Earth Day Calling
Who's going to Answer?
Earth Day is here, and it’s got me thinking. I’ve got so much on my mind in fact, that I’m going to stretch it out to provide articles all week long. Some of the articles will be available to my free subscribers and some will be exclusive to my paid members. Today’s article is FREE and it’s a call to action, to think about the world a little differently. How often do you consider the Earth in your everyday decisions? Hopefully, more than ever before, and hopefully often enough that it’s reframing those decisions, but no sweat if this isn’t the case. You have been setup to fail.
Before we explore those details, here are some photos of Earth’s beauty that I captured over the weekend for Earth day:
Big oil and gas corporations have invested millions of dollars over decades to make people believe that their individual actions are enough to move the needle of climate change. While personal decisions, and even collective choices made by communities, can affect the environment on a local scale, to a degree, industry contributes magnitudes more greenhouse gases to our atmosphere and other pollutants to our waters. Those pollutants end up affecting humans and ecosystems around them directly. The lobbyists that represent these industries have turned this back around to have you believe that consumer choices inform industry trends and therein, shift the onus back to you to make decisions that affect the Earth.
There is so much that pulls our attentions in every direction, that it is near impossible for people to have the presence of mind to be conscientious of how their every action may affect our one and only home planet, and how larger scale environmental changes may affect them directly. This is especially true when the same corporate entities that tell us to make informed choices obscure the true impact of their operations. Plus, at the end of the (long) day, with mounting economic pressure and other strains, how can individuals be expected to take the responsibility for their actions when our governments won’t take it upon themselves to lead the way?
So, from this perspective, you may think that what’s most important is that our governments make scientifically informed policy that can positively affect the way their constituents interact with the world around them. If that’s the case, then act now! Unfortunately, we know that other socio-economic and political motives get in the way of this. Even when politicians are shown scientific models, their policy is always informed by the desires of their constituents in stead. So, it’s up to us as citizens of Earth to show that we care about specific issues and engage our political representatives to act.
With so many to chose from, there has to be at least one environmental issue that hits home for you, with a movement behind it that you can lend your support. It can be as simple as signing a petition. Maybe you go a little further and send a letter to your representative, or it can be as involved as volunteering for the cause. Please, whatever you do, just don’t sit idly by while corporate lobbyists convince your politicians that more investment in extractive industries and other damaging practices, is the way forward, all in the name of appeasing big business for economic advancement.
Over the course of Earth Week I’m going to lay out some of these causes. The official cause of Earth Day this year is a campaign to reduce plastics by 60% by 2040, Planet vs. Plastics - 60 X 40. Another worthy cause is to support the bans on forever chemicals, found in all sorts of consumer goods, that are not only linked to cancer and liver disease, but also pregnancy complications and ecosystem collapse. These bans have recently been passed in Canada as well as in the U.S. and the E.U. but they are still flawed and need to be even more strict if they are to have a significant and lasting effect.
From there, the issues broaden. Perhaps you’re interested in reallocating jobs in Canada from oil and gas, mining and forestry, to housing, recycling, health care, renewables and carbon capture. Rather than that, maybe you take a land-based approach, prioritizing land stewardship initiatives that range from land-back, to land-based education.
No matter which approach you take, I hope you enjoy the read and feel compelled to act fast. In each of my subsequent Earth Week articles I’ll dive deeper into these topics outlined above, so if you haven’t yet, subscribe to learn more. Even more than that I hope you are able to get outside and enjoy the Earth with respect.
Leave it better than you found it.
André DeBattista