Did you know that Saturday April 22 is Earth Day? No? Well now that you do know, what would you like to do about it?
Before you decide, you may first want to know who says it’s Earth Day. It’s a reasonable question, to which the answer is the Earth Day Network.
And as the Earth Day Network grew out of the very first Earth Day back in 1970 and has organised every one since, it’s probably right.
That first Earth Day was an attempt by American environmentalists to draw attention to climate change and its problems for planet Earth and to mobilise international support to do something about it.
Sinister trend
You could be forgiven for thinking the relentlessly sinister trend of the symptoms of climate change, not to mention the recent decision by the President of the United States to reduce funding for his Environment Protection Agency by a third, suggests Earth Day is a drop in the warming ocean.
And yet, consider its potential reach. It already claims to be “the world’s largest recruiter to the environment movement”, working with 50,000 partners in 196 countries, “to build environmental democracy”.
Environmental democracy: now there’s a phrase you won’t hear in a State of the Nation address by the President of the United States, or for that matter, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, the reason being that governments like theirs are terrified of the very idea.
Lovingly nurtured policies like the HS2 high speed railway would be dead in the water, for example. And you could forget fracking.
As it is, environmental democracy is doomed to further and further backsliding once the reins of European legislation are cut.
But Earth Day encourages you and me to carry out what it calls (being American and with only a tangential grasp of the English language) Acts of Green.
I know what they mean of course, I just wish they’d call it something else.
What they have in mind is planting trees, reducing your ecological footprint, making cities and schools greener, helping endangered species and joining the Earth Day March for Science (although that is in Washington, so your ecological footprint would not be well served by the process of getting there and back).
It is a wonderful idea. By their own definition of the phrase, people and organisations signed up to the Earth Day cause have effected more than two billion Acts of Green in the last 47 years. The target is three billion by the time they reach their 50th anniversary in 2020.
Here is the acceptable face of globalisation. Environmental democracy should be on the lips of the world, not Pepsi.
The trouble with the Earth Day concept is that you and I cannot see it as it makes a difference. And it’s one day a year and Earth requires rather more of us than that. But I have an idea.
Earth Day should happen every week. It should take the place of Monday in the calendar, so that the new order of things will be Saturday, Sunday, Earthday, Tuesday, etc and environmental democracy will have its say every week of every year.
Last month, the World Meteorological Organisation of the United Nations produced its report for 2016.
It recorded unprecedented heat across the globe, exceptionally low ice at both poles, rising sea levels, Arctic ice “tracking at record low conditions since October, persisting for six consecutive months” and in the southern hemisphere, the least amount of global sea ice ever recorded.
The WMO also warned that with carbon dioxide in the atmosphere consistently breaking new records, the influence of human activities on the climate system has become more and more evident.
Cooperation
It added that “as weather, climate and the water cycle know no national boundaries, international cooperation on a global scale is essential…”
So that’s the World Meteorological Organisation of the United Nations on board the Earth Day philosophy.
But if “environmental democracy” means anything at all, it surely means empowering the individual.
So the architects of the philosophy must find a way to mobilise the uncommitted masses, must find ways to demonstrate how far the actions of the individual can serve the cause of their Mother Earth and embarrass governments from the mighty to the mousey into a new era of green politics.
All the governments of the world and all the conservation charities of the world and the whole green movement from one side of the world to the other are overwhelmingly outnumbered by the sheer global mass of the unaffiliated, the uncommitted and the unconvinced.
Convince them, or even convince one in 10 of them and a momentum of Acts of Green might just begin to change the world for the better, for the greener.
A billion of us have got three years to act.