HAPPY EARTH DAY TO YOU
James Bowman on the
guilt that equates humans and slugs
Washington THE man in front of me at the big Earth Day environmentalist bash on the Mall last Sunday toted a placard which read:
Appeal for the Birmingham Six No Government Censorship Repeal Clause 28 End Preventive Detention Autonomy in Northern Ireland Stop the Poll Tax
Most of the more than 120,000 other people who were there must have puzzled over that message, but it turned out that the celebrities who graced the rostrum on the west steps of the Capitol saw, on the front of the sign, 'Hold Polluters Fully Liable — Libertarian Party'. When I asked him about his ambiguous message, the mustachioed Libertarian shrugged and told me that the sign had been recycled, pre- sumably after having been shipped across the Atlantic, from a previous demonstra- tion. Very much in the spirit of the day.
He didn't seem to notice the difference in quality between this and demonstrations arising from ethnic or economic grie- vances, but the contrast with the recent anti-poll-tax riots in Trafalgar Square could not have been greater. Here, the motivating force was guilt, and the result was an occasion of bizarre contrasts: apocalyptic rhetoric washed over this chub- by, white, middle-class, middle-aged crowd like the waves of a polluted sea over beached seals. To a crowd, at least a third of which wore T-shirts announcing music- al, educational or sports-shoe allegiances, speakers were congratulatory about their refusal to be moulded by advertisers. One firebrand tried to get them to repeat after him: 'Figure out what you care about and live a life that shows it!' Not surprisingly, nobody repeated it.
For it would be hard to imagine a crowd which had more obviously done just that already. What they cared about was feeling good about themselves, and they were living a life that showed it. They had made themselves comfortable on the grass where they picnicked and sunbathed and listened to the music and the speeches indifferently, and they only got excited when folks in front stood up and blocked their view of stars which had come out for the day against a bright blue sky, especially Tom Cruise, Richard Gere, Olivia Newton John and John Denver.
'It's a Kurtweiller.' `You folks look great!' said one speaker, to enthusiastic applause. 'Because of peo- ple like you,' Cruise told them, 'we will have dolphin-safe tuna!' The man whose placard read 'Animal Rights is Earth Rights' and those who wore T-shirts aver- ring that they didn't eat their friends were more restrained in their applause. Why was it only the mammals of the sea that were, as another speaker told us, 'our brothers and our sisters'? Why is a rat, or some poky, medium-sized, inarticulate and non-endangered whale, more lovable than a tuna?
In fact a lot of the more shadowy figures behind Earth Day 1990 are people who believe — as does John Davis of the `ecoterrorise group Earth First! — that `human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs'. What he means is that they actually have less value, since Earth Firsters, who might object to killing slugs, don't mind killing people if it will save trees. One of their acts of `eco-sabotage' consists of driving spikes into trees before they can be cut for timber. When the logger's power-saw hits the spike, the consequences can be fatal, but not for the tree. Even the honorary co-chairman and the man who, inspired by anti-Vietnam war 'teach-ins' of the 1960s, organised the first Earth Day in 1970, Senator Gaylord Nelson (now, happily, no longer a sena- tor), thinks that Earth First! 'makes a significant contribution to the educational process'. Absolutist rhetoric was muted for the day, but once in a while it showed a glimpse of its fangs — as when Jay Hair of the National Wildlife Fund said that 'con- sensus and compromise are killing our world'.
He was alluding to co-operation between the Bush administration and the Senate Democratic leadership which resulted in the passage earlier this month of a Clean Air Bill. This will cost American industry something in excess of $21 billion to comply with and will yield at best marginal improvements in the already improving quality of the air, but it was called by another speaker, Representative John Conyers of Michigan, 'a disaster' — not for the reason that it was a disaster but because it does not go far enough. Like that of Janet Hathaway, of the Natural Resources Defence Council, who believes that pesticides should be banned even when their benefits outweigh their risks, Conyers's strain of environmentalism is one with which any responsible govern- ment would be ill-advised to treat. The universal condemnation at Earth Day of the Bush administration's record on the environment ought to be a lesson to moderate politicians who think that they can steal the Left's clothes on the issue.
Everyone who forgathered on the Mall on Sunday was asked to fill in a card addressed to his congressperson, asking it to vote for a more expensive Clean Air Act and other environmentalist measures. Happily, however, these people were not the stuff of which Earth First! revolutionar- ies are made. After having signed the cards and congratulated themselves for attend- ing, after finishing their picnics, tossing the frisbee around and then putting their trash into three separate bins, most of them will have gone home to vote for jobs and economic growth, just as they always have done. And when the bills for environmen- talist absolutism begin to come in they will perhaps look with a slightly more jaun- diced eye at their children's school pro- jects, which will no doubt continue to encourage sentimentalising about 'nature'.
Meanwhile, we shall all have to put up with a certain amount of sick-making smugness from that never-never land of American sentimentality, Hollywood. On the evening of Earth Day, ABC broadcast a two-hour special on which a galaxy of stars, from ET and Tweetie Pie to Bette Midler, who played Mother Nature on a life-support system attended by a brace of television doctors, paraded their environ- mentalist credentials. Sometimes a view of man as the moral equivalent of a slug has its attractions.
Previous page
