ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, April 20, 1997 TAG: 9704220124
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BRIAN TOKAR
EARTH DAY has become a rite of spring. Every April 22, it marks a celebration of life and environmental activism.
But over the years, Earth Day has come to uphold a brand of environmentalism that's insufferably polite and politically neutral. It points only to our individual misdeeds, rather than the policies and institutions that threaten the integrity of all life.
Popular support for the environment helped turn back much of the last Congress' all-out attack on environmental protection. Still, in 1997, environmentalists remain largely on the defensive. Republican committee chairs in Congress continue pressing for radical deregulation, taking their cues from lobbyists for the oil, chemical, timber, mining and ranching industries.
Bill Clinton, Al Gore and Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt adopt environmental language, but often step aside when powerful economic interests are at stake. This spring, a multimillion-dollar lobbying drive is poised against a relatively modest Environmental Protection Agency effort to strengthen Clean Air Act standards.
With pollution still choking our cities, toxic chemicals in our drinking water, continuing destruction of forests and waterways and the stability of the Earth's climate increasingly at risk, why has it become so difficult to advance a more assertive, long-range environmental agenda?
An increasingly aggressive free-market political agenda, which rejects all limitations on the power of corporations.
Today's heightened corporate arrogance makes it very easy for companies to proclaim environmental values and sponsor Earth Day events, even as their lobbyists press for aggressive anti-environmental measures.
The environmental movement's role in its own declining fortunes.
In a relentless drive to become inside players in Washington and the state capitals, the best-known national and regional environmental groups have become politically submissive. They refuse to challenge the power of corporations, which some of the largest of these groups rely upon for contributions. And they offer no real challenge to the Clinton administration's largely rhetorical environmental stance.
Last Earth Day, Sierra Club members voted 2-1 to oppose all future commercial logging in the national forests, despite the reluctance of the club's Board of Directors. Organizations like the Environmental Defense Fund, with no grass-roots membership to keep them accountable, support counterproductive free-market measures, such as the trading of pollution rights under the Clean Air Act, along with newly proposed marketing schemes for mining and grazing permits, offshore-fishing allotments and other regulatory perquisites.
The myth of green consumerism.
This myth - that we can do our part for the Earth simply by buying more environmental products - has lulled many environmentally aware people into believing that political activism is no longer a priority. Only a more assertive grass-roots ecology movement can regain the momentum environmentalists have lost in recent years.
Fortunately, such a movement is beginning to stir. Environmental-justice activists are linking anti-racism work with efforts to curb poverty and pollution. A new generation of forest activists is confronting the expanded global reach of the timber industry. Like ecology activists around the world, they understand that ecosystem protection is inseparable from global demands for economic justice.
These stirrings promise a more politically sophisticated environmentalism in the years to come, and the hope for an Earth Day fully worthy of its name.
BRIAN TOKAR, author of the just-published ``Earth for Sale: Reclaiming Ecology in the Age of Corporate Greenwash," teaches at the Institute for Social Ecology and Goddard College in Vermont.
- KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE
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