Earth Day actions- Global in scope
1990 1990-04Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 18 →
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On Sunday, April 22, people in over 100 countries will mark the 20th anniversary of the first Earth Day in 1970.
On that date, more than 20 million Americans, many of them students, organized rallies, teach-ins, and protests on environmental issues.
The central event of the U.S. protest will take place on the Mall in Washington, D.C. The Sunday rally will be preceded by a concert organized by Farm Aid on Saturday evening, April 21, in RFK Stadium.
Local actions, religious services, and mass rallies are planned in many big ciCalifornia and Firestone Tire Co. and replaced these lines in over 45 major cities, including New York, Los Angeles, and Baltimore.
In Los Angeles, the buses replaced a trolley system which could have formed the basis of a highly efficient rapid-transit system and would have prevented the current traffic and smog problems which are choking the city.
Needless to say, no one got to vote on this issue. Indeed, most American people were not even informed by the politicians and industry of what was going on. This is only one small example of how, behind our backs, corporate America dominates the key decisions that affect the quality of life on this planet.
The energy confrontation Big Oil has advocated the development and growth of the nuclear power industry, which generates ever-increasing wastes that must be isolated from people and the environment for an average of 200,000 years.
It is these same profit-hungry corporate barons that influenced federal policies which devote 14 times more research and development funds to nuclear fusion than to solar energy—in spite of the tremendous potential that this abundant, cheap, and pollution-free energy resource presents.
The February 1990 issue of Nation's Business has a cover story called "A New Energy Crisis" written by Donald C. Bacon. In it he outlines Big Business' belief that environmental restrictions will seriously inhibit its rights to energy expansion.
Bacon states, "Even now, powerful forces are lining up for a high-stakes confrontation later this year over energy strategy proposals that the Department of Energy (DOE) was ties, including New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles.
The National Earth Day 1990 Coalition represents over 100 organizations. Six international unions have already sponsored the event. Owen Bieber, president of the United Auto Workers, is on the national board of directors.
For more information contact the national office at Earth Day 1990, Stanford University, P.O. Box AA, Palo Alto, CA 94309. Phone: (415) 321-1990. On the East Coast, contact Earth Day 1990, 424 C Street, N.E., Washington, D.C. 20002. Phone: (202) 547-1990.
assigned to draft by December 1990 by President Bush."
The clash Bacon refers to is between the goals of industry for energy expansion and the demands of environmentalists for global conservation of energy resources. The confrontation is shaping up along class lines, with the needs of the multinational corporations pitted against the environmental concerns of the masses.
A necessary balance sheet After 20 years of reform efforts on the part of the environmental movement, some activists have stepped back and are attempting to draw a balance sheet of their successes and failures.
Most notable in this on-going assessment is an article printed in October 1989 issue of the Greenpeace bimonthly magazine by Barry Commoner. In it Commoner discusses the fact that after 20 years of organizing, environmental quality has only slightly improved, with the rate of improvement slowing down in the past few years. He attributes failures to the strategy of pollution control and successes to pollution prevention.
"Only where production technology has been changed to eliminate the pollutant has the environment been substantially improved. Where it remains unchanged, where an attempt is made to trap the pollutant in an appended control device-the automobile's catalytic converter or the power plant's scrubber-environmental improvement is modest or nil. When a pollutant is attacked at the point of origin, it can be eliminated. But once it is produced it is too late."
Most environmental laws do not address the technological origin of pollutants and therefore deal only with the subsequent probSOCIALIST A