Published on Portside (https://portside.org)
Earth Day 2016: Retrospect and Realism
H Patricia Hynes
Tuesday, April 19, 2016
portside
In June 1969, the Cuyahoga River caught fire from floating oil and
combustible debris as it wound through Cleveland. While not the first
river fire, it was the last for this and other industrial rivers.
Federal laws enacted in the early 1970s, in particular the Clean
Air Act and the Clean Water Act, and the creation of the Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA), began a more than 40 year uphill effort nationally to
reduce intense smog and filthy rivers. New regulations required catalytic
converters in motor vehicles; pollution capture technologies for factory air
emissions; filter and treatment technologies for factory liquid wastes
discharged into rivers; and more advanced municipal wastewater treatment plants
for human waste and street runoff. All slowly reversed the extreme
degradation of our rivers and air from unfettered industrial development.
Ten months after the Cuyahoga River fire, the first Earth Day was
launched. On April 22, 1970, 20 million people took to the streets in
what was the largest political demonstration in history. They walked into
polluted rivers with scuba gear, demonstrated at stockholders’ meetings of
corporate polluters, and conducted peaceful actions in front of the Interior
Department. Ten thousand schools, 2,000 colleges and universities and
almost every community took part.
The U.S. Congress formally adjourned so
that senators and representatives could attend teach-ins in their districts.
That afternoon I took my twenty-five eleven-year-old students to walk along the
Brandywine Creek, which bisects Wilmington, Delaware. Maybe we picked up
trash, maybe we just walked on the cobbly streambank – I don’t remember.
The kids were mostly from the older, struggling east side of
downtown Wilmington and the younger, uglier, angrier projects off Northeast
Boulevard. They were second-class children in a state purported to have
the highest per capita income and PhDs in the United States. Downtown Wilmington,
a stone’s throw from where we walked, was embellished with the Hotel DuPont and
the DuPont corporate headquarters. Otherwise, it was a city of de facto
segregated housing and schools. A few years earlier, the National Guard
had policed downtown streets, so raw and so threatening was the anger of urban
African–Americans in the face of blatant, punishing racist neglect.
I remember asking myself, as I watched kids jumping from stream
boulder to stream boulder. What does this have to do with them? What do
clean streams have to do with literacy, jobs, housing, and human dignity?
Time and events would answer my question.
The 1980s ushered in EPA’s Superfund and hazardous waste programs,
the goals of which were to identify the most toxic of solid and liquid manufacturing
waste flagrantly buried on industry site in drums and catchall landfills,
leaching into groundwater and nearby water bodies or burned in open air and in
unregulated incinerators.
It was in this decade that I found the answer to my
question: What does Earth Day have to do with my eleven-year-old second class
citizens?
The Housatonic River was neither drinkable nor swimmable and its
banks hosted health warning signs for those fishing, when I was assigned in the
early 1980s, as an EPA environmental engineer, to oversee the study of the
river’s pollution for eventual cleanup. The General Electric Company’s
transformer division in Pittsfield, Massachusetts had used the river as a sewer
for their toxic PCB waste, which magnified in the river’s food chain and
concentrated in fish. Studies showed that the contaminated
sediments carried by the river amassed behind downstream dams. The challenge of
possible dredging and burying the contaminated sediments in a protected site
took me to meeting upon meeting with downstream towns to discuss a potential
burial site for the toxic sediments in their town. Predictably, no town
was willing, which left one option–a landfill in Warren County, South Carolina
designated by the state and EPA for PCB wastes.
Not long after, I learned through national news of a public
protest in Warren County, South Carolina led by African American women, who
formed a human chain and blocked the entry to the landfill. Their message: stop
dumping other people’s industrial waste in our community.
The Warren County non-violent protests and marches, with more than
500 arrests, ignited the movement for environmental justice, a movement now
linking poor, excessively polluted communities of color and Native American
lands in the US with climate justice activists in developing countries
disproportionately burdened with drought, growing deserts, food shortages, and
sea level rise from climate change primarily caused by wealthy industrial
countries.
In the 1990s new onslaughts of mal-development in industrial
agriculture began. Rachel Carson’s pathbreaking Silent Spring published
in 1962 exposed the “chemical rain of death” on farms, forests and yards
following World War II, which succeeded in DDT being taken off the US market
(while the government allowed it to be manufactured for sale abroad).
With the regulatory focus on toxic, long-lived insecticides, which accumulate
up the food chain, the pesticide industries turned to research and
manufacturing of genetically modified (GMO) seeds, mainly ones that would
resist their herbicides. And thus, the pesticide industries morphed into
vertically integrated genetically modified seed (GMO) and herbicide companies,
which aim to control global agriculture. GMO acreage has grown
exponentially worldwide–282 million acres are planted in Monsanto's GM crops,
up 100-fold since 1996, according to Food and Water Watch, together with the
use of herbicides, resulting in the vicious cycle of herbicide-resistant weeds
(superweeds) requiring greater use of herbicides.
In the 21st century climate change is the defining issue of our
times. It is an issue of peace, or more precisely of militarism and
war. Beginning with the belligerent Carter Doctrine in the late 70s in
response to the Arab oil embargo, the US launched what would grow into a total
military presence in the Middle East over access to oil and three wars since
1991. The US naval presence in the Persian Gulf, with its entry and exit
point at the Straits of Hormuz, had cost US taxpayers an estimated $8 trillion
dollars by 2010, one of the many externalized costs that subsidize fossil fuels
Climate change accelerates the Sixth Extinction and ecological
collapse, together with pollution, and loss of habitat. Between 1970 and 2010,
the population of birds, reptiles, fish and reptiles fell by 52%. A recent
study on global fisheries forecasts the collapse by 2048 of “all fish currently
caught commercially.” Warming marine waters are pushing fish away from the
tropics toward the poles, depriving poorer equatorial countries of their
dominant source of protein. The changing chemistry of the warming and
more acidic oceans portends an unprecedented loss of the ocean’s nursery and
most biodiverse ecosystem on Earth–coral reefs.
