Earth Day, 1990 - 20 April 1990

What is the word, the word, brother? That used to be the morning greeting of the members of a Christian sect in the back country of the Deep South.

I was going to say in the "long ago" but I have to watch myself these days. I'm thinking only of the late 1930s when I was down in Georgia and Louisiana on a recording expedition, recording I regret to say not the words of the good people in the countryside but the words of the 12-bar blues as crooned by the bad girls of New Orleans, behind the swinging doors of their cribs, in the shady alleyways behind Basin Street and Rampart Street.

What is the word, brother? was not just an offhand greeting. It required, before you settled down to the small change of gossip, the weather, who's ill et cetera, it required an answer. Preferably a quotation from the Bible worthy to be used as the text of a sermon or at least as the watchword for the day's course of conduct.

It sounds quaint today, but it's hardly less civilised than the morning habit of the Ancient Greek teachers in rounding up their pupils at the break of day and setting the topic for discussion. What is the essence of the good life? Or, what is the first condition for the success of a democracy? Aristotle posed that one and his answer – which should give us pause – was, "only when most people are virtuous".

Well, here it is, Earth Day, again. And although a survey reports that only about 27% of Americans mean to take part in any public observances, over 80% say they're doing something in their daily lives to help protect the environment.

Above and beyond these little civic acts, like sending money to environmental groups, or, much more courageously, if you're a young mother, swearing off the convenience of disposable diapers, nappies, and going back to cloth ones, there is a huge clamour of voices across the country giving us the word for the day. Earth Day. Many words. And just now, most of them warning words, prophesying in grim phrases our probable fate if we, if governments and the peoples, don't do more about it.

Global warming is the loudest word. Ozone depletion. Save the rain forests. Nuclear night. Acid rain. Dead lakes and rivers. The coming death of the oceans.

The trouble with all these tocsins, no pun intended, I mean these alarm bells, is that they're too grand, too melodramatic, too unreal and ear-splitting to be believed. They sum up in a phrase a kind of doom beyond what we've read in the most lurid science fiction. And they are denied everywhere we turn by our eyes and our ears.

You look out, as I'm doing now, down beyond the midtown skyscrapers of Manhattan which, on a brilliant spring day, are as sharp as needles, and see the flowing Hudson River, bluer, and incidentally, cleaner, than it's been for some time.

And down to the left, to the south, the great bay and beyond, the Atlantic Ocean. Tiny puffs of cumulus cloud, very white, in a surely very clean blue sky. It happens to be a weekday and you'd expect to see a thick veil of industrial smog over the Jersey flats. Who says that New York atmosphere is getting to be as bad as that of Los Angeles?

Well, the national government for one. And the governor of New York State, for another. And now the American Lung Association. That's who says so.

The fact which is not visible is unlikely to occur to most of us that on this day the wind is from the north-west, that is to say, has blown 3,000 miles across dry land and every time we have it – it's practically prevailing in the fall – it sweeps every grain and whiff of smog way out to sea.

On such days, the environmental warnings sound like the cries of hysterics. Unfortunately they're all right. Except on such enormous, vague conceptions as global warming about which the world's experts are in hot dispute. And suppose they agree, that there will be a rise in the globe's temperature of 2, 5, 9 degrees a century from now, tell me the name of a politician anywhere who has the knowledge, the imagination and the willingness to commit political suicide by saying we must do something drastic now on behalf of 2090.

The nuclear night threat. What President Bush calls "the nuclear night thing". We're hearing very little of that just now, partly because all the best nuclear doctors violently disagree about it. Mainly, I suspect, because the European revolutions and the parlous state of the Kremlin's authority has made the nuclear threat suddenly appear less menacing than the threat, thanks to Iraq, of poison gas and bacterial warfare.

Of all the doomsday warnings, I suppose the one that has been heeded most is the one about acid rain, because in most industrial countries, the effects of it can be shockingly seen over huge areas of forest and water on fine days and foul.

