40 Years of Earth Days
By Brian Tokar

The 40th anniversary of the original Earth Day is upon us, and many seasoned environmentalists are nostalgic for the heady days of the 1970s, when 20 million people hit in the streets and eventually got Richard Nixon to sign a series of ambitious environmental laws. Those laws managed to clean up waterways that were turning into sewers, saved the bald eagle from the ravages of DDT, and began to clear the air, which in the early 1960s was so polluted that people were passing out all over our cities.

While environmental awareness has clearly seeped into mainstream consciousness in the US, today’s environmental movement is floundering, even though the stakes are higher than ever. While grassroots campaigners continue to fight for endangered forests, challenge polluting companies in their communities, and confront the coal industry’s assaults on the mountains of southern Appalachia, the best known national organizations can point to precious few substantive victories of late. Most appallingly, they have utterly failed to demonstrate meaningful leadership around what climatologist James Hansen calls the “predominant moral issue of this century,” the struggle to prevent the catastrophic and irreversible warming of the planet. . .

Where has the environmental movement gone wrong? . . .

The full article is at http://www.zcommunications.org/40-years-of-earth-days-by-brian-tokar. Originally drafted for this week's edition of The Indypendent, an outstanding biweekly newspaper in New York City, online at indypendent.org.