earth day Archives

Reading List: Community and Climate Change

April 19, 2021

This month, HNY’s Online Community Conversations will focus on “Community and Climate Change,” with a series of questions that focus on the collision of culture, science, and global warming. We will be hosting this conversation on April 21st at 8:00 p.m. HNY’s Zoom-based Community Conversations are free with registration. Register here.

To complement this conversation, we have curated a selection of articles and books that explore the cultural and community impacts of the climate crisis. Like all of HNY’s Community Conversations, this one will use a single brief text to get things going. This text will be provided after registration. You are not required to read any of the selections on this list in order to participate in the conversation!

Articles

“I’ve Said Goodbye to ‘Normal.’ You Should, Too,” Roy Scranton

Scranton reflects on the desire to “return to normal” after the pandemic, arguing that, instead of going back to yesterday’s fossil-fueled lifestyle, we should use the pandemic’s emergency mindset, its defining sense of rupture, to forge ahead with “a new ethos adapted to the chaotic world we’ve created,” leaving our complacency and denialism behind in order to finally confront the climate crisis.

“What the Coronavirus Means for Climate Change,” Meehan Crist

In one of the earliest pieces on the relationship between coronavirus and the climate crisis, Crist argues that, for all its horrors, the pandemic presents an opportunity to reflect on long-term social and institutional patterns in the United States, asking what has worked and what hasn’t and what it would take to build a better society.

“The Coronavirus Is a Preview of Our Climate-Change Future,” David Wallace-Wells

Building on insights from his 2018 book, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (see below), Wallace-Wells discusses the links between coronavirus and the climate emergency and notes that we can expect more frequent and terrifying pandemics in a future of cascading crises.

“Gaia Versus the Anthropocene: A Conversation with Dorion Sagan,” Greg Ruggerio

This fascinating conversation explores scientist James Lovelock’s “Gaia theory” — the idea that the Earth is a sentient and self-regulating organism — and how it challenges Enlightenment-based anthropocentrism, including the theory of evolution and the idea of “the Anthropocene.” Proponents of Gaia theory urge humans to try to live more cooperatively with each other and with the planet’s biodiversity.

“We Are Nature,” Beth Lord

Drawing on the holistic philosophy of Baruch Spinoza, Lord argues that once people see humanity — and its contribution to global heating — as an extension of nature rather than of its destruction, they will better understand climate change and the need to rethink humanity’s relationship to Earth and its biodiversity.

“Climate Signs,” Emily Raboteau

Prompted by a public-art exhibit featuring cryptic messages about climate change, Raboteau travels across New York City’s five boroughs with a new friend, reflecting on family bonds, environmental racism, public policy, and community development in the context of rising sea levels.

“The Concession to Climate Change I Will Not Make,” Jedidiah Britton-Purdy

In this meditation on what it means to raise a child amid climate breakdown, Purdy pushes back against the nihilistic strain in climate doomism, arguing that children must inherit a sense of wonder about the natural world, the belief that the Earth is indeed worth preserving.

“Is It OK To Have a Child?” Meehan Crist

Crist offers a radical-humanist rebuke to environmentalists who see population control as the key to limiting humanity’s carbon footprint, writing that the problem is not humanity itself but the fossil-fuel economy, which is far and away the leading source of carbon emissions.

“Optimism has Never Been Cool but Even Covid and Climate Change Give Us Reasons to Be Cheerful,” Ian Leslie

This brief against climate doomism calls for sober-minded optimism in the face of compounding crises, suggesting that optimism is morally necessary if we are to escape the evasion and inertia bred by constant doom-mongering in the media.

“Dudes Who Won’t Wear Masks,” Julia Marcus

In this early analysis of our ongoing mask-wearing controversy, epidemiologist Julia Marcus zooms in on matters of trust and responsibility, arguing that public-health measures work best when they recognize and support people’s needs and desires without judgment.

“How to Actually Talk to Anti-Maskers,” Charlie Warzel

Writing on how difficult it is to get some people to wear masks, Warzel suggests that our mask controversy is a proxy for deeper crises of trust and legitimacy in America and that calls to “mask up” will need to rely less on scientific evidence than on renewed trust and solidarity.

