Earth Day has up and passed.

Sadly the most interesting blog piece that I found on the day was from EcoGeek tracking the history of the Google Logo for the past few Earth Days. Why Sadly?

Well, because no one seemed to raise too much concern or contentiousness for the day and that was more than mildly depressing. Talking to my roommate I got to thinking that the environmental scene is starting to crumble in the same way that the feminist scene has crumbled in the past…

I hate to constantly bring this post up, I do it quite often, but it just contains all of my thoughts that pertain to a wide range of subjects - in the particular post it is about the lack of inclusiveness within feminism. But really, this can apply to environmentalism (or almost any movement, really…) as well.

While talking a friend of mine, we started criticizing people who do one simple little thing for the environment, like buying recycled paper instead of regular paper, and then they think they’ve done “their part”. We’ll mock this person for having a false identification of being an “environmentalist” to our particular definition. And to flip the circumstances, many other environmentalists who I may consider “extreme” would criticize me for wearing American Eagle and Garage and showering every day. This is just as problematic as the schisms within the feminist circles.

But the difference here is that there are significant commonalities between all environmentalists. With feminism you’re dealing with literally millions of different mind sets towards what it means to be a woman - different class structures and races all having ONE commonality, the want to be at least an equal to man. With environmentalists, although they still come from different classes and races there is the commonality of some degree of simplicity, a want of policy changes, concern for resources… etc. There are multiple niches for people to get into as an environmentalist - so you’d think there would be larger groups of people fighting particular areas.

The sort of segregation that seemed to happen between classes and races in feminism isn’t as apparent in environmentalism. Instead we see the people fighting against climate change, or perhaps buying recycled paper, others devoting their time and energy to the development of solar panels and there are those that find it’s enough to simply standing on a street corner screaming at SUVs.

What there has never been is a clear day, group, effort…whatever at attempting to bring all of the environmental movements together to put people to action where it actually matters, and that would be in policy. My “niche” definitely isn’t political intervention, but I strongly believe that that is where the change is going to be made. From my last post on earth day you can see that 35 years ago 20 million people participated in Earth Day… I couldn’t find a number for this year - and it was very easy to see why… it was just a day. Instead of it being “just a day” it really should have been … a day when we all put our niches aside and step up and say to someone running in the next presidential election “You will have 100% of our votes if you make your environmental policy this: … ”

… Why the hell not?

For one day just recognize that all environmentalists are essentially fighting the same fight and until we’re willing to put our “holier than thou” selves aside for being “more environmental” than the person beside us we’re not going to be able to make the sort of impact that our number actually could. The commonality among environmentalists is that there needs to be some action, and there needs to be action NOW.

Environmentalism has come so close to extinction time and time again and it is finally surfacing all over the political table - so now is the time to step it up and actually get something done. I’m still trying to figure out why someone can’t just pull Obama aside… and be like “listen, yo… you will have every environmentalists vote if you do this, this and this” …and then make it sort of a … pact… amongst environmentalists that they will ALL vote for Obama if he promises to do that, that and that … (…And hopefully that particular candidate would do… that, that and that…) You’d have two years to simply get the message out all across America that this would be the first step at implementing extremely vital environmental goals…

I’d be will to bet that nearly all environmentalists would go for it. The environment is our future, and it is quickly becoming the most important element in political debates - so I don’t see why the environmentalists who are supposed to be leading this movement can’t devote that one vote to the cause. Maybe you have to be American to understand. Now is the time for you to school me in why this wouldn’t work…

(cross posted at appletree, yo.)