Feeding The Earth Celebrating Earth Day By Thinking About What We Can Give Back

Earth Day turns 25 today, and like most 25-year-olds, it’s showing signs of maturity.

For starters, Earth Day is less flashy - fewer rock concerts, fewer pranks (like the time ecoterrorists dumped oil in the reflecting pool outside Standard Oil’s San Francisco headquarters).

Instead, it’s become more family oriented. Riverfront Park will host an assortment of activities for all ages today, including fiddlers, story-tellers and solar-powered model car races. Elsewhere, cleanups and picnics are planned.

“In the past, Earth Day - especially the first one - was more of a protest event,” recalls Jeanne Schrock of the Washington Department of Ecology. “Gradually it’s evolved into an educational event.

“Protest is fine,” she says, “but education is an easier, friendlier way to encourage people to change. Environmentalists have become more user-friendly over the years, and more people are listening to their message.

“So, instead of having a bunch of anti-people in the park on Earth Day, we’ll have a bunch of people who are for something: for vegetarianism or planting trees or recycling.”

Increasingly, today’s environmentalists also are for something called sustainability.

The word isn’t likely to crop up on bumper stickers any time soon - “Think globally, act sustainably” isn’t very catchy. But many environmentalists say sustainability is the philosophy that nations, corporations and individuals must embrace if we are to coexist with nature through the next century.

The word “sustainability” appeared half a century ago in fishery studies and timber projections. But it didn’t gain widespread currency until 1987, when the U.N. World Commission on Environment and Development framed sustainability in more comprehensive terms, defining it as “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.”

Sustainability was a central theme of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, and since has been the focus of numerous books, lectures and essays.

But the concept behind sustainability is ancient, according to “Ecotopia” author Ernest Callenbach. “It goes back tens of thousands of years to so-called primitive people who knew better than to wipe out their resources by over-harvesting them.”

Sixteenth-century Iroquois tribes had their own version of sustainability, referred to as the great law: “In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations.”

Spokane’s Expo ‘74 preached a similar message. The fair’s official creed read, in part: “We believe that the human spirit itself must set its own limitations to achieve a beauty and order and diversity that will fill the hearts of the children of the world with a new and happier vision of their destiny.”

Seattle and Olympia both have fledgling “sustainable community” movements, and British Columbia hopes to create a new city on Vancouver Island that “embodies the many traditional values associated with small-town life, ecological sustainability and a positive vision of the future.”

“It’s real simple,” says Donella Meadows, Dartmouth College environmental studies professor and co-author of “Beyond the Limits: Confronting Global Collapse, Envisioning a Sustainable Future.”

“Sustainability is taking the long-term view. It’s not selling out the future in order to make a flash-in-the-pan profit today.”

Northwest Environment Watch director Alan Durning, author of “How Much is Enough?”, calls sustainability the golden rule of ethical societies. “It means leaving the Earth in as good or better condition than we found it.”

Some see sustainability as a measuring stick for gauging the impact of everyday decisions. For instance, imagine the environmental consequences if all 5.7 billion people on Earth ate the same meaty diet Americans eat, owned as many cars, and spent their weekends playing tag on snowmobiles or jet skis.

“I don’t think people in Spokane realize that the choices they make in their daily lives affect the planet,” says DOE’s Schrock. “They don’t realize that eating beef at a fast-food restaurant accelerates the denuding of rain forests or that eating seafood affects the oceans.

“We probably can’t go a day without harming the environment somehow,” she says. “But we can lessen our impact if we’re more thoughtful about how our actions in Spokane affect things somewhere else.”

Unsustainable behavior on a national scale is easier to recognize: depletion of fish and timber stocks; loss of agricultural land; overpumping aquifers; the typical American using 40 times more energy than the average person in a developing country.

“The building up of enormous (federal) debt is a good example of unsustainability,” says Meadows. “It means we’re meeting our present needs at the cost of the future. Our children and grandchildren will have to pay for our consumption.”

But there are encouraging signs, too. “Germany is doing a fantastic job of reducing wasteful packaging,” Durning says, “and Denmark is doing pretty good with wind power. In the Netherlands, most people walk, bike or use mass transit, and India and Israel are harnessing solar energy.”

In this country, air and water quality is improving, and the number of communities with recycling programs has grown from 600 just seven years ago to 6,600 today.

“Almost all the things we need to do are being done by somebody somewhere,” Durning says, “and it’s only a question of putting it all together.

“If we applied the extraordinary ingenuity of this country to the challenge of satisfying our needs and wants without causing appreciable harm to natural systems, I think the results would be phenomenal,” he says. “We could have a century of breathtaking discoveries, inventions and breakthroughs.”

“What makes me optimistic,” says Meadows, “is that the more I try to live sustainably, the better life gets.

“Life has more meaning when we move away from a consumer-oriented, I-am-what-I-own lifestyle and start defining ourselves by what’s really important … things like human relationships.”

MEMO: Two sidebars appeared with the story: 1. EARTH DAY AT RIVERFRONT PARK Spokane’s Riverfront Park will celebrate Earth Day today starting with an 8 a.m. fun run, followed by entertainment and environmental exhibits in Clocktower Meadow from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Other activities include an 11 a.m. tree-planting ceremony on Canada Island, Junior Solar Sprint model car races from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Howard Street Bridge, and an “Eco Adventure” live stage show at the YMCA at 2 and 4 p.m.

2. SUSTAINABILITY: GOOD NEWS AND BAD The good news: Smog in America has declined by about one-third since 1970, and airborne lead has dropped 98 percent, even as the number of vehicles has jumped 85 percent. In 1972, only a third of U.S. bodies of water were safe for fishing and swimming. Today, almost two-thirds are safe. In a recent Times Mirror survey, 78 percent of respondents agreed that “this country should do whatever it takes to protect the environment.” In the past 30 years, recycling and composting of municipal solid waste in this country has grown to 22 percent.

The bad news: The average American consumes as much energy as 3 Japanese, 12 Chinese, 147 Bangladeshis or 422 Ethiopians. Americans produce twice their weight per day in household, hazardous and industrial waste, and an additional half-ton per week when gaseous wastes such as carbon dioxide are included. Fewer than 12,000 wild Snake River spring chinook are expected to reach the Bonneville Dam this year, compared with 100,000 just two years ago. At least half the natural ecosystems in the contiguous 48 states have declined to the point of endangerment, threatening entire communities of species.