Books

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, David Wallace-Wells (2019)

A terrifying glimpse into a torrid, inhospitable future, Wallace-Wells’s book could be seen as a touchstone of contemporary doomism, but its careful analysis of warming’s social and cultural implications is nothing if not humanistic, focusing on humanity’s intransigence and adaptability in the face of ecological breakdown.

The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, by Amitav Ghosh (2016)

Reflecting on the depth and persistence of climate denialism in all its guises, author Amitav Ghosh writes that the sheer scale of the climate crisis is beyond our imaginations, that the cultural tools we’ve used in the past to explain natural phenomena — myth, history, politics, literature — fail to capture the magnitude of our present emergency. A stellar introduction to the fraught question of how culture relates to nature and the climate crisis.

Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back (2020)

In this dystopian travelogue, Dublin-based writer Mark O’Connell explores the dark heart of contemporary catastrophism — “prepper culture,” Mars colonization, Chernobyl tourism, disaster real estate — surveying it all with skepticism, a biting sense of humor, and a practical humanism grounded in fatherhood.

Flight Behavior, Barbara Kingsolver (2012)

When an unlikely group of climate refugees — a swarm of delicate Mexican butterflies — suddenly descends on a small Appalachian town, the arrival prompts wonder and suspicion from the local population, who use science, religion, and conspiracy to make sense of the spectacle. An early and first-rate contribution to “climate fiction,” Kingsolver’s book shows how ordinary people interpret climate change through the prisms of place, class, and culture.

The Yellow House, Sara M. Broome (2019)

In this epic memoir about the meaning of “home,” ownership and loss, Broome uses the destruction of her childhood home during Hurricane Katrina to explore her family history and the abiding patterns of dispossession in New Orleans East and the United States more generally.

The Wall, John Lanchester (2018)

An accessible work of dystopian fiction that explores the human-scale experience of climate disruption, reflecting on the altered meanings of trust, responsibility, and friendship in an age of environmental catastrophe, in particular the generational tensions that emerge between the old and the young — between those who bequeath, and those who inherit, a broken world.

Ethics of Climate Change: Right and Wrong in a Warming World, James Garvey (2008)

Philosopher James Garvey shifts the focus from climate science, which he accepts as indisputable, to the moral dimensions of the climate emergency, casting new and urgent light on familiar values of respect, compromise, responsibility and justice.

A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind, Harriet A. Washington (2019)

In this data-driven story about the deleterious effects of toxic exposure (e.g., heavy metals, neurotoxins, bad nutrition) on cognitive development and intelligence in contemporary African-American communities, medical ethicist Harriet A. Washington argues that ostensibly “lower” IQ levels in such communities — itself a problematic claim — have less to do with “race” than with racism and class in America today.

As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock, by Dina Gilio-Whitaker (2019)

Indigenous researcher and activist Gilio-Whitaker provides a history of Native American resistance to land incursion and environmental injustice, and calls upon the environmental justice movement to accommodate indigenous cultural practices and learn from these traditions’ history of activism.

The Great Conversation: Nature and the Care of the Soul, Belden C. Lane (2019)

Drawing on spiritual masters from a wide range of global religious traditions, theology professor Belden Lane offers a spiritually-centered environmentalism for our moment of ecological breakdown, showing that doomism is best countered with humility and solutions grounded in past cultural practice.

How Culture Shapes the Climate Change Debate, Andrew Hoffman (2015)

Environmental scholar Andrew Hoffman argues that, in our polarized age, it’s not scientific data but opposing worldviews that set the terms of contemporary climate “debate,” with people interpreting the science through multiple cultural lenses — and only a significant culture shift will end the impasse and bring about decisive action.

This Land is Our Land: The Struggle for a New Commonwealth, Jedidiah Purdy (2019)

Legal scholar Jedidiah Purdy offers a vision of civic engagement for the “Age of the Anthropocene,” one that appreciates the interdependence of democracy and environmental stewardship and builds on America’s “long environmental justice movement” while acknowledging and transcending its flaws.

The Genius of Earth Day: How a 1970 Teach-In Unexpectedly Made the First Green Generation, Adam Rome (2014)

A comprehensive, highly readable history of the inaugural Earth Day in 1970 that focuses on the intellectual milieu and generational politics that gave rise to the environmental movement and a legacy of green consciousness and sophisticated eco-infrastructure in the United States.

How Do We Talk About the Environmental Crisis?

