Earth Day - 55 Years Later

Through the Belonging Lens of People-Place-Power-Purpose

Happy Passover, Happy Easter, Happy Earth Day! Happy Merrie Monarch Week! Whatever your cultural orientation, may you enjoy this time to celebrate with friends and families - and/or within your own soulful being - the renewal of the earth and endurance of holy life and traditions on it. I am back on my beloved ʻāina after a magical trip to DC and NYC, and so Place and People continue to be very much on my mind. Thank you for joining me - for the first time or the fiftieth - in reading these memories and essays.

Please remember there is a like button, a share button, and even a comment space if you feel so inclined…

Where were you on April 22, 1970?

I donʻt ordinarily feel old, but my mental estimates of how many of my 600 or so readers were not yet born 55 years ago leave me wondering how to convey a sense of the era. Without that context, it could be hard to understand the optimistic feeling of that first Earth Day, hard to conceive that on April 22, 1970 one in ten Americans, 20 million people, participated in teach-ins at schools and colleges, joined bicycle rides (forgoing emissions-producing vehicles for the day), cleaned up parks and beaches, paddled down rivers - and yes protested and made music and very likely, this being the start of the 70s, a percentage of them got high and made love.

Hard to imagine in the current climate, but the first Earth Day event and the rise of ecological consciousness was not political. Sure the founder of Earth Day was a liberal Democratic Senator, Gaylord Nelson. But a famous photo of the Day showed the Republican New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller riding a bicycle the wrong way up a street in Albany - on his way to sign the bill creating the stateʻs Department of Environmental Conservation. Richard Nixon was President when the Environmental Protection Agency was formed, implementing the newly enacted Clean Air Act, followed in quick succession by the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act.

These were my (precocious) high school years.

By the time I entered graduate school at the end of that decade, it made sense to choose “The Environmental Policy of the Mining Firm: An Economic Analysis” as my dissertation topic. The private sector was just beginning to wrap their heads around new mandates to protect the public (which included their own employees) from negative health and wellbeing externalities caused by their business activities.¹

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Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

While there was for sure a sentiment of pure love for “Mother Earth,” the impetus for this new² widely shared call for environmental protection was mainly coming from a recognition that poisoning Place was in fact poisoning People. Protecting air and water quality had real health benefits - and real costs on our public health care system. Think of it as an extension of the health warnings that first appeared on cigarette packages five years earlier.

The mood of the public, and the political will, reflected what science was showing: a healthy Place was necessary for healthy People. And more importantly, the sense of Belonging, and responsibility, was global. People share One World. People share One Planet. The first Earth Day was less than a year after the first moon landing, a “giant leap for mankind.” Every astronaut, including ones to whom I have spoken personally, speaks of looking down on the Earth as a spiritual experience, recognizing the beauty and fragility of our home.

It was a time of optimism, a time of an expanded sense of Belonging, that gave rise to the first Earth Day.

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And there was another reality in the shadow.

My memories and the photo archive of the original Earth Day are peopled primarily by white people, young adults in the colorful flower power garb of the 60s. But people of color, people of urban core and extremely rural areas, people of the global south, were being disproportionately affected by environmental pollution. As a nation today we did, do, and are on a path to increasingly, export our destruction to places starving for employment, even if those are life- and earth- destroying forms of employment.

People of means, whose employment and wealth likely carry stress as their only personally unhealthy attribute, can buy properties with privacy and distance from pollution, enjoying exceptional natural beauty and conservation easements to protect it.³ People for whom these Places are not an option may not have the luxury of being “environmentalists.” That was an argument I heard a lot working in Latin America in the early 1990s.⁴

All of which takes me back to the Place where I live, where reciprocal care for People and Place is intrinsic to the word ʻāina. People and Places belong to one another.

Back to Power as a component of Belonging. The legal framework of environmental protection gave Power to the People and Power to the Non-human World of Place that cannot speak for itself (at least in language that decision makers can hear). It creates Power for collective wellbeing, in a domain of public good where market forces do not lead to optimal solutions. The question I ponder on this 55th Earth Day is - what frameworks can we imagine beyond this unwieldy one we inherited. Can we flip the paradigm, so that the public good is optimized? Do ideas like the principles of Circular Economy⁵, or indigenous economic pathways offer experiments that could lead to new solutions?

Oh wait - 1973. Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. E.F. Schmacherʻs book was a bestseller when it was published. Maybe it is time for a fresh read with fifty years of perspective.

Up next week: thoughts on becoming a fresh observer.

1. Analyzing case studies, supported by the mathematics of microeconomic theory, my thesis showed that when a firm creatively designed for environmental protection as one of its objectives, it could generally capture sufficient benefits to offset costs of preventing externalities (“externalities” meaning those negative consequences for public health and wellbeing.)

2. Or so ancient it had to be rediscovered as a “new” consciousness of our human interconnectedness with all of nature.

3. Not to imply that those using their wealth for preserving these special places (even as residences and personal playgrounds), and the mechanism of conservation easements, are bad things. If government gives up on protecting the public good, private concern for the environment and social welfare may be what we have left.

4. As documented in the chronological memoir section of this Substack.

5. Here is a circular economy primer.