No self-respecting environmental blog would be complete without a post for Earth Day.
So, what is Earth Day?
Wikipedia provides a brief summary, which can be summed up thusly: originally started in 1970 as an American holiday, the celebration went truly global in 1990. It is credited with helping raise awareness of environmental issues and might have been a catalyst for the Rio Summit in 1992. Most countries are now home to Earth Day celebrations of one sort or another.
Environmentalists spend a great deal of time thinking about the health and wellbeing of the earth, its systems, and the miraculous life it makes possible. Average people don't. Earth Day might be the only day each year when many people pause to think about Earth and our relationship to it. So it's important for environmentalists to get the messaging right and capitalize on the public's attention.
2015 is an important year for Earth, or rather, for humans to get serious about taking action to protect life on Earth. Earth is a rock, orbiting a star. As such, it doesn't really care one way or another what happens on its surface. (Neither does the sun care what happens in its solar system. Nor does the universe care whether an asteroid obliterates one planet or another.) But if we as humans value our own lives and the potential lives of future generations, it only makes sense that we do our part to preserve Earth's delicate life-sustaining systems, including the oceans and the atmosphere. Dealing with climate change and air and water pollution are serious challenges threatening life as we know it.
A popular environmentalist slogan states: "There is no planet B." This is true (at least for now): there is no other planet humans (or any other life on Earth, for that matter) know about, let alone could escape to, capable of supporting life forms like those found on Earth. If humans (or other animals or any other force, for that matter) disrupt the circumstances that enable the existence of life, we could cease to exist. (Humans have already done this for many species.) If humans believe life has worth, they must act to protect Earth's enabling circumstances.
These principles form the philosophical foundation of environmentalism. There is much disagreement about the extent to which human activity has affected the integrity of Earth's life-support functions, but it's hard to argue humans haven't had an impact. While nature does change over time, humans have accelerated the rate of change, perhaps beyond nature's ability to adapt and recover. Thus, while species have always gone extinct, the rate of extinctions in the human era is unprecedented in the history of life on Earth. While the composition of Earth's atmosphere has changed over time, the rate of change in its composition since the Industrial Revolution is unprecedented. While sea levels and polar ice coverage have risen and fallen, the rate of sea-level rise and decreases in ice coverage in the human era are unprecedented.
And yet, compared to the scale of many environmental problems, little is done to address them. There are many reasons for this, such as the problems' distance from us in time and space or the perception that we are powerless to address them, but Earth Day is an opportunity to reflect on and discuss these issues. It's an opportunity for environmentalists to communicate with the general public, and it's an opportunity for people everywhere to think about – and act on – challenges to preserving Earth's life-sustaining systems.
And there are reasons for optimism. Bloomberg recently reported that installations of clean energy production facilities are outpacing fossil-fuel based installations. The US and China signed an historic agreement to act on climate change. CEOs are asking world leaders to act on climate change. And many are optimistic about a positive outcome in Paris this year.
These are not reasons to rest on laurels, but rather to show that action is possible. And it's happening. And Earth Day might just have something to do with why.