Can there be anything more tedious than Earth Day?
Year after year, four decades in a row, like the dripping of a leaky faucet, comes the tiresome scoldfest and guilt-o-rama that Americans are asked to join on April 22.
On this day we are meant to exude concern. We are urged to “go green” in some new way, ideally by swearing off showers and sports cars and electric light and other ecological abominations that happen to enhance the human experience.
Not that there’s anything wrong with conservation. Naturally we ought to appreciate the world’s beauty and its impressive environmental capacities, and of course we should avoid wanton despoliation. But like President Teddy Roosevelt before us, we ought to keep in mind that we can conserve natural resources whilst also exploiting them in an enjoyable manner.
The main problem with Earth Day is that there’s no fun in it. There’s no romance. And there’s absolutely no sense that by participating in its recycling sacraments and unplugging rituals that anything can come of it but a burgeoning sense of futility.
That feeling may be very useful to Earth Day proponents, feeding as it does an apparent need to intensify efforts to get more people to celebrate Earth Day and worry about the environment even more intensively, but for the rest of us it just gives April 22 a depressing dullness.
Such was not the case with the rather dear holiday that Earth Day devoured. Arbor Day, inaugurated in flat, treeless Kansas in 1872 (until paling into insignificance under the Earthy onslaught), involved the lovely, human-scale practice of planting saplings.
Actual people dug real dirt and planted genuine trees that would grow to give shade and color and to hold the soil together in heavy rain. The observance of Arbor Day yielded something beautiful and tangible, and the first time it happened participants planted nearly a million new trees.
Earth Day, by contrast, has always been both vague and vast. Built on the protest culture of the 1960s and suffused with environmental alarmism, its joylessness has been seeping steadily into even the youngest American lives.
The propaganda is inescapable. The other day at the dentist’s office, children in the waiting room were gazing placidly at a TV on which a performer was strumming a “canjo” made of bits of tin and string retrieved from a trash can and chanting: “Re … duce! Re … use! Re … cycle!” I half expected the fellow to start leading them all in synchronized calisthenics, North Korean-fashion.
“Forty years after the first Earth Day, the world is in greater peril than ever,” warns the official Earth Day Web site. What can we do to ameliorate this dire circumstance? We can take bold action!
Contributors to the Web site have all sorts of brave ideas: We can pay bills online, take cloth shopping bags with us to the supermarket and abstain from meat once a week to curb carbon emissions from the livestock industry!
There’s something especially pathetic about these earnest, Lilliputian efforts, and the degree to which we are hammering their importance into the heads of the young, after a week in which we have really seen some of what the Earth — the actual Earth, not some anthropomorphized Gaia — can do.
Today, while millions of people are engaged in yet more dreary didacticism about the perfidy of plastic bags and the uncharted terrors of climate change, the eruption of Eyjafjallajokull continues to fill the skies with impossible quantities of gases and ash and other particulates. There’s really nothing like an Icelandic volcano to put Earth Day into comical perspective.
Examiner Columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon is a former foreign correspondent and a regular contributor to the books pages of the Wall Street Journal. Her Examiner column appears on Thursday.
