Post by Rabbi Neil on Apr 21, 2023 22:07:56 GMT
I received an email the other day from a board game company giving me advanced notice of this weekend’s Earth Day sale. The board games that they will be selling are all environmentally-themed. Some environmental board games are actually very good – Endangered, for example, teaches players about real-life endangered species and the unique threats that each of those species face, and even has the players trying to lobby in differing ways to protect those species. CO2 is a very complicated game in which companies try to create power stations giving them the largest share in the energy sector while simultaneously not releasing so many carbon emissions that they cook the planet. In the game Rescue Polar Bears, players form a scientific organization that tries to collect data about climate change to persuade governments to change their energy policy while simultaneously preventing polar bears from sinking into the freezing water as the ice caps melt. There are many science-based board games that can be used as teaching tools that could help players become much more sympathetic to environmental change, and particularly regarding threats to biodiversity. While they may not bring about social change because the people likely to buy such games probably already care about such issues, they at least create sensitivity to the issues. But is sensitivity enough?
The first Earth Day was in the year 1970, now over 50 years ago. The World Wildlife Fund had been created nine years before, and the following year, Rachel Carson’s seminal work Silent Spring had totally changed the way that people viewed pesticides and the effect of pollution on the planet as well as on other human beings. In 1967 Greenpeace was founded, under its original name Don’t Make a Wave Committee, and in 1968 Garrett Hardin introduced the idea of the Tragedy of the Commons while Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb. The concept of the tragedy of the commons is a simple one that is hotly debated. It suggests that where individuals have access to a public resource (also known as a common) they will always act in their own interest and therefore will deplete the resource. As the resource becomes even more rare, they will grab what they can while they can, thus exhausting the resource entirely. The Population Bomb was an essential text in population studies, although decades later it seems that while the human population has increased dramatically, most of the terrifying predictions of that text failed to emerge, mainly due to technological developments, some of which were extremely damaging to the environment. In 1969, Friends of the Earth was founded and the very famous incident of the Cuyahoga River fire ignited, as it were, a new passion in the general public when they were able to see that this country’s rivers were so polluted that they literally caught fire. At that time, there was no EPA, no Clean Air Act, and no Clean Water Act. There were no legal or regulatory mechanisms to protect our environment. So, in spring 1970, Senator Gaylord Nelson created Earth Day as a way to force the issue of saving the environment onto the national agenda. Earth Day rallies that involved 20 million people – 10% of the US population at the time - took place across the country. By the end of 1970, the first Earth Day led to the creation of the United States Environmental Protection Agency and the passage of other first of their kind environmental laws, including the National Environmental Education Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, and the Clean Air Act. Two years later Congress passed the Clean Water Act. A year after that, Congress passed the Endangered Species Act and soon after, the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act. Back in 1970, Earth Day tapped into an ever-growing movement, connecting disparate environmental groups together, and helped to create changes in US environmental policies.
The Earth Day website also boasts 1990 as a seminal time for the development of Earth Day. It explains that “As 1990 approached, a group of environmental leaders approached Denis Hayes to once again organize another major campaign for the planet. This time, Earth Day went global, mobilizing 200 million people in 141 countries and lifting environmental issues onto the world stage. Earth Day 1990 gave a huge boost to recycling efforts worldwide and helped pave the way for the 1992 United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.” So, well done, Earth Day.
Except…. one author of many wrote twenty years ago that “in the thirty years from the first Earth Day, the human population increased by 62%, world oil consumption increased from 46 million to 73 million barrels a day, natural gas extraction increased from 34 to 95 trillion cubic feet per year, the global motor trade tripled in size, [and] air traffic increased by a factor of six. (The Enemy of Nature, Joel Kovel (2008), p.1-3).” That was written in 2008. The numbers are far worse now. Since then, our society has at least become obsessed with carbon emissions, with reducing our carbon footprint. Companies now boast their environmental credentials. There are thousands and thousands of environmental NGOs all around the world. The result of that on global carbon emissions is fascinating to look at. In 1970, total global carbon emissions were around 15 billion metric tons. Now, thanks to fifty years of Earth Day and of environmentalism, of environmental treaties, of green NGOs, of green businesses, now instead of 15 billion metric tons, last year the world emitted 37 billion metric tons of CO2. What that means is that since Earth Day 1970, the amount of global annual carbon emissions has more than doubled. Our society now releases more carbon into the atmosphere in one year than it did in the two years after the first Earth Day and the amount we release increases every single year. We release more carbon now in one year than we did in five years during the 1940s. On the first Earth Day, carbon dioxide concentration in the Earth’s atmosphere was around 325 parts per million. For decades, scientists warned that having that number pass 400 parts per million would lead to feedback loops that would make climate catastrophe all but inevitable. Now it’s at 421 parts per million. Now, 34% of US plants and 40% of US animals are threatened with extinction, and 41% of US ecosystems are at risk of wide-range collapse. Worldwide, a million animal and plant species are currently under threat of extinction, and extinction rates are increasing not decreasing. So, well done, Earth Day.