January 27, 2021

Reflections on “Turning the Tide: Communicating Climate Change.”

In 2017, as part of the Buffalo Humanities Festival, HNY convened some of the most brilliant minds in New York to examine how the language and conversations around climate change have shaped our understanding of it, and why the divide between people is so vast. This year we revisited the conversation with one of the panelists, environmental historian Adam Rome, to reflect on where we were then and what the world looks like now.

This interview, by HNY’s Joe Murphy, is the first in a series of pieces with scholars and grantees exploring the question of how culture and science relate to one another in our public discourse and how that shapes the environmental movement today.

Above: Youth march down Madison Ave for 1970 Earth Day in New York City. Courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archive.

What has changed since 2017 in the climate “debate”?

The word “debate” kind of ticks me off, because there is no debate! The notion that we’re having a “debate about the science” is completely fictitious. A real debate would see a Republican conservative like Bob Inglis, the former congressman from South Carolina, in conversation with a Left progressive like Bernie Sanders, joined by a business-school professor whose views are somewhere in-between the two politicians. All would agree on the basic premise that climate change is real and that it’s a civilization-threatening problem. But they would disagree on how to tackle it, on the concrete steps needed to mitigate the problem. That’s a debate, and we haven’t had anything remotely like that.

The reason why is complicated. When I did that HNY panel on climate communication in 2017, I hadn’t yet read Andrew J. Hoffman’s 2015 book, How Culture Shapes the Climate Change Debate. Hoffman is a professor in the business school at University of Michigan who writes on environmental sustainability. His starting point is that you’ll never convince climate skeptics with more scientific data. He reviews a huge social-science literature about how people form their views and change their minds and argues that this is essentially a cultural and an ideological divide, which is what makes it so hard to find any kind of common ground.

We know that many climate skeptics are driven purely by economic self-interest. The most powerful economic force in history, the fossil-fuel industry, has no interest in seeing a real debate about this because it would endanger their profits and their very existence. There are other industries, too, beyond fossil fuels, that have a vested interest in maintaining business as usual. But there’s this even more important ideological debate that’s largely independent of pure economic interest — “more important” in the sense that so many more people share this ideology than directly work for an industry with a stake in the matter. There are a lot of people who think the “the free market” can do no wrong. They’re incredibly proud of the ways that the market has been a dynamic, constructive, liberating force.

But climate change — and many free-market economists will say this — is a huge market failure. The market has not prevented climate change. If your whole life has been devoted to the idea that the market is infallible, that it’s the greatest thing ever, then it’s truly disturbing to reckon with the reality of a profound market failure that could jeopardize all of civilization — not just wreck the economy, but destroy society and the planet as we know it. And free-market ideology goes hand in hand with other assumptions. A lot of people dislike government regulation; they don’t want people telling them what to do. Some of that’s human nature; I feel it too sometimes, even though I believe that the government can do a lot of good. The bottom line is, you’re not going to change someone’s mind about any of this by giving them some data about temperatures in Hawaii or glaciers in Greenland.

There’s a great phrase in Hoffman’s book: We have to separate the problem from the solution. If the way you discuss climate change implies that the only solution is massive government regulation, then anyone who doesn’t like government regulation will find a way to cast doubt on the problem itself. But you can open a dialogue with them if you open the door to say, look, we just have to agree on the nature of the problem, but as far as solutions are concerned, there might be more than one approach.

Is the country stuck in “problem mode,” unable to envision, or even articulate, solutions?

It is a “vision problem.” And in a way, that, too, is cultural. Environmentalists are terrible at offering positive, can-do visions of the future. And it’s not just environmentalists. There are a lot of people who take climate change very seriously but try to scare people into taking action. Their strategy boils down to: “This is what we’ll lose if we don’t do something! This is all the bad that will come if we don’t do something!” Sometimes that is the only way to think about a problem. But it’s an inherently limiting way of thinking about it. There are a lot of other people who, in order to be motivated, must feel like they’re building something with a team. For them, the question should be: “How will the world be better if we address climate change?”And that takes a positive vision. To be sure, in the short run it might not be better; we’ve already baked in a lot of really damaging changes that we’ll have to deal with over the next decades. But if all you ever talk about is staving off catastrophe — which is what a lot of environmentalists have fallen into — it’s really hard to convince people whose temperament is more optimistic, who like to believe that there will be progress.

