by woodleywonderworks
Let’s Dump “Earth Day”:
[Via Climate Progress]
Affection for our planet is misdirected and unrequited. We need to focus on saving ourselves.
Last year, I wrote a piece for Salon, “Let’s dump ‘Earth’ Day.” It was supposed to be mostly humorous. Or mostly serious. Anyway, the subject of renaming Earth Day has been on my mind for a year now – and all the more so today because the NYT magazine just published an interview with our Nobel-prize winning Energy Secretary, Steven Chu, in which he says:
I would say that from here on in, every day has to be Earth Day.
Well, duh! Heck, we have a whole day just for the trees – and we haven’t finished them off … yet. So if every day is Earth Day, than April 22 definitely needs a new name. So I’m updating the column, with yet another idea at the end, at least for climate science advocates:
[More]
As has been stated many times, the Earth will do just fine, no matter what we do, as will life on Earth. This is all about trying to maintain a climate on Earth that is close to the one we have evolved, both physically and socially, to thrive in.
We created the INdustrial Revolution in part to solve the problem of exponential population growth vs. arithmetical agricultural increase. Now we are having to deal with the fallout of Industrial Age approaches, while again dealing with the exponential vs. arithmetical.
Again, we do have the tools to fix this. Will we have the strength and foresight? I believe so but I would feel a whole lot better if the climate changes we are seeing were significantly less than predicted by the models. At the moment, the models have been underestimating the changes seen in the climate.
Technorati Tags: Environment, Sustainability