The organizers of Earth Day are correct that 1990 was an important moment in making Earth Day a global phenomenon, but what they fail to mention is at what cost. In order to get the message out worldwide, the organizers of Earth Day looked for corporate sponsorship, and while they did turn down millions in potential sponsorship, that Earth Day had sponsors that included Monsanto, Peabody Coal and Georgia Power. Houston Earth Day in 2003 was made possible by a $15,000 donation by Waste Management, a company that in 1986, sued the EPA to get permission to burn toxic waste on ships at sea. In 1990, Earth Day became global, and it also became greenwashed. This year’s Earth Day has car manufacturer Hyundai and airline company Jet Blue as two of the sponsors. When companies sponsor your event, they get to determine how the event is framed. They help define the language. And the new greenwash message that emerged around 1990 was clear – that Green Consumerism could exist. The onus for global climate change was then put on us, the consumer. We were told that all we needed to do to save the planet was recycle, use more efficient cars, and stop wasting energy. And who was driving that message? The multinational corporations who wanted us to buy more. The first commercials for plastic recycling were creating by oil companies. Today, over 90% of plastics that go to be recycled are instead incinerated because recycling plastic is a lie that helps us feel better about ourselves for buying more oil-based products. Who told us to use more efficient cars? The car companies that wanted us to go out and buy the latest model, while they and the oil and gas companies keep suing the EPA to keep fuel efficiency numbers low so that we consume more. Who told us to stop wasting energy? The same manufacturers who told us that all we needed to do was buy more energy-saving appliances, that we could consume our way to a greener society, while they did virtually nothing to shift to green energy.
Around the same time as the first Earth Day, the Audobon Society spent $38 million a year, with only $10 million coming from individual contributions. Corporate donors included Waste Management Incorporated, General Electric, GTE, Amoco, Du Pont, and Morgan Guaranty Trust, with smaller donations (under $5,000) from Dow Chemical, Exxon, Ford, IBM, and Coca-Cola. Similarly, back then, the National Wildlife Federation had a budget of $63 million, with only 22 percent coming directly from members, and another 15 percent from the sale of magazine subscriptions to schoolchildren. Their corporate donors included Amoco, ARCO, Coca-Cola, Dow, Duke Power, Du Pont, Exxon, General Electric, General Motors, IBM, Mobil, Monsanto, Tenneco, USX (formerly US Steel), Waste Management, Westinghouse and Weyerhaeuser. Matchings grants came from Boeing, Chemical Bank, Citibank, Pepsico, the Rockefeller Group, United Technologies, and others. Corporations had their members invited onto the boards of environmental groups to transform business but in the end all that was transformed was the mainstream environmental groups who bowed to the almighty dollar. And that was absolutely inevitable because the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. The corporate takeover of environmental NGOs has transformed Earth Day from a movement to a shopping opportunity. Now instead of creating new ways to protect the environment, we instead have new ways to buy things that are about the environment, like the board games I mentioned before.
