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The day after
Earth Day, I was hanging my laundry on the clothesline (or "solar
dryer" to you 21st-century types) and pondering the weekend
that had just passed. I remembered the ecology movement in
the ’70s, celebrating Earth Day at Freedom Park in Charlotte,
resplendent with my ecology flag handbag and tie-dyed t-shirt.
My brother and
I even had a neighborhood recycling business which we actually started
in 1969, the year before the first Earth Day. I wish I could
tell you that we had totally altruistic motives, but we were mainly
looking to supplement our meager allowance.
Through the
years, Earth Day has been mostly celebrated on college campuses
by "tree-hugging" types much like me and in elementary
school classrooms, because children are natural environmentalists.
Not so Earth
Day 2007. Largely because of Al Gore’s popular movie,
An Inconvenient Truth, Earth Day has become much more mainstream,
even trendy. Every Amazon.com visitor was greeted with ads
for Newman's Own organic goods for two weeks prior to the big day.
Other sites sported ads for Ford's Escape Hybrid SUV, which gets
a whopping 34 mpg (according to the official Ford website). The
newspapers were filled with coupons for organic this and 30% recycled
content that. Wal-Mart featured ads for compact florescent
lightbulbs in major weekly magazines. Home Depot had a 4-page
full-color pull-out that exhorted me to buy a $698 energy-efficient
clothes dryer (but why would I replace my more efficient "solar"
model?). All of which begged the question: Do we Americans
really believe we can consume our way out of the climate crisis
we’ve gotten ourselves into?
Not on your
life.
Don’t get
me wrong. I’m thrilled that folks are a little more interested
in where their food comes from and are more than a little concerned
about what kind of muck goes out of the tailpipe and into the air.
But while buying Organic Frosted Flakes instead of the other kind
might be grrrreat, it’s not going to turn back the clock on
greenhouse gases. Our global climate crisis needs leaders
who are willing to find solutions through industry and innovation,
not leaders who barely admit that a problem exists.
In the next
election we have an opportunity to elect a president who will take
action. All three of the Democratic presidential front-runners
have comprehensive energy and environmental strategies posted prominently
on their websites. Edwards and Obama have lengthy issue statements,
and Clinton has a video. Dennis Kucinich has an even more
hard-hitting statement on his website.
But among the
three current Republican frontrunners for president, only John McCain
has an actual issue statement on the environment on his website
- he likes our National Parks. Mitt Romney excerpts an
interview in which he says he thinks we use too much oil, and Giuliani
apparently doesn't think global warming is enough of an issue to
address at all.
My memory is
that my clothesline cost me about $25 ten years ago when I put it
up, and that included the sack of concrete to set the pole.
It hasn’t needed a lot of maintenance over the years, except
a wipe-down every now and then. I have had to buy a few new
clothespins, as they are apparently highly sought after as doggie
toys. The clothesline even made it through Hurricane Ivan,
when most of the rest of my front yard ended up down the river somewhere
in East Tennessee, so I guess we're together for the long haul.
But all the clotheslines in the world aren’t going to
save the planet...only the strategies of responsible government
will.
Marsha Walpole hangs her family's clothes on her solar dryer
in Sugar Grove. She is Volunteer Coordinator for the Watauga
County Democratic Party.
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