Earth Only Gets The One Day?

Via Meteorblades, an excellent rant from the folks at Grist about making Earth Day the appropriately sanctioned box for 'green' sometimes seems to trivialize it.

Sure, it's a great excuse for people everywhere to make awareness-raising papier mache demonstrations, of which I am quite fond, but do those efforts just end up preaching to the choir?

We've talked here before about the urgency of climate change induced droughts, flooding, and seasonal fluctuations to the food system. Not to mention that it threatens the existence of maple syrup, as fellow Change.org blogger Emily Gertz points out on the Global Warming blog. When I talk about it like that, it sounds serious.

Then you walk away from your computer and go outside. You walk downtown and see trashcans overflowing with non-recyclable containers. If you wanted to recycle a beverage container or similar item when you were out walking around, you'd probably have to take it home with you and put it out on your curb on recycling day. That's if your city or town has a recycling program.

You go to a restaurant, where you will routinely be offered more food than any one person should really eat in a sitting, unless that person is Andre the Giant or Michael Phelps. If you can't or don't want to take it home, that food won't be composted and returned to the soil. It will end up in a landfill mixed with old batteries, thrashed appliances, the contents of foreclosed homes, torn clothing, used diapers, expired pharmaceuticals and all manner of thing.

Your digital camera wears out and the manufacturer tells you it'd be cheaper to get a new one than to fix the old one. Which is nothing special to digital cameras. Nothing gets fixed anymore except used cars.

All the rest of the year, nearly everywhere except special events or demonstration projects, we live in a grinding clockwork of unfathomable waste. It's easier to waste. It's cheaper to waste. It's more normal to waste. It makes more sense to waste as we go about our daily lives.

This is not a society that's been paying attention to the last 38 Earth Days, nor anticipates any future time when the flow of raw resources might be restricted.

So while I'm very glad that there are people who spent a lot of time and effort arranging Earth Day demonstrations, I feel confident that if they're that committed, they'd agree that the state of our only home needs more sustained attention.