Whose Earth Day? - Part 3 (conclusion) 

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

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The two currents that brought about the first Earth Day are in motion once more. On the one hand, there is a growing, genuine desire to stop the runaway colossus from sending all of human society and several hundred million years of evolutionary development hurtling into the abyss. This movement must link the large questions of militarism, social oppression, ecological destruction, megatechnics, and alienation into a vibrant radical response.

But the powers of manipulation continue to function. The chemical manufacturers and the “forest products” magnates will plant some trees. The president called for the planting of a billion trees. But none of the rulers or their allies mention the possibility of refraining from cutting a billion trees. These forces, these institutions, are concealing their grisly, daily business and using Earth Day as a multi-media extravaganza, a spectacle that converts a natural love of what is alive into a tepid civic ritual.

What would an authentic Earth Day look like? Wouldn’t it look like a moratorium on production, a reduction of mechanical movement, and with it of the industrial noise that drowns out the wind? ... When all of the former cogs of the megamachine take a long look at the world, perhaps for the first time, and begin the process of becoming living subjects once more? Wouldn’t they engage one another in a face-to-face discourse, taking stock of hands and feet and head and heart as the real material bases for a new society? Wouldn’t they begin to retrace their steps, back away from the edge of the precipice, turning things off ... and beginning to rely on their communities and their own human powers to meet their few trifling needs so as to get on with the real adventure of living, of singing, of dreaming?

And that first night - wouldn’t the sky be dark and beauteous and studded with stars for the first time in memory? Wouldn’t a different language, spangled with eternity, find its way into daily discourse as the conditioning of industrialism and manufactured values began to be shed? Couldn’t it be, rather than one more supervised saturnalia for the inmates, a Festival of the Oppressed capable of bursting its limits and calling a new culture into being?

Let us be clear to those who propose only negotiated half-measures and “practical politics” for fear that anything more will be too radical, too “utopian.” Collaboration with the wide array of the forces of extermination now facing us will bring only extermination, whether it be in a general conflagration or in small graduated doses.

Every incremental reform is worthwhile, no doubt, but it will take a bold, defiant, thoroughly visionary outlook - and a far-reaching transformational politics - to lead us to those measures necessary to realize our aspirations for a new society and a Green world.

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