Earth Day 2012

Earth Day festival with Earth Saver Girl

I had a great time yesterday at Earth Saver Girl's Earth Day Festival in west Cobb County. Earth Saver Girl is a remarkable young lady who writes environmental books for children. It is young people like her who give me hope for the future.

But, today, Sunday, April 22, is EARTH DAY and hardly anyone will do anything. I hope that the tobacco addicts will at least refrain from throwing their cigarette butts on the ground for a day.

A Dedication To Activism

Environmental activism requires three levels of activity:

• Field Activism - Where you are getting out in front of the public at tabling events, demonstrations, etc...
• Armchair Activism - Where you write letters and sign petitions from home, usually in an effort to influence public policy.
• Personal Lifestyle Changes - This is where you "walk the talk" by changing personal habits to reduce impact on the Earth. For instance, one thing we can all do is buy locally grown foods whenever possible.

I live in the state of Georgia, USA, a part of the country that is predominately evangelical Christian. In the conservative, fundamentalist Christian world an environmental ethic simply doesn't exist. Today is Sunday and there are dozens and DOZENS of churches within a few miles of my house. I seriously doubt that even one will mention Earth Day during their services today. I would say the reasons for this are:

• Environmentalism challenges the very foundation of their religious story. In their world, God controls everything, humans are to have "dominion," and so forth.
• Environmentalism is associated with liberals, which are the great enemy of any King James Bible toting believer.
• There is too much mass ignorance and what I call "voluntary ignorance." People just don't want to know the facts about coal plant pollution, climate change, etc... Their God is going to lift them out of this crap soon with the Second Coming, so they just don't care. 

I do see some young people getting engaged in the environmental movement but there's also hundreds of others that simply do nothing but play video games. These are the people I call "background noise." They just don't have it in them to care about the environment, let alone become an activist. Perhaps there was no one in their family or school to serve as a role model. Perhaps their interest in the world around them does not go far beyond the little devices they stare into all day.

Our Sierra Club Booth

At our booth yesterday we had two exhibits. The first exhibit was an enviroscape, which taught children about nonpoint source pollution. There were different color water-based paints, and each paint represented a different source of contamination -- fertilizers, clay silt, spilled gasoline, etc.. Other children held spray bottles over the exhibit to create rain. The water washed away the pollution sources, which flowed into streams and eventually into a lake at the bottom of the exhibit.

The other exhibit taught youngsters about the dangers of mercury in fish. A child was given a fishing rod and "fished" in a pail of water. When the fish was caught, we looked for a black "X," which meant it contained mercury. The child who could catch the most fish without mercury poisoning was the winner.

Having thought about it more, I think my work in the festival yesterday is one of the best things I could be doing for the Earth. Environmental education is a beautiful thing and something we need much more of.

Antidote

Education is the great antidote for ignorance. It's important to create a culture where education is respected, young people are eager to learn, and scientific-based facts are presented. In my years of environmental work I have worked with many German-American citizens who have a particular passion for the environment. Or when Californians transfer into our local Sierra Club Group, I find that they also have a strong environmental ethic. It puzzles me how some regions of the world are environmentally sensitive, and most of the southern U.S. is not. My interest is finding a way to port the environmental values of a place like Vermont to a Bible Belt town like, say, Powder Springs, GA, which is where I live. How can I help to change attitudes? After all, I'm surrounded by Young Earth Creationists who think global warming is a hoax. Where do I begin to change the attitudes of these people? I guess one thing is to change the cultural mores and to respectfully challenge outdated ideas, like, for example, the Earth has infinite resources, the Earth is too big for people to harm, etc...

Well, I ramble .... enough for now. The Goose must go on in the lonely battle to save Mother Earth.