Confession: I can't stand Earth Day. I know I'm not alone; by time I was born it was already getting a little cliché. And I actually do believe the equally tired idea that it should be every day, not just one single 24-hour period at the end of April that sometimes coincides with both Easter and Passover and the hockey playoffs. The reason I dislike it that it has become mostly an excuse to peddle products of dubious "green" credentials and host events that involve celebrities in the lower-B-list category.
But I'm finding it especially hard to handle this year. Wednesday was the first anniversary of the Gulf oil disaster. It also comes against the backdrop of last year's total failure to pass a climate and energy bill in the Senate—or pass even the most basic legislation responding to the oil spill, arguably the worst environmental disaster in US history. Frankly, this Earth Day sucks because it just serves to remind me that the environmental movement is not exactly the powerhouse it was 41 years ago. Back then, millions of Americans mobilized not just to honor the environment as something worth protecting, but to demand that their leaders do something about it. The Environmental Protection Agency, the Clean Air Act, and the Clean Water Act as we know them today are all products of that generation of environmental activism.
If you can't make hay of a disaster—a visible, fast-moving one like the oil spill or a less tangible one like climate change—is there any hope of changing things? I know that the country's leading environmental groups have spent a good deal of the past year discussing, at least internally within individual groups, where the heck they went wrong. But there is still an unwillingness, it seems, to have a real conversation between groups and in the progressive community more broadly about what went wrong and what can be done better in the future.
To that end, a report released earlier this week has been creating a stir in the green world: In Climate Shift, Matthew Nisbet, a communication professor at American University, evaluates why environmental groups failed to pass a climate bill. It's generated quite a bit of controversy on two particular points—one, the conclusion that green groups actually outspent foes of the legislation and two, that media coverage of climate science has actually been pretty good. (Full disclosure: My partner is a colleague of Nisbet's at AU.)
Sienna Miller Cindy Taylor Halle Berry Catherine Bell Tessie Santiago