Do you see an overlap between the climate and pandemic contexts? Are the same values clashing now in the debate over Covid-19, the lockdown, and mask-wearing?

The answer is yes, but I want to qualify that, because I see a few counter-trends.

The pandemic seems like such an easy problem compared to climate change. Yet the cultural beliefs and political ideologies that have long held up climate action are now making it harder to contain the epidemic, too. There are several themes to both the pandemic and the climate crisis. There’s radical individualism, dislike of government regulation and dearly-held notions of personal liberty. There’s the free-market ideology of putting the economy above everything else. There’s the very human reluctance to sacrifice in the near term for some future benefit, and the difficulty of acknowledging issues of equity, of who is going to bear a social burden. There’s also distrust of expertise, or really, a kind of cynicism that prompts people to ask about others’ motives rather than actually engage with their ideas. Both sides exhibit this kind of cynicism. It’s not happening all at once, but I do see encouraging signs, on both sides of the partisan divide, that people are finding common ground on the need for action. That’s something which I just don’t see with climate change.

Humanities New York · How has the pandemic influenced climate change discussions? — Adam Rome

What, in your view, has contributed most to the collapse of trust and the spread of cynicism? Do you think the pandemic will disrupt current trends?

Some of the causes are fairly straightforward, though hardly anyone ever talks about them. When I was growing up, television had something called the “fairness doctrine.” Because the airwaves were owned by the public, a private company’s right to use them was subject to a public assessment that it was indeed in the public good. That assessment was enforced by a government agency. They had a rule that, if you talked about anything controversial, you had to give time to both sides. During the 1980s, the fairness doctrine was abolished as part of a broader push for deregulation. On the one hand, we have a zillion more kinds of media than we had when I was growing up. There are so many more places where you can get information. But none of them are bound to pay any attention to views other than those they want to promote. Giving equal time to opposing views is not an economically sound model compared to the alternative.

The shift started with television, but obviously now we’re dealing with the entire media landscape, including the big social media conglomerates. These companies thrive by telling you again and again what you already believe and gives you more evidence as to why your view is right. Modern media doesn’t encourage thought or reflection, it encourages certainty. If we’re honest, we have to admit that it takes a conscious effort to hear voices that are radically different from our own, to circumvent all the algorithms that social media sites use to know how we think. That’s one huge problem in itself that we don’t talk about very much, though there’s a lot of interesting social science research on it: we have very powerful institutions now that benefit financially from keeping us in partisan silos. It would take a conscious effort not just by us as individuals, but by society as a whole, to begin to break that down.

When I first read about the fairness doctrine, I thought this is another great example of why history matters. If all you know is the media today, it doesn’t seem weird that Facebook, Google and Twitter are the way they are. That’s just the way they are. But if you know the history, you know that they don’t have to be that way, that there’s nothing inherent about any of this. It’s not the way people thought that the media should be even as recently as thirty, forty years ago. History is incredibly helpful, not only for understanding how we’ve gotten into the bind we’re in, but also for reminding us that the current state of things is not etched in stone. It’s the result of choices and unintended consequences that involved real people rather than abstract forces.

Humanities New York · Adam Rome On Gaylord Nelson’s organizing for Earth Day

How might ordinary people contribute to a restoration of trust? What kinds of conversations would move people closer to common ground? Are there any lessons from the history of the environmental movement?

This idea of history as providing alternatives is really valuable when it comes to trust. We have to think like the opposite of Facebook if we want to create a better society and get past these partisan divides. More and more people will have to say, “You know, distrust isn’t really profitable for me.” And I don’t just mean profitable in dollars and cents. I mean that it doesn’t advance our sense of the Good, of individual or collective happiness. People will have to say, “You know, it’s actually in my interest to find ways to overcome this distrust.”

You have to start by getting into a problem solving mindset rather than a click-and-momentarily-feel-better mindset. If you really want to solve problems, you have to think about how to actually reach people with whom you disagree. Where might you possibly find common ground? That requires thinking about how they view the world. You can’t just preach to them, “This is what I think. This is what I value.” They don’t necessarily care about that. Instead, you have to say something like, “OK, I know you really care about this and I’m sensitive to that. So I’m trying to find a way that we can talk about this without violating that assumption of yours.” Maybe that’s impossible. But it’s certainly impossible if you don’t even make the effort to understand why people think what they do.