Now, Earth Day has been reduced to tokenistic events. Turn off your lights for an hour. Turn down your thermostat by one degree. Inflate your tires this Earth Day to save the planet. All of that is corporate greenwash. Al Gore’s 2006 movie An Inconvenient Truth ignited environmental passion across this country but because Gore so famously defends corporations in speeches and in his books, the practical action steps that he suggests at the end of the movie were merely tokenistic. You can’t save the planet by buying a Tesla when the person who owns Tesla launches a rocket that causes more greenhouse gas emissions in the two minutes before it blows up than you might generate in your entire lifetime. We cannot buy our way out of environmental catastrophe. The only way we can avoid environmental catastrophe is by totally dismantling and reassembling our society. Contemporary environmentalism has become so contaminated with the filth of corporate misappropriation that it seems impossible to now separate the two. Having read a report by Enron boasting their environmental credentials and the plethora of awards they have received from differing famous environmental groups and even by climate change summits, the environmental cause has to be declared utterly lost, consumed by the financial behemoths that rape the planet and devour the global poor. They boast sustainability and corporate responsibility while creating then trademarking genetically modified natural resources before manipulating the market so that only that particular modified strain can be purchased. For the last thirty years, environmentalism has become subsumed into corporate capitalism. It has become the very thing it once hated. And we let it happen because it helped us acquire more without guilt, it helped us plunder the planet with a clean conscience. New Yorkers now use more energy commuting in a week than all people living in the entire continent of Africa use in a year. So, Earth Day becomes an hour of turning off lights and then patting ourselves on the back for how green we are. It becomes an hour of buying new environmentally friendly gadgets and then disposing of the old ones in ways that pollute rivers and poor communities around the world. Earth Day, once a moment of activism, has become an annual cleansing of our conscience, an eco-Yom Kippur where we emerge guilt-free without changing the way we act. Where once Earth Day was about change, now it has become a way that the world’s worst polluters – and that includes all of us - can ensure that nothing changes. The environmental radicalism of Earth Day is dead, recycled into the abhorrent turning of a blind eye to global devastation wreaked by the most fortunate in society. Where once it lamented the state of the earth, now it affirms everything that despoiled it.
So, if Earth Day is to mean anything this year, I believe that we would have to use it as a springboard for a radical overhaul of our society and that starts with us. We would have to ask ourselves what a Temple that really, truly cares about the environment would look like. We would have to reduce our community’s carbon emissions dramatically, our water usage, and much more. And we would help our members do the same. We would fight against corporate environmentalism and would spread an ecological message instead – a message that affirms the reality of our interconnectedness with all life and our duty to save it. We would not seek to subdue the earth so that we could fill our homes, but we would instead work with the earth’s natural cycles to sustainably live in this region. We would not pray for the health of our planet, we would actively work for it. We would then inspire those around us. We would be held up as an example of sustainability, where at the moment we barely even mention that word. We would reclaim Earth Day as an opportunity to insist on new environmental legislation, and to promote sustainability projects locally and abroad. We would use it to commit to consuming so much less, by learning to be happy with what we already have. And, essentially, we would do it together as a community.
Maybe the key to saving the planet and to saving ourselves is by first saving Earth Day. This Shabbat and this week moving forward, on this 53rd Earth Day, let us be really honest and ask ourselves if we actually care enough about the planet to totally overhaul our community and our society. May God help us as we ask ourselves that difficult question, and as we truly face ourselves and our place in the world, and may God help us to find the strength to totally change ourselves, our community, and our society for good. And let us say, Amen.
The first Earth Day was in the year 1970, now over 50 years ago. The World Wildlife Fund had been created nine years before, and the following year, Rachel Carson’s seminal work Silent Spring had totally changed the way that people viewed pesticides and the effect of pollution on the planet as well as on other human beings. In 1967 Greenpeace was founded, under its original name Don’t Make a Wave Committee, and in 1968 Garrett Hardin introduced the idea of the Tragedy of the Commons while Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb. The concept of the tragedy of the commons is a simple one that is hotly debated. It suggests that where individuals have access to a public resource (also known as a common) they will always act in their own interest and therefore will deplete the resource. As the resource becomes even more rare, they will grab what they can while they can, thus exhausting the resource entirely. The Population Bomb was an essential text in population studies, although decades later it seems that while the human population has increased dramatically, most of the terrifying predictions of that text failed to emerge, mainly due to technological developments, some of which were extremely damaging to the environment. In 1969, Friends of the Earth was founded and the very famous incident of the Cuyahoga River fire ignited, as it were, a new passion in the general public when they were able to see that this country’s rivers were so polluted that they literally caught fire. At that time, there was no EPA, no Clean Air Act, and no Clean Water Act. There were no legal or regulatory mechanisms to protect our environment. So, in spring 1970, Senator Gaylord Nelson created Earth Day as a way to force the issue of saving the environment onto the national agenda. Earth Day rallies that involved 20 million people – 10% of the US population at the time - took place across the country. By the end of 1970, the first Earth Day led to the creation of the United States Environmental Protection Agency and the passage of other first of their kind environmental laws, including the National Environmental Education Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, and the Clean Air Act. Two years later Congress passed the Clean Water Act. A year after that, Congress passed the Endangered Species Act and soon after, the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act. Back in 1970, Earth Day tapped into an ever-growing movement, connecting disparate environmental groups together, and helped to create changes in US environmental policies.
