Whose Earth Day? - Part 1 

Adapted from an article by David Watson
which appeared in the Spring 1990 issue
of Fifth Estate magazine.

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Twenty years after the original Earth Day demonstrations in April 1970, the ecological crisis is far more grave, with major organs of the living ecosphere apparently taking a rapid slide downhill.

Now everyone is climbing on the bandwagon of “environmentalism.” Big oil and the politicians and the Utilities - even the Pentagon must be scheming up an announcement for an “Earth-friendly” war. Every company and promoter with something to sell is giving an Earth Day Spin to the sales pitch. Yet somehow the contamination and plunder are accelerating even as the noise about saving the planet is becoming loudest.

It’s not just radicals who are sounding the alarm about the biocrisis, but mainstream scientists. Holes in the ozone layer, global warming, destruction of habitat, forest death from acid and toxic rain, diminishing topsoil, nuclear waste - the list goes on and on. Everywhere, uncountable species and ecosystems - including most of those that make the world recognizable to us, and many more that we will never encounter before they vanish forever - are going down capital’s drain.

I say capital’s drain, for isn’t it investment, capital expansion, economic growth, and the drive for profit that are torching the forests and raking the seas? Listen to the words of Lowell Moholt, director of investor relations for Weyerhaeuser, the ten billion dollar logging company that is the biggest private possessor of forests (in Deathspeak: “timberland") in the world: “We are rational people ... We have to run our company to the best of our ability for shareholders ... You can’t ignore that a lot of our products are just commodities.” This is the rationality that is dragging the entire world to its doom, led along by powerful institutions administered by the experts of “practical next steps,” practitioners of what C. Wright Mills called “crackpot realism.”

“In this society,” Mills wrote in 1958, “between catastrophic event and everyday interests there is a vast moral gulf ... The atrocities of our time are done by men as ‘functions’ of a social machinery - men possessed by an abstracted view that hides from them the human beings [and, we would add, those other beings] who are their victims and, as well, their own humanity. They are inhuman acts because they are impersonal. They are not sadistic but merely businesslike; they are not aggressive but merely efficient; they are not emotional at all but technically clean-cut.”

Thus it should come as no surprise that every year, more than a ton of hazardous waste is produced for every man, woman and child in the United States. These are the production wastes, mind you, not the toxic products themselves, like the automobiles and electronic and plastic gizmos, the pesticides and chemical compounds that appear in the marketplace. And technicians work every day to find “new disposal methods” - constructing ziggurats of garbage and high tech incinerators - while publicists get paid to assure toxic victims that all is well with the world and that we are achieving “better living through chemistry.”

Economic growth - that is, the accumulation of capital - is the bottom line. In 1988, the year that Time magazine dubbed the Earth “Planet of the Year,” profits for basic extractive/exploitive industries increased across the board, with metals up 110 percent, petroleum refining up 63 percent, forest products up 45 percent, chemicals up 35 percent, electronics up 19 percent, pharmaceuticals up 17 percent, and motor vehicles up 12 percent. It’s no accident that the Earth (and our communities along with it) is being reduced to a cesspool - the entire world is being mined and the work machine of the Empire is riding the crest of the contamination from which it profits.

[to be continued]

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