The worst case of this, in the climate discourse, is the idea that science by itself can solve these problems. Science has become a bludgeon that one side uses against the other. But all science says is that there’s a really serious problem. It doesn’t set up a dialogue about the solutions. If all you do is emphasize the scientific data, people who disagree with you on how to approach the problem will think you’re chastising them. All they hear is, “You arrogant so-and-so!” And they’ll react defensively, saying, “I don’t want you to tell me I’m stupid because I don’t get the science. I do get the science, I just happen to think there’s a different way of solving the problem than you do.” The liberal side of the climate discourse really has to figure this out. Why has it been so hard for liberals to talk about climate with conservatives, or with people who don’t really care about politics at all, who just care about business?

I think empathy is a key part of it. You can’t have trust without empathy. You have to be able to enter into other people’s roles. And that’s the bread and butter of the humanities. The humanities help you understand how people quite different from yourself look at the world. That’s a very valuable asset if you want to solve problems, if you want to bring people together, because it brings the issue down from the abstract level of ideology to, well, the human level. Hoffman’s book made me realize that. Sometimes you have to say to a person, “Hey, I know that you’re against this solution, and that may make it harder for you to admit there’s a problem. But let’s forget the solution for the moment; I think there are actually many different solutions, and we can have an interesting discussion about that. But can we just talk for a moment about the problem?”

I’m not sure what that would look like in practice. But the point is, people will just deny the problem if they think that your solution is something they’ll hate. Building trust means hinting to your interlocutors that you’re open-minded about what approach to take, even if you have very strongly held ideas about what’s probably best. If you’re worried that the other side will deem your solution unacceptable, you’ve got to defuse that if you want to have any kind of conversation.

What lessons do you draw from the young Earth Day organizers? What do you tell your students about them?

One of the things I like about being a professor is that my students teach me stuff all the time, especially on climate. I know a lot about how we arrived at the present. But my students have much more to say than I do about the next steps, because they’re thinking more imaginatively about the future. Young people don’t have decades of opinions holding them back from new thinking. They feel like there’s a lot at stake, that their whole lives are ahead of them, and they’re a reminder that we all need to step back and say, “What do we really care about? What can we do to make things better — not only to avoid bad outcomes, but actually make things better?” There are many answers to these questions, not just one.

When I read your chapters on the young Earth Day organizers almost a year later, I recognized some of the dynamic Greta Thunberg is driving at, this attempt to wrest control of the future and with it, the terms of debate in the present.

I assigned Thunberg’s little collection of speeches to my students. It really helped me think differently about the climate movement. Thunberg talks about science all the time, but her real message isn’t scientific. It’s about urgency. It’s about her phrase “Your house is on fire.” It’s a reminder that the expertise we really need now is from people who understand psychology or economics or social movements. It’s not science. The most useful writing on climate talks about psychology or sociology or political science or economics. Once you get past the science, there are so many more important, interesting, essential questions that we would have to answer if we really want to change society, the economy, our energy system.

Learn more about Earth Day in our previous conversation with Adam Rome.

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Adam Rome is professor of environment and sustainability at the University at Buffalo. A leading expert on the history of environmental movements, he is the author of the prizewinning The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism (2001) and The Genius of Earth Day: How a 1970 Teach-In Unexpectedly Made the First Green Generation (2013). He also is co-editor of Green Capitalism? Business and the Environment in the Twentieth Century (2017). From 2002 to 2005, he edited the journal Environmental History.

The Genius of Earth Day

September 18, 2017

In 2017 the Buffalo Humanities Festival’s theme was “Environments;” HNY’s panel event “Turning the Tide: Communicating Climate Science” included Adam Rome, Professor of History at the University at Buffalo and the author of The Genius of Earth Day. Humanities New York provided initial funds for the Buffalo Humanities Festival in 2014 and has been a proud sponsor for each year since. The Festival is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University at Buffalo in cooperation with Buffalo State College, Canisius College, Niagara University, and SUNY Fredonia as well as cultural institutions including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and the Burchfield Penney Arts Center.

Rome, Adam. “Postscript.” The Genius of Earth Day: How a 1970 Teach-in Unexpectedly Made the First Green Generation, Hill & Wang, 2014.

