Earth Day 2023

After talking about the history of Earth Day to my Sustainable Systems Parsons students, I swim my way through the billowing clouds of weed smoke in Washington Square Park en route to Houston Street. By 7pm, the ground is littered with plastic water bottles and I wonder what our ancestors would think.

The First Day Earth Day was April 22, 1970.  Over 20 million people gathered worldwide to sweep streets, clean beaches, protest for legislation and have basic environmental education teach-ins. There was such incredible collective momentum. It seems now more people get excited over smoking in circus costumes on 4/20.  

Before 1970 nothing legally protected our air and water.  Laws in place for the commons was significant and long overdue. And yet to this day, New York City does not abide by the Clean Air Act or Clean Water Act.  If it did we wouldn’t have some of the highest asthma rates in the country right here in the South Bronx.  We wouldn’t have e-coli in our rivers and a combined sewer overflow system (CSO) that flushes your shit water into the Hudson and East River estuary every time it rains over a quarter of an inch overwhelming the wastewater treatment plant.  

Listening to Stevie Nicks and Chet Baker as I write this, unsure if it’s the power of hindsight nostalgia or the incongruent reality that has me yearning for some kind of 1970s collective action.   But a part of me feels sad on this 53rd anniversary.  

I am asked this question a lot. “How are you going to get my community to care about sustainability?”  And I think that’s the wrong question to be asking.  It’s not anyone’s job to get anyone else to care. And yet by asking there’s an assumption that “they” whoever they are, don’t care.  Which is setting the bar awfully low.

Let’s assume everyone does actually want clean and healthy water, air, land, food and habitats for all beings.  That people do want Nature to continue practicing its ecological intelligence in being able to sustain itself.  Let’s assume people want to engage with Nature in ways that are spiritually feeding that allow us to practice culture and art in compliment.   

In class we play musical chairs. The rules are simple: when the music stops they must find a seat and cannot sit on a chair with a note card.  After a few rounds, a student sits on a flipped over recycling bin surrounded by yellow note cards.  “I think I have a hypothesis, I think I know what’s happening.” 

What is happening?

“I think we’re not solving the real problem, we’re just going around it. Trying different ideas but the problems persist.”  

Her hypothesis freed the class from additional rounds of sitting on desks, radiators or upside down receptacles. 

The game isn’t about finding a seat at all.  An amazing learning tool created by Jaimie Cloud, the Founder of Cloud Institute and one of the Pioneer’s of Education for Sustainability.  

“It’s about resource depletion.”  

When we practice what Cloud Institute calls, “upstream thinking”, we get to the fundamental source of a problem, which is typically the underlining worldview. In leveraging systemic change, we must seek to transform the way of thinking that informs structures, behaviors and systems that are unjust.  Without understanding the source of the problem, we end up just treating symptoms over and over again.  

But you already know that.  

So back to Earth Day and this nagging concept of getting people to care.  

One of my many jobs over the years was to canvas on the sidewalk for Greenpeace and to get people to sign up for renewable energy in grocery story lobbies.  I would walk with people for blocks in fast past motion like a cocaine head rattling off statistics and trying to keep up with the bustling lunch hour break.  Finally one guy stopped in his tracks and said:

“Stop fucking following me around.”  

He’s not wrong.  I was pleading desperation when the product I was selling makes complete environmental, economic, and social sense. So why aren’t we playing offense? If relationships teach us anything, it’s that we only get what we think we are worthy of. 

My question to you this Earth Day, is a similar one Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer asks in Braiding Sweetgrass, and that’s:

 “Do you feel worthy of being in relationship with Nature?”