The Earth Day website also boasts 1990 as a seminal time for the development of Earth Day. It explains that “As 1990 approached, a group of environmental leaders approached Denis Hayes to once again organize another major campaign for the planet. This time, Earth Day went global, mobilizing 200 million people in 141 countries and lifting environmental issues onto the world stage. Earth Day 1990 gave a huge boost to recycling efforts worldwide and helped pave the way for the 1992 United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.” So, well done, Earth Day.
Except…. one author of many wrote twenty years ago that “in the thirty years from the first Earth Day, the human population increased by 62%, world oil consumption increased from 46 million to 73 million barrels a day, natural gas extraction increased from 34 to 95 trillion cubic feet per year, the global motor trade tripled in size, [and] air traffic increased by a factor of six. (The Enemy of Nature, Joel Kovel (2008), p.1-3).” That was written in 2008. The numbers are far worse now. Since then, our society has at least become obsessed with carbon emissions, with reducing our carbon footprint. Companies now boast their environmental credentials. There are thousands and thousands of environmental NGOs all around the world. The result of that on global carbon emissions is fascinating to look at. In 1970, total global carbon emissions were around 15 billion metric tons. Now, thanks to fifty years of Earth Day and of environmentalism, of environmental treaties, of green NGOs, of green businesses, now instead of 15 billion metric tons, last year the world emitted 37 billion metric tons of CO2. What that means is that since Earth Day 1970, the amount of global annual carbon emissions has more than doubled. Our society now releases more carbon into the atmosphere in one year than it did in the two years after the first Earth Day and the amount we release increases every single year. We release more carbon now in one year than we did in five years during the 1940s. On the first Earth Day, carbon dioxide concentration in the Earth’s atmosphere was around 325 parts per million. For decades, scientists warned that having that number pass 400 parts per million would lead to feedback loops that would make climate catastrophe all but inevitable. Now it’s at 421 parts per million. Now, 34% of US plants and 40% of US animals are threatened with extinction, and 41% of US ecosystems are at risk of wide-range collapse. Worldwide, a million animal and plant species are currently under threat of extinction, and extinction rates are increasing not decreasing. So, well done, Earth Day.
The organizers of Earth Day are correct that 1990 was an important moment in making Earth Day a global phenomenon, but what they fail to mention is at what cost. In order to get the message out worldwide, the organizers of Earth Day looked for corporate sponsorship, and while they did turn down millions in potential sponsorship, that Earth Day had sponsors that included Monsanto, Peabody Coal and Georgia Power. Houston Earth Day in 2003 was made possible by a $15,000 donation by Waste Management, a company that in 1986, sued the EPA to get permission to burn toxic waste on ships at sea. In 1990, Earth Day became global, and it also became greenwashed. This year’s Earth Day has car manufacturer Hyundai and airline company Jet Blue as two of the sponsors. When companies sponsor your event, they get to determine how the event is framed. They help define the language. And the new greenwash message that emerged around 1990 was clear – that Green Consumerism could exist. The onus for global climate change was then put on us, the consumer. We were told that all we needed to do to save the planet was recycle, use more efficient cars, and stop wasting energy. And who was driving that message? The multinational corporations who wanted us to buy more. The first commercials for plastic recycling were creating by oil companies. Today, over 90% of plastics that go to be recycled are instead incinerated because recycling plastic is a lie that helps us feel better about ourselves for buying more oil-based products. Who told us to use more efficient cars? The car companies that wanted us to go out and buy the latest model, while they and the oil and gas companies keep suing the EPA to keep fuel efficiency numbers low so that we consume more. Who told us to stop wasting energy? The same manufacturers who told us that all we needed to do was buy more energy-saving appliances, that we could consume our way to a greener society, while they did virtually nothing to shift to green energy.
