Whose Earth Day? - Part 2 

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

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If the original Earth Day was one of many manifestations in the 1960s of the desire to become a “Friction Against the Machine,” it also suffered from domesticated qualities that blunted its potential radicality from its inception. At the initial rally in Washington, DC, maverick journalist I.F. Stone noted that half of Nixon’s cabinet was on the speakers’ platform. Capitalists such as Henry Ford II and Lawrence Rockefeller were prominent and widely published Earth Day promoters, with Hank the Deuce promising to install “the cleanest coke ovens in the world” in his auto factories.

The ecological imbalances caused by industrial capitalism are now approaching dangerous and unprecedented thresholds; mass starvation is a permanent fixture of the world global economy, while in the industrialized world elites are achieving unparalleled and obscene consumption levels. If the years since the first Earth Day have demonstrated anything, it is the failure of simple environmentalism to halt the process of planet-wide destruction. Yet the Earth Day revival is predicated on the same failed strategy and the same reformism.

Most significant is the liberal assumption or at least the implication that ecological devastation is an aberration, a well-intentioned error (just as Vietnam was seen as a mistake in the 1960s) rather than the direct result of programmatic policies on the part of elites to expand exploitation, extraction and imperial power. Or it is seen as a feedback of the “good life” brought by modern industrialism, which can be corrected by a mix of technofix fine-tuning and personal piety.

Thus the official Earth Day 1990 “Green Pledge” urged its adherent “to the maximum extent possible do business with corporations that promote global environmental responsibility.” Of course, what corporation doesn’t promote environmental responsibility? That’s what public relations departments are for! Nowhere is the social system of consumerism, of corporate power, ever questioned. Nor is the possibility that the very structures and content of industrialized society are inherently anti-ecological ever mentioned. Instead, Earth Day recruits are reduced to eco-production, eco-work, eco-investing and eco-shopping in a world that functions essentially in the same manner as the present one.

Simple environmentalism takes for granted the working and the buying that keep capital reproducing itself at the expense of the planetary web of life. It fails to see what might become the revolutionary insight of a radical ecological perspective that challenges the corporate-industrial production system itself.

High energy/commodity consumption is fundamentally destructive not only to the natural world, but to human personhood as well. Industrialism promises a “higher” standard of living by undermining the possibilities of a deeper kind of life, one characterized by such values as autonomy and community; direct control by individuals and communities over tools and forms of subsistence; access to clean air and water; silence, green areas and wilderness.

Industrialism is a cultural, political, and evolutionary dead-end. An entirely new kind of politics, a far more profound response, is needed, something Rudolf Bahro, in his book Building the Green Movement, called “an anti-investment and a deconcentration strategy, an emergency brake against any further ‘progress’ in the fateful direction which the accumulation of capital, driven by the world market, is taking.”

Such a response would have to move rapidly beyond simple environmentalism. It would need to create a social movement that clearly recognizes the myriad connections between global capital, nation-state empires, industrial growth, the disabling impact of mass technics on human culture, and the social and ecological chaos which result; a social movement which begins by elaborating a profound critique of the global urban-industrial megamachine and which bases its practices on this outlook. Neither a reform environmentalism that leaves the capitalist economy in place, nor an eco-leftism that leaves industrial civilization intact by placing it under the direction of some spurious form of socialist commonwealth can be enough. We must challenge not only the social and economic forces of urban-industrial expansion presently fraying the very tissue of life, but their technological and cultural content as well.

[to be continued]

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