I realized early in my work on this book that Earth Day made a green generation, yet I don’t think I really understood why until I was nearly done. Now—belatedly—the explanation seems obvious. Earth Day was an educational experience as well as a political demonstration. That rare combination enabled Earth Day to have both a long-term and short-term impact.

The educational experience was most intense for the thousands of Earth Day organizers. They often devoted months to their task, and they had to answer question after question as they worked out what kind of event Earth Day would be. The assignment for the thousands of Earth Day speakers was easier but still challenging. Few could repeat talks they had given before; the rest had to figure out what to say. Earth Day also challenged attendees to decide where they stood on difficult and important issues, and many took that challenge seriously.

Of course, the Earth Day education was informal. No one graded Earth Day organizers or speakers or participants. The educational process was self-motivated and self-directed. As a result, many people learned something about themselves. How much did they care about pollution or population growth? What were they willing to sacrifice to help the environmental cause? And what might they find fulfilling and even exciting to do? Those questions often proved empowering, even transformative.

None of that was inevitable. Few political demonstrations are powerful educations. Though a rally or a protest march might teach participants something about solidarity or entrenched power, demonstrations rarely are occasions for debate or soul-searching. Their goal is not to educate: Most demonstrations aim instead to inspire action, to channel anger, to give hope, and to express a common will.

Earth Day was different because Gaylord Nelson made two inspired decisions that allowed the event to be a life-changing education for many people. Even Nelson’s greatest admirers have not appreciated how inspired those decisions were. Indeed, the most common way of crediting Nelson as the man behind Earth Day, calling him “Earth Day founder,” actually obscures Nelson’s true achievement. “Earth Day” was not Nelson’s name for the event, and acknowledging that neglected fact is critical to appreciating what Nelson did to make Earth Day so transformative. Nelson envisioned a “nationwide environmental teach-in”—a politically charged educational event—and the teach-in model allowed Earth Day to be far more powerful that a traditional political demonstration. Nelson also decided not to be a micromanager—he did not even object when the national teach-in staff renamed the event—and Nelson’s willingness to let others take ownership of the teach-in made Earth Day even more powerful.

The teach-in model encouraged an entrepreneurial approach to problem solving. That might have been a drawback. The open-ended discussion at most Earth Day events meant that participants did not end up agreeing on a specific agenda. They were not all ready to lobby for antipollution laws or press corporations to account for environmental costs or reconsider the nature of the good life. But the environmental crisis had many causes, which required many kinds of solutions: No single piece of legislation or change in business practice or new way of thinking could address all the issues of the day. The educational structure of Earth Day allowed participants to decide for themselves how they might make a difference—and then to act, in whatever way they saw fit.

The teach-in model also made Earth Day a youthful event, and again that was a potential weakness that proved to be a source of strength. In 1970, students were not a compelling constituency for most politicians: The voting age still was twenty-one, and student protesters had become a cliché. But young people were ideal participants in a do-it-yourself educational event. They were more likely than their elders to internalize what they learned. They still were forming their values, their priorities, even their sense of themselves. They tended to believe that anything was possible. Because they weren’t as constrained by responsibilities, they often could change their plans abruptly without burdening or even disappointing anyone. Earth Day ultimately pointed thousands of young people in new directions.

Nelson might have limited the scope of the Earth Day education, but he chose instead to do the opposite. He let local organizers determine the curriculum. He did not insist that the teach-ins focus on specific issues. Though he was a legislator eager to pass new environmental legislation, he did not insist that the teach-ins promote a specific set of solutions to environmental problems. As a result, Earth Day became a remarkably capacious event, able to attract and inspire a range of people.

Nelson’s decision not to micromanage the teach-in also made the local organizing effort more empowering. Because Earth Day events could take any form, the local organizers were more like small-business owners than franchise managers. They did not just implement a business plan devised by higher-ups. They were responsible for everything, and the breadth of their responsibility ensured that they were tested in many ways.

I did not fully appreciate the genius of the first Earth Day until I compared the 1970 event with the twentieth-anniversary celebration in 1990. The 1990 celebration was organized nationally—the only time that has happened since 1970—and the organizers had ambitious goals. They hoped, in the words of lead organizer Denis Hayes, “to galvanize a new outpouring of public support for environmental values and to enlist a new generation of activists in the environmental struggle.” The 1990 organizers also sought to make Earth Day a global event, and they managed that brilliantly. In the United States, however, the twentieth anniversary celebration accomplished less than Earth Day 1970, and the reasons why the 1990 effort fell short are instructive (1).

