I must admit, it's been years since I celebrated Earth Day (pictured to the right laying out an endangered species graveyard on the Cornell University Arts Quad in 1994). Back in the early nineties, I participated in Earth Day preparations throughout high school and college. Those were the heady days of the Rio Summit, the Brundtland Report, and TV specials such as After the Warming that highlighted the potential impact of global warming through the next few decades. Environmental concerns were going to be the next big thing as the Berlin Wall crumbled, or so we thought.
Amazingly, it's After the Warming that starkly reminds me how much time has been wasted on the climate change front. From its broadcast to the Kyoto Treaty, eight years elapsed. Four more years would pass for Canada to officially ratify the treaty, and four more for Canada to all but pull out of the deal, leaving the entire regime in shambles. Despite the increasing sophistication and dire nature of the warnings emanating from the scientific community, we have seen political stagnation and regression as economic growth and globalization dominated the 1990s, followed by war and terrorism in the 2000s. Environmental concerns largely fell by the wayside, and even now, anything besides climate change and energy is all but ignored in the media.
As such, I cannot but feel wary of the recent resurgence of green issues in the body politic. I am also wary of the increasingly corporate and commercial edge of this new environmentalism as it substitutes individual consumer choices for the broader transformational change necessary to harmonize human civilization with the urgency of biosphere survival. My fear is that this upsurge of interest may quickly dissipate, leaving us next time to muddle through an upcoming planetary crisis, a dark authoritarian period veteran journalist Ross Gelbspan termed the Permanent State of Emergency.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel put it this way in March:
"It's not five minutes to midnight. It's five minutes after midnight."
We were perhaps five minutes to midnight in 1990. Not so anymore. We can't afford any more wasted time.
