Earth Day turns 50 April 22, 2020.
Amid spiraling pollution, the tumultuous Nixon presidency and raging Vietnam War, Earth Day held out the hope and promise of a clean environment and an enlightened future. (Nixon, for all his issues, established the Environmental Protection Agency July, 1970.)
Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog — “Brand's intent with the catalog was to provide education and "access to tools" so a reader could "find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested."
In the middle of its four-year, 1968-1972 run, the Whole Earth Catalog brought together the unifying, revelatory concepts of Buckminster Fuller's Spaceship Earth and Marshall McLuhan's Global Village. Without it, Earth Day may not have come into being.
For all its human carnage, the pandemic is pulling back the curtain on just how beneficial even a temporary reduction of carbon levels can be. Carbon emissions are plummeting. Skies are clearing. Waters are clearing. Animals are coming out to play. The planet itself is calming.
As that first Earth Day 50 years ago opened the conversation for a better, cleaner planet, today’s pandemic reveals just how clean a carbon-free world can be. Oil is in free-fall. Good! If oil goes, so goes plastic. The Green New Deal, or something very close to it, may be our planet’s last hope.
"Save the Planet"