Chicago together with the World Land Trust, which has dedicated over 20 years to saving rainforests and endangered species.

“I tried to think of ways to make (rainforest protection) more relevant, more tangible to people here.” He came up with the concept of preserving an amount of land equivalent to the Windy City. “Simple ideas have potential to travel fastest through the world.”

Lukas, co-founder and “chief evangelist” of Bean & Body (beanandbody.com), “the earth’s healthiest coffee,” believes that social entrepreneurs, and the business world in general, must be the instruments for environmental change. “I see more and more businesses realizing and working toward greener business practices,” he said. “From an energy perspective, the solution has to come from the marriage of socially and environmentally-responsible business practices and the environmental activism movement.”

Howard Learner, President of the Environmental Law and Policy Center (elpc.org) concurs that what’s good for the environment should also be good for business. Confronting climate change means embracing clean energy solutions that also create jobs and generate economic growth, such as wind and solar power (viewed as fringe 10 years ago, though some are now calling the Midwest “the Saudi Arabia of wind power”), and transportation solutions such as the development of a Midwest high-speed rail network. “These are smart, job-creating and economy-growing solutions to our global warming problems,” says Learner.

Whether Earth Day is celebrated every day or just once a year, it’s a time to reflect, act, and work toward a better future—for Chicago and for the Maldives. As Learner says, “Earth Day is a time to spend with friends and neighbors and talk about the solutions to our problems. Because solving our global climate problem is the political, moral and economic challenge of our generation.”

Jacob Wheeler is a freelance journalist, editor and publisher who hails from the cobblestone streets of Copenhagen and the forests of northwest-lower Michigan, where he publishes the Glen Arbor Sun (glenarborsun.com).