Earth Day Catastrophe

That the oil spill—threatening to become another environmental disaster—began just in time for Earth Day seems like a cruel joke. Earth Day, it would appear, has become unmasked. And it’s high time. Thinking that we can set aside one day each year to love Mother Earth and celebrate the fact that some of us recycle simply doesn’t cut it.

I’ve wondered for some time if we have the collective will to change our ways. When it comes to environmental awareness, we are light years behind Europe. Ireland prohibits plastic bags, I learned when we traveled there three years ago. You had to bring your own bags for shopping, and the only plastic bags I saw were biodegradable. These are impossible to buy locally at a reasonable price.

In Greece, where my daughter is studying this spring, hot water isn’t an open tap. In her apartment she and her roommates need to plan ahead; they turn a switch to heat the water and turn it off when they’re done. Ditto the electric stove. Lights turn off automatically after a certain amount of time.

Germany has windmills everywhere. My mother’s friends who live in a small village have solar panels on their roof, and their energy use data is collected regularly and transmitted to a central monitoring agency. Friends of friends who spent a semester in Germany were charged for the amount of trash they produced. Thanks to a host of incentives, they managed to reduce, recycle, reuse, and compost, and at the end of their stay they collected just one bag of trash.

Imagine accomplishing this in our country—with all the packaging that attends nearly every purchase.

Until Earth Day becomes ingrained in our lives, we are destined to trot out our globes and garlands each April and hope for the best. This isn’t good enough. As long as we consume 21% of the world’s energy and constitute less than 5% of the world’s population, we will continue to wreak the havoc that only gluttons can produce.

And watch an unimaginably large oil slick grease its way through our off-shore waters and fragile coastline.