This week marks 55 years since the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970. The genesis of the first Earth Day had begun a few months earlier when the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland literally caught fire because of the chemicals that had been dumped into the river by nearby industrial plants. The blaze was broadcast on national TV news, sparking (no pun intended) the environmental movement.
Earth Day led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency by President Richard Nixon, including the landmark legislation of the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. For those of us who were around at that time, Earth Day gave us hope that we had reached a turning point in the effort to eliminate the air and water pollution that threatened the health of every American, not to mention the impacts upon sensitive environmental areas and wildlife. To be sure, there have been many victories since that first Earth Day. We recall that in our youth growing up on Pt. Shirley in Winthrop, swimming was forbidden in Boston Harbor because of the high levels of pollution emanating from the untreated waste from the MDC’s sewer plant on Deer Island, not to mention the untreated effluents spilling out of sewer pipes throughout the Metro Boston area.
Paint peeled from homes and cars in Winthrop, Chelsea, and Revere because of the fumes emanating from adjacent waterways. The famous 1960s rock song Dirty Water, an homage (of sorts) to the high level of pollution in the Charles River, is a cultural reminder of that era. The creation of the Mass. Water Resources Authority in the mid-1980s eventually resulted in the beautiful and clean Boston Harbor environment that we enjoy today. However, when that first Earth Day was observed in 1970, the term “climate change” did not even exist. It was later in that decade that scientists at major oil companies determined that the carbon emissions from their products would cause the climate to warm, but those companies hid that information from the public, much like how the tobacco companies had kept secret their data establishing the link between smoking and lung cancer.
Today we know that climate change is both real and accelerating — and it also is generally acknowledged that there is nothing we can do to reverse it. In 1975, the world’s total carbon emissions were 17 billion tons, of which the U.S. was responsible for a bit more than 25% with 4.4 billion tons. Today, the U.S. essentially is at that same level with 4.8 billion tons of carbon emissions. However, the rest of the world’s output has increased from 12.6 billion tons to 32.2 billions tons. The U.S. could become carbon-neutral tomorrow, yet the amount of emissions would be more than double what they were in 1975. Another cultural icon from that era, the 1967 movie The Graduate, ironically highlighted another product that was becoming ubiquitous in our lives and that would come to haunt us 50 years later.
The most famous line in the movie was one word: “Plastics,” which was the career advice given to Dustin Hoffmann’s character Benjamin by a neighbor who told him that the future lay in the plastics industry. Little did we know then that by the first part of the 21st century, microscopic nanoplastics would be detectable in every organ (including our brain) and tissue of every human and animal on the planet. Plastics are in the air we breathe (especially in our homes), the food we eat, and the water we drink. So yes, it’s nice that we can swim in Boston Harbor today. But that small pleasure provides little comfort given the inevitability of the dire consequences of climate change and the conversion of our bodies into toxic waste sites that have occurred since that first Earth Day in 1970. Fifty five years after the first Earth Day, the state of the planet and our environment is this: The present is bad and the future will be worse — and there is nothing we can do about it.