Hayes proposed a national organizing effort for Earth Day 1990 in a short essay in the Environmental Protection Agency journal in late 1988. At the time, he was a lawyer in California, but he had worked for years on environmental issues, especially energy. His call to arms immediately impressed the leaders of the major national environmental organizations, who offered their support. Hayes then established a not-for-profit organization to promote Earth Day 1990. He took a leave of absence from his law firm to serve as the organization’s CEO, and he hired a thirty-five-year-old lawyer and political strategist, Christina Desser, as executive director. A $3 million budget allowed Desser to run a remarkably professional operation. In addition to a sizable staff, Desser had the help of a talented group of consultants—and most donated their time or worked at reduced rates. The coordinator of television, print, and radio advertising had created the “Everything you always wanted in a beer. And less” campaign for Miller Lite. Other consultants brought expertise in direct-mail fund-raising, polling, publicity, lobbying, event planning, and merchandising (2).

Desser envisioned the organizational effort as “a national political campaign without the politicians.” The staff used focus groups and test mailings to hone the Earth Day 1990 message. The event had a logo and slogan: “Who says you can’t change the world?” The promotional campaign aimed to match Hollywood’s prerelease hype for blockbusters. “I want Earth Day to be as well known on April 22 as ‘Batman’ was the day it opened,” consultant Josh Baran said. To counter the stereotype that environmentalism only appealed to the privileged, the organizing effort included outreach to labor unions and social-justice groups. Field operatives worked with grassroots groups to produce local events that served the national mission. Though the organizers encouraged students to celebrate Earth Day, they put much more effort into off-campus events: Big turnouts at attention-getting celebrations in community venues would demonstrate the breadth of support for the environmental cause (3).

The organizers stressed the need for direct action. A test of the direct-mail operation, for example, asked a million people to take the Earth Day Green Pledge. Would they promise to recycle, conserve energy, buy products with smaller environmental impacts, and vote for pro-environment candidates? Of course the mailing also asked recipients to support the Earth Day 1990 campaign with a contribution. Though the pledge did not become a major part of the organizing effort, the basic message of the national campaign did not change. “We are trying to generate as much interest as we can for people to start doing things immediately—at home, at work and at school,” communications director Diana Aldridge said (4).

The Earth Day 1990 organizers accomplished all of their immediate goals. The turnout at Earth Day events in many major cities was far greater than in 1970. More than a million people attended the celebration in Central Park in New York City, and a rally and concert on the steps of the Capitol in Washington, D.C., drew 200,000. The media gave “saturation coverage” to the environment in the run-up to Earth Day, and the subject continued to receive unprecedented media attention for the next two years. Membership in many national environmental organizations reached all-time highs in the early 1990s. Earth Day 1990 also encouraged millions of people to think about how they could reduce their environmental footprint. The most conspicuous example of the heightened interest in individual eco-action was the astonishing success of 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth, a privately published pamphlet that came out just before Earth Day 1990 and soon sold more than 5 million copies (5).

But Earth Day 1990 did not match the long-term impact of the 1970 event. Even Denis Hayes acknowledges that. Though circumstances seemed to be favorable for national legislation to address climate change, biodiversity, and other pressing issues, Earth Day 1990 did not lead to a second “environmental decade.” I am less sure about the institutional and individual legacies, but Earth Day 1990 evidently did not engender the same kind of entrepreneurial activism as the 1970 event. The young people inspired by Earth Day 1990 mostly joined established environmental organizations, agencies, and professions (6).

Why was Earth Day 1990 less successful than the 1970 event, despite a much bigger and more professional organizing effort?

Perhaps the limited long-term impact of Earth Day 1990 was inevitable. Because the idea was not new, the organizing effort largely lacked the freshness of discovery. Some of the national organizers were veterans of Earth Day 1970, and all already had a sense of what an Earth Day event should be. The local organizing effort relied on established organizations, not ad-hoc groups formed to plan Earth Day events.

