50 years later, Earth Day’s unsolved problem: How to

build a more sustainable world

Sarah Kaplan

Fifty years ago, flames sprang from the oil-slicked surface of a Cleveland river. Smog
choked Los Angeles. Pesticides silenced millions of insects and birds. Oil gushed from
a busted well off California, swamping anything that lived in the ocean.

© AP Hundreds of people listen to

speakers after cleaning up New York's Union Square on April 22, 1970 — the first
Earth Day.

Then, on April 22, 1970, 10 percent of America took to the streets for the first Earth
Day. It was an unprecedented demonstration on behalf of nature, a declaration that
people could not thrive unless the planet did, too. “Things as we know them are falling
apart,” one of the movement’s young organizers, Denis Hayes, told a crowd in
Washington. “A whole society is realizing it must drastically change course.”

Government responded in stunningly short order. The Environmental Protection

Agency was created, a suite of powerful laws were enacted to protect the air, water and
endangered species. The release of toxic substances was controlled.

But half a century later, one of the problems that motivated the early Earth Day activists
remains unsolved, said Hayes, now 75. We haven’t quit the fossil fuels scientists say
are warming the atmosphere and harming the Earth. Humans use more resources
than the planet produces. Society has not changed course.

In this moment of overlapping crises, activists say it’s all the more important to make
good on the promises of 50 years ago. To avoid a future as painful as the present,
people must learn to live more sustainably — respectful of the living things whose
fates are linked to ours, aware that the laws of nature apply to us as well, experts
say.

In other words, we have to become better Earthlings. 

 © Paul Sakuma/AP Earth Day organizer Denis Hayes in
Palo Alto, Calif., on April 21, 1990.

Step one is to understand how Earth works, said paleontologist Scott Wing, a curator at
the National Museum of Natural History.

Twice a week during the novel coronavirus pandemic, Wing drives an eerily empty
stretch of road to the Smithsonian’s research facility on the shores of the Chesapeake
Bay. There he tends ginkgo trees for an experiment on ancient climate. The trees are
immersed in the atmosphere of 50 million years ago, when greenhouse gas
concentrations exploded and the world got hotter, faster than any other moment in
geologic history — except this one.

By re-creating this ancient cataclysm, Wing is revealing the forces that still govern life
on Earth. Adding carbon to the atmosphere traps heat. The ocean turns acidic, sea levels
rise, species die, migrate and evolve. Positive feedback loops, such as the melting of
premafrost, can turn what once seemed a slow-moving process into one that worsens
exponentially. And even change that happens quickly is slow to reverse; it took more
than 150,000 years for the world to recover from the warm period Wing is studying
with his ginkgo trees.

“The idea that all things are connected to each other — it’s not just a metaphor,” Wing
said.

Humans’ capacity to control the environment — to domesticate animals, turn forests

into farmland, dam rivers, build cities, create light and clothes and rocket fuel from the
carbon remnants of a long-gone world — has “deluded” us into thinking we stand alone,
Wing said.

But human health depends on the activity of millions of bacteria that dwell in our bodies
and on our skin. Our stomachs would be empty without the winged creatures that
pollinate the crops we grow for food. Microscopic organisms floating in the ocean
produce more than half the oxygen we need to breathe. Forests filter the falling rain,
cleaning water before it flows into lakes and streams.
Even a tiny packet of genetic material wrapped in a protein shell can bring human
society to its knees.

“We’re now co-creating a planetary environment with the ancient forces that have
always worked on it and modified it,” Wing said.

And most sustainability scientists say we’re not doing a very good job.

“Society has organized itself … as a pyramid, or hierarchy,” said Beth Sawin, a

biologist and complex-systems scientist who co-founded the think tank Climate
Interactive. “All the way at the bottom is the Earth to be dominated.”

Climate change has exposed the flaws in that system, she said. So, too, has the
coronavirus outbreak. Sawin points to farmers who had to destroy crops because of
supply-chain problems, even as food banks are overwhelmed by millions of people who
have suddenly lost their jobs.

“We have to start to realize the way we’ve been living is just habit in many ways”
Sawin said, “and many things that seem like they could never change are shakier than
you think."

In the late 1990s, Sawin helped establish a cooperative community in rural Vermont. On
270 acres shared by residents, they harvest vegetables and boil down maple syrup, eat
meals in a communal dining hall and help raise one another’s children. Their houses are
carbon-neutral and environmental protections are written into the bylaws. All decisions
are made by consensus, and when there is disagreement, the cooperative has four pages
of guidelines for conflict resolution.

The community is imperfect, Sawin said, especially because it’s embedded in an

imperfect global system. But it has showed her what’s to be gained by living differently:
the sweetness of strawberries you grow yourself, the comfort of knowing you are not on
your own.

The coronavirus has done something similar, she said. It has prompted individuals
to stay home for the good of the many and communities to come together to protect
the vulnerable. It has opened our eyes to our interconnectedness — how easily a
sickness in a single city can become a pandemic that threatens the world.

This Earth Day was supposed to be a display of global solidarity. Protests were
planned in more than 180 countries. Hayes was dreaming of the anniversary as a
“climate inflection point,” when more than a billion people marching would finally
force the world to change.

But social distancing measures have pushed the event online, where Hayes fears it will
reach fewer people. “It’s a huge lost opportunity,” he said.

Yet the 1970s hold another lesson for today, Hayes said. After the initial Earth Day,
organizers launched a campaign to unseat members of Congress who opposed
environmental legislation. Seven of the 12 incumbents were defeated that November,
and the Clean Air Act was passed one month later.
 © Charles Tasnadi/AP President Richard
Nixon observes as William D. Ruckelshaus is sworn in as administrator of the
Environmental Protection Agency in December 1970.

In an editorial for his hometown newspaper, the Seattle Times, Hayes called on
Americans to treat Election Day as this year’s Earth Day, and vote for politicians who
favor climate action.

“With covid-19, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel,” Hayes said. “There’s going to
be a vaccine.”

Climate activists also need something to look toward, he added: A plan to rebuild
society in a more sustainable way, to finally change course and create the world
envisioned on the original Earth Day.

“That,” Hayes said, “is the climate vaccine.”