Climate change is an issue of human survival. At current rates of
melting, sea level rise will reach 6 feet minimally by 2100 threatening 1400
cities, among them New York City, San Diego, Boston, Miami, and thousands of
cities across the world. New research by James Hansen and colleagues forecasts
a marine Armageddon: an estimated several meters of sea level rise within this
century with the melting of glacial sheets in Antarctica and Greenland,
drowning coastal cities worldwide.
Climate change is an issue of justice. We are all on the Titanic,
observed Kenyan ecologist Ruth Nyambura at the recent Paris Climate Summit, but
the wealthy own the lifeboats. The developing world and the poor–those
least responsible for climate change–are the most vulnerable to extremes of
climate. Of the 10 most affected countries between 1994 and 2014, nine
were developing countries in Asia and Central America and the country of Haiti,
which suffered extreme, record-breaking natural catastrophes from intense rain,
flooding and mudslides, typhoons and hurricanes.
Capitalism wedded to delusional American manifest
destiny–including our fatuous decades-long effort to control of the Middle East
and recent militarized pivot to Asia–meets its limits in Nature. Either we heed
those limits immediately and aggressively, or we face an ecocide from which not
even those who own lifeboats will escape.
Always, indigenous peoples have grasped this. In their
dramatic presence at the Paris Climate Summit, they exposed most clearly and
cogently the root causes of climate change: namely, that Western science,
technology and capitalist economies regard Nature/Mother Earth as a lifeless
trove of commodities–minerals, metals, coal, oil, gas, uranium and water–to
exploit ruthlessly and relentlessly for amassing wealth. Their primal message
to the world is that the Earth is our sacred source of life and that the
dominant worldview commodifies nature and subordinates all other rights–human
rights and the rights of nature–at our peril.
Prescient children understand this. Twenty-one young people, members of Our Children’s Trust, have filed a landmark climate change lawsuit in all 50 states against the federal government on the grounds that the government’s continued exploitation of fossil fuels violates the rights of the next generation to a stable climate and healthy future. Oregon’s Federal District Court Judge Thomas Coffin has ruled against the federal government’s and fossil fuel trade associations’ motions to dismiss the case, deciding in favor of the plaintiffs. Based on the doctrine of public trust, the lawsuit alleges that just as the federal government must protect public waterways and seashores for public use, so also the climate and atmosphere must be protected for public well-being. The judge called the case “unprecedented” and 19-year-old lead plaintiff Kelsey Juliana said in response to the ruling: “This will be the trial of the century that will determine if we have a right to a livable future, or if corporate power will continue to deny our rights for the sake of their own wealth.” Three fossil fuel industry trade associations, which joined the government as defendants, called the case “a direct, substantial threat to [their] businesses.”
Prescient children understand this. Twenty-one young people, members of Our Children’s Trust, have filed a landmark climate change lawsuit in all 50 states against the federal government on the grounds that the government’s continued exploitation of fossil fuels violates the rights of the next generation to a stable climate and healthy future. Oregon’s Federal District Court Judge Thomas Coffin has ruled against the federal government’s and fossil fuel trade associations’ motions to dismiss the case, deciding in favor of the plaintiffs. Based on the doctrine of public trust, the lawsuit alleges that just as the federal government must protect public waterways and seashores for public use, so also the climate and atmosphere must be protected for public well-being. The judge called the case “unprecedented” and 19-year-old lead plaintiff Kelsey Juliana said in response to the ruling: “This will be the trial of the century that will determine if we have a right to a livable future, or if corporate power will continue to deny our rights for the sake of their own wealth.” Three fossil fuel industry trade associations, which joined the government as defendants, called the case “a direct, substantial threat to [their] businesses.”
Pat Hynes, a retired environmental engineer and Professor of
Environmental Health, directs the Traprock Center for Peace and Justice in
western Massachusetts http://traprock.org [1]
Selected References
http://responsibletechnology.org/media/docs/GMO_Myths_and_Truths_1.3b.pdf [3]
http://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/15/4/1416/htm [4]
http://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/15/4/1416/htm [4]
Democracy Now coverage of Paris Climate Summit: November
30-December 12, 2015. https://www.google.com/?client=safari#q=Democracy+Now [9]
Links:
[1] http://traprock.org
[2] https://www.nrdc.org/stories/environmental-justice-movement
[3] http://responsibletechnology.org/media/docs/GMO_Myths_and_Truths_1.3b.pdf
[4] http://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/15/4/1416/htm
[5] http://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/The-U.S.-has-Spent-8-Trillion-Protecting-the-Straits-of-Hormuz.html
[6] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/overfishing-could-take-se/
[7] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/could-sea-level-rise-swamp-cities-within-a-century/
[8] https://germanwatch.org/en/11366
[9] https://www.google.com/?client=safari#q=Democracy+Now
[10] http://ourchildrenstrust.org
[2] https://www.nrdc.org/stories/environmental-justice-movement
[3] http://responsibletechnology.org/media/docs/GMO_Myths_and_Truths_1.3b.pdf
[4] http://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/15/4/1416/htm
[5] http://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/The-U.S.-has-Spent-8-Trillion-Protecting-the-Straits-of-Hormuz.html
[6] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/overfishing-could-take-se/
[7] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/could-sea-level-rise-swamp-cities-within-a-century/
[8] https://germanwatch.org/en/11366
[9] https://www.google.com/?client=safari#q=Democracy+Now
[10] http://ourchildrenstrust.org
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Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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