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1969: Earth's Epic Year
by Thanos Kalamidas
2008-04-22 08:10:38 |
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You could say that 1969 was an epic year for modern human history. By July humanity had conquered space with man landing on the Moon and the Soviet Union sent a space probe to Venus; back on Earth John Lennon, with Yoko Ono, sang “Give peace a chance”, while the first American soldiers withdrew from Vietnam. Woodstock, a small agricultural area in upstate New York, became synonymous with Rock & Roll, hippies and the sex revolution, and the Brazilian Pele scored his 1,000 goal.
 In September 1969, US Senator Mr. Gaylord Nelson announced that in spring 1970 there will be a nationwide grassroots demonstration for the environment. However, before 1970 even began, a series of reports about the environment appeared that led to the birth of the modern environmental movement. As promised, in April 1970 the first demonstration for a healthy and sustainable environment marked what has now been recognized by the United Nations as Earth Day!
I suppose with demonstrations and announcements on a daily basis we can forget how much environmental issues have changed over the last three decades. Global warming was not an issue, even for science fiction novels, the environment was not a scary subject and that is exactly what makes it scarier. Back then the atom bomb was the fear and a nuclear WWIII the nightmare.
I remember as a kid practising what we would do in case of a nuclear war, naively hiding behind concrete walls. However, that had built gradually and the fear had already left behind some thousands of victims in Hiroshima. The environment was not an issue; it was only the hippies that loved the flowers.
It took 30 years for the environment to become the main issue, but the question should be how much has really changed in these thirty years for the environment. It took millions of years of evolution to reach the level we are today and only thirty years to drive it to destruction and gradually in evanesce? This is the big question, it is what we must remember and find out now.
Earth Day is not just a remembrance, but a chance to take our responsibilities seriously and do something about it. In the case of Earth the responsibility doesn’t lay only on the states' shoulders, but on all of us collectively. Airplanes and cars are responsible for the majority of the environmental destruction, yet the simple hairspray we have at home can make the difference as long as we become environmentally aware.
Recycling is not just a good thing to do, it is an obligation; saving energy is not only good for our wallet but also prevents waste of something necessary and in danger of running out in the next few decades. Energy is the biggest culprit for the damage to the environment, with our homes and, to an extent, our lives have become a constant waste of energy. Think of it, all of us have lived through electricity cuts for many reasons: how did we feel during one of those power cuts? Suddenly we found ourselves without television, computers, electric knives and toothbrushes.
Think of this, when was the last time you went to the local shop to buy milk by foot? A shop that is most likely just 300 meters away from your house; you use your car for the most ridiculous distances and that means use of oil. Imagine now how many people do exactly the same thing and add to that the fact that oil is not something endless.
Countries have already started talking about the end of oil resources. The US administration has been arguing for years for the necessity to start drilling Alaska, one of the last virgin areas on earth, and the damage will be permanent if something like that happens. The Arctic countries have already started arguing with Canada, Russia and Denmark over who owns the Arctic and who has the drilling rights to the land under the ice.
In a consuming and productive world there was no room to waste time; time is money, after all, so everybody turned to nuclear power forgetting what we are going to do with the nuclear waste. Feloniously for years nuclear states dumped their nuclear waste in countries of the Third World bribing local dictators and destroying nature, not only for years, but for thousands of years. Now these countries dump their waste either in their countries or in the oceans.
If the Earth was like the human body then the rainforests are her lungs and speedily the rainforests in the Amazon are meeting their end. Asthma cases increase in the industrial west, nearly 40% a year due to a polluted environment, cancer is coming in new forms all the time and the following question should be: what will happen in the next thirty years?
Earth Day is a time to raise all these questions and motivate us all to recognise our collective responsibility and do something to change the situation starting with our own home and lives.
pollution Thanos_Kalamidas UN Environment |
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