Congress passed a Clean Air Act in 1970 and while for many years many industries resisted obeying it – their livelihood depended after all, through all the decades of their existence, their prosperity had depended, on pouring their wastes into lakes and rivers.

What eventually forced through a new law with stiffer penalties for violations was the strong and, in time, the thunderous protests of the Canadians who came to demonstrate without any effective argument to the contrary that the toxic emissions from the industrial Midwest of the United States, when the prevailing wind was from the south or south-east, ruined forests, polluted crops, threatened all kinds of horrors, were the prime cause of fishless lakes and rivers, and threatened even in our own Vermont, and New Hampshire also, the maple syrup business.

Canada's pollution crisis, caused by the puffing chimneys to the south, were the spur to the second Clean Air Act. That, and a response, reluctant at first, and then alarmed, to the plain evidence all around the country, in the Arizona Desert, a mile high in the sky in Denver, in industries as far apart as the bayous of Louisiana and the airplane industries of Seattle, 4,000 miles to the north.

The evidence of decay, pollution, industrial waste, strangling crops, poisoning rivers and, what really had the politicians on the hop, seriously affecting the health of human beings, as was testified and is daily being testified in thousands of lawsuits against companies, industries, city and state governments, and the federal government.

Well, what a mighty ruined oak grew from such a tiny acorn. I'm not thinking of the admirable Mr Denis Hayes who had the idea of Earth Day and founded it 20 years ago. I'm thinking of a small, sad, elegant book which came out in 1962 and both in its tone and its subject matter could hardly have been expected to start a revolution. Yet in its small way, it turned out to be as powerful as a goad to action as Uncle Tom's Cabin.

An American woman scientist, Rachel Carson, put out in 1951 a book called The Sea Around Us and five years later, another, The Edge of the Sea, fascinating accounts of the life, the habits of the seas, scientifically precise and enlightening.

But Miss Carson suffered from a disability which only rarely affects first-rate scientists, she wrote very well – too well to advance her scientific reputation. In 1962, she put out another book, shot with anxiety and fired by anger.

Her beautiful writing could not disguise her strong contention that the indiscriminate use of weed killers and insecticides constituted a hazard to wildlife and to human beings. The Silent Spring was, you might say, the first environmental classic. It was a slow and then a solid bestseller. It seeded the birth of the environment movement and led pretty soon to the banning of DDT and eventually a whole range of insecticides and pesticides.

Looking back on all this, from this small beginning to the involvement of large populations in all the industrial countries, most of us, I'm afraid, who are not in government still blame them – big business and big government.

Though, while we are all victims of the Industrial Revolution, we are also its heedless beneficiaries and with all the habits we've picked up with our gadgets from gas ranges to refrigerators, sprays, detergents, cars, heaters, we, each of us, get rid every day, one way and another, of a pile of energy and refuse and then scream when we see the stinking mountains of landfill. But most of us have no intention of joining a car pool, foregoing all plastic or Styrofoam containers, walking instead of using public transport.

There's a young man in Berkeley, California, John Javna and his woman partner, Julie Bennett, who have published, with their own money, another little book. They could afford to print only 25,000 copies which vanished in four days. Within a month, over a million were being snapped up. It's called 50 Simple Things You Can Do To Save The Earth – separate trash, how to travel to work, ask the electricity company to give you an energy audit, stop, or make your cities stop junk mail which would save millions of trees a year. Put a plastic bottle in the toilet tank, it saves one to two gallons a flush. And 45 other simple, not very troublesome suggestions. If 30 million people took Javna and Bennett up on it, they'd do more in a year than our federal government has done in 20 years.

Happily, some city governments have made laws out of the John and Julie tips, which reminds me, I must now go and obey the new New York City law, and put out the garbage in three separate piles. One, kitchen and other trash. Two, bottles, glass and plastic. Three, newspapers.

"If you don't do this from now on", a note from the city reminds me, "you are liable to fines and, after persistent violations, imprisonment."

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