It's Earth Day, though you could be forgiven if you missed it. The
annual event doesn't quite have the same energy as it once did —
especially not compared with the first Earth Day 43 years ago. That
nationwide event, initially inspired by the work of Wisconsin Senator
Gaylord Nelson, was celebrated by more than 20 million people in more
than 12,000 events around the country. As Nicholas Lemann pointed out
in a recent piece in the New Yorker , Congress took the day off, and
two- thirds of its members — Democrat and Republican alike — spoke at
Earth Day events. The Today show devoted 10 hours of airtime to Earth
Day. And that mobilization — which was decentralized, mostly achieved
through a tiny national office — paved the way for real government
action: the Clean Air Act of 1970, the Clean Water Act of 1972, the
Endangered Species Act of 1973 and the creation of the Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA). This year's Earth Day was a little less
memorable, and a whole lot less bipartisan. (I can't imagine a
Republican member of Congress giving a speech during Earth Day now
unless they were calling for the dismantling of the EPA.) And it comes
during a moment of crisis for the environmental movement as it
attempts to grapple, so far unsuccessfully, with the existential
threat of climate change. Back to Lemann: Then, 40 years after Earth
Day, in the summer of 2010, the environmental movement suffered a
humiliating defeat as unexpected as the success of Earth Day had been.
The Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, announced that he would not
bring to a vote a bill meant to address the greatest environmental
problem of our time — global warming. The movement had poured years of
effort into the bill, which involved a complicated system for limiting
carbon emissions. Now it was dead, and there has been no significant
environmental legislation since. Indeed, one could argue that there
has been no major environmental legislation since 1990, when President
George H.W. Bush signed a bill aimed at reducing acid rain. Today's
environmental movement is vastly bigger, richer and better connected
than it was in 1970. It's also vastly less successful. What went
wrong? Forty-three years after the first Earth Day, are Lemann and
other critics of the modern environmental movement right? Have greens
lost their way — and if so, why?There's no getting around the fact
that environmentalists have failed to push through a legislative
solution to climate change . Cap and trade, even under a Democratic
Congress and President, failed in 2010. The international climate
regime under the U.N. seems to get closer to collapse every year, and
even in much greener Europe , carbon markets simply aren't working .
And environmentalism as a concept doesn't seem to resonate with
Americans as it once did. A new YouGov/HuffPost poll found that
Americans are less concerned about the environment now than they were
on the first Earth Day. While isolated issues like fracking and the
Keystone pipeline resonate strongly with some Americans, especially
those who are directly affected — witness the mobbed hearin g on the
proposed Keystone XL pipeline last week and the stream of antifracking
protests — there's nothing close to the sheer number of Americans who
were motivated to take part in the first Earth Day. What's changed?
You can blame the specific failure of cap-and-trade legislation in
part on the mechanics of the U.S. Senate — the bill passed the House,
barely — where rural conservative states get outsize representation
and where legislation now needs to get 60 votes to pass. (Though of
course health care reform still managed to pass despite those same
obstacles.) The growing political polarization that has made
environmentalism almost solely a Democratic cause can't be blamed only
on greens. But I think the biggest reason is that environmentalism has
been a victim of its own success. The environment — everyone's
environment — really was a mess in 1970. Urban rivers were on fire,
smog choked the Los Angeles basin, toxic waste affected towns like
Love Canal and shorelines were marred by industrial runoff. See this
Slate roundup of once polluted or threatened sites in America that
have been saved by the environmental movement over the past four
decades. Things used to be very, very bad.
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