Around the same time as the first Earth Day, the Audobon Society spent $38 million a year, with only $10 million coming from individual contributions. Corporate donors included Waste Management Incorporated, General Electric, GTE, Amoco, Du Pont, and Morgan Guaranty Trust, with smaller donations (under $5,000) from Dow Chemical, Exxon, Ford, IBM, and Coca-Cola. Similarly, back then, the National Wildlife Federation had a budget of $63 million, with only 22 percent coming directly from members, and another 15 percent from the sale of magazine subscriptions to schoolchildren. Their corporate donors included Amoco, ARCO, Coca-Cola, Dow, Duke Power, Du Pont, Exxon, General Electric, General Motors, IBM, Mobil, Monsanto, Tenneco, USX (formerly US Steel), Waste Management, Westinghouse and Weyerhaeuser. Matchings grants came from Boeing, Chemical Bank, Citibank, Pepsico, the Rockefeller Group, United Technologies, and others. Corporations had their members invited onto the boards of environmental groups to transform business but in the end all that was transformed was the mainstream environmental groups who bowed to the almighty dollar. And that was absolutely inevitable because the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. The corporate takeover of environmental NGOs has transformed Earth Day from a movement to a shopping opportunity. Now instead of creating new ways to protect the environment, we instead have new ways to buy things that are about the environment, like the board games I mentioned before.
Now, Earth Day has been reduced to tokenistic events. Turn off your lights for an hour. Turn down your thermostat by one degree. Inflate your tires this Earth Day to save the planet. All of that is corporate greenwash. Al Gore’s 2006 movie An Inconvenient Truth ignited environmental passion across this country but because Gore so famously defends corporations in speeches and in his books, the practical action steps that he suggests at the end of the movie were merely tokenistic. You can’t save the planet by buying a Tesla when the person who owns Tesla launches a rocket that causes more greenhouse gas emissions in the two minutes before it blows up than you might generate in your entire lifetime. We cannot buy our way out of environmental catastrophe. The only way we can avoid environmental catastrophe is by totally dismantling and reassembling our society. Contemporary environmentalism has become so contaminated with the filth of corporate misappropriation that it seems impossible to now separate the two. Having read a report by Enron boasting their environmental credentials and the plethora of awards they have received from differing famous environmental groups and even by climate change summits, the environmental cause has to be declared utterly lost, consumed by the financial behemoths that rape the planet and devour the global poor. They boast sustainability and corporate responsibility while creating then trademarking genetically modified natural resources before manipulating the market so that only that particular modified strain can be purchased. For the last thirty years, environmentalism has become subsumed into corporate capitalism. It has become the very thing it once hated. And we let it happen because it helped us acquire more without guilt, it helped us plunder the planet with a clean conscience. New Yorkers now use more energy commuting in a week than all people living in the entire continent of Africa use in a year. So, Earth Day becomes an hour of turning off lights and then patting ourselves on the back for how green we are. It becomes an hour of buying new environmentally friendly gadgets and then disposing of the old ones in ways that pollute rivers and poor communities around the world. Earth Day, once a moment of activism, has become an annual cleansing of our conscience, an eco-Yom Kippur where we emerge guilt-free without changing the way we act. Where once Earth Day was about change, now it has become a way that the world’s worst polluters – and that includes all of us - can ensure that nothing changes. The environmental radicalism of Earth Day is dead, recycled into the abhorrent turning of a blind eye to global devastation wreaked by the most fortunate in society. Where once it lamented the state of the earth, now it affirms everything that despoiled it.
So, if Earth Day is to mean anything this year, I believe that we would have to use it as a springboard for a radical overhaul of our society and that starts with us. We would have to ask ourselves what a Temple that really, truly cares about the environment would look like. We would have to reduce our community’s carbon emissions dramatically, our water usage, and much more. And we would help our members do the same. We would fight against corporate environmentalism and would spread an ecological message instead – a message that affirms the reality of our interconnectedness with all life and our duty to save it. We would not seek to subdue the earth so that we could fill our homes, but we would instead work with the earth’s natural cycles to sustainably live in this region. We would not pray for the health of our planet, we would actively work for it. We would then inspire those around us. We would be held up as an example of sustainability, where at the moment we barely even mention that word. We would reclaim Earth Day as an opportunity to insist on new environmental legislation, and to promote sustainability projects locally and abroad. We would use it to commit to consuming so much less, by learning to be happy with what we already have. And, essentially, we would do it together as a community.
Maybe the key to saving the planet and to saving ourselves is by first saving Earth Day. This Shabbat and this week moving forward, on this 53rd Earth Day, let us be really honest and ask ourselves if we actually care enough about the planet to totally overhaul our community and our society. May God help us as we ask ourselves that difficult question, and as we truly face ourselves and our place in the world, and may God help us to find the strength to totally change ourselves, our community, and our society for good. And let us say, Amen.