But the problem went beyond the difficulty of making a sequel more compelling than the original. The organizational effort in 1990 was more top-down and more directive than in 1970. The models were political and marketing campaigns, which fail if they prompt lots of questions. In politics and marketing, the goal is yes or no—a vote for or against a candidate or a decision to buy one product rather than another. Though the Earth Day 1990 organizers did not promote a specific policy agenda, they framed the event in ways that pushed people to make simple, immediate, and conspicuous demonstrations of commitment to the environmental cause. They sought to “enlist” people in a well-defined movement, not to empower them to work out their own vision of how they might make a difference. No one called the discussions at Earth Day 1990 events “soul-searching.”

That was not an accident. Desser argued that Earth Day 1990 needed to be about action, not education. “The challenge in 1970 was educating people that the environment was an issue,” she explained. “The challenge now is: What are we going to do about it? How can I change my behavior? How can I get corporations, the government, to change their behavior?” (7).

Of course, that contrast derived from a serious misreading of what the first Earth Day accomplished. The first Earth Day was about action as well as awareness, and the two were related in ways that the 1990 organizers failed to appreciate. People only change because they have learned something important—and hard-won lessons are the most transformative.

Desser’s suggestion that the time for education had passed also speaks to a more profound misunderstanding. For the 1990 organizers, the only important question was whether people had the will to “change the world.” Yet a willingness to act only is meaningful if people have a clear goal, and the goal of eco-action never is a given. Though human existence ultimately depends on the health of natural systems, humans can survive and even thrive in many kinds of environments, so the kind of environment people prefer always will be a complicated question of individual values, social circumstances, and cultural traditions. Whose preferences count the most also is a critical question. The simple exhortation to save the planet avoids the hard questions that are the foundation of true commitment.

I take no pleasure in criticizing the 1990 organizers. Hayes and Desser have continued to work on environmental issues, and I appreciate their dedication. But understanding the short-comings of the twentieth-anniversary celebration is not just useful in appreciating the genius of Earth Day 1970. The differences in the two great Earth Day celebrations offer insight into the predicaments of the contemporary environmental movement.

Like the Earth Day 1990 organizers, the professionals on the staffs of the major environmental organizations today are much better at leading campaigns than asking questions. They are adept at marshaling scientific evidence, making legal arguments, framing messages, and assessing environmental costs. They also know how to raise money—the sine qua non of not-for-profit advocacy. But they seldom inspire the deep reflection that might make the environmental movement dramatically bigger and stronger.

That sort of reflection begins with questions. What are the most important reasons why we have environmental problems? What environments do we value most? Who should decide how best to use the resources of the earth? What are the most effective ways to build a more sustainable future? As Earth Day 1970 demonstrated, those questions really can change the world. We need to ask them more often.

Photo: Approximately one million people participated in the first Earth Day celebrations in New York City. NYC Dept. of Records and Information Services.

Adam Rome is the author of The Genius of Earth Day and Professor of History at the University at Buffalo.

Robert Cahn and Patricia Cahn, “Did Earth Day Change the World?” Environment 32 (September 1990): 19.
Cahn and Cahn, “Did Earth Day Change the World?” 19– 20, 36; New York Times (November 12, 1989): F4; Los Angeles Times (October 26, 1989) (online).
Cahn and Cahn, “Did Earth Day Change the World?” 20, 36; New York Times (November 12, 1989): F4.
Cahn and Cahn, “Did Earth Day Change the World?” 20; Los Angeles Times (October 26, 1989) (online).
Cahn and Cahn, “Did Earth Day Change the World?” 37; Ronald G. Shaiko, Voices and Echoes for the Environment: Public Interest Representation in the 1990s and Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 36, 42; Joel Makower, “The Death and Rebirth of ‘50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth,’ ” http://makower.typepad.com/joel_makower/2008/03/the-death-and-r.html.
For a critical view of Earth Day 1990’s accomplishments, see Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1993), 201– 4. Cahn and Cahn offer a more positive spin in “Did Earth Day Change the World?” 39– 40. In an April 25, 2012, comment on a Web blog, Denis Hayes wrote: “In 1990, Earth Day was larger domestically than in 1970— though its impact was not as great.” See http://alltagsgeschichte.wordpress.com/2012/04/23/who-actually-founded-earth-day/.
Los Angeles Times (October 26, 1989) (online).