Earth Day + 40

I was the Earth Day coordinator at my junior high school in Wayne, Pennsylvania, 40 years ago. I remember running off flyers on the school’s mimeograph machine and can still recall that sweet (undoubtedly toxic) aroma of the chemicals those machines used. I recall, too, the huge celebration in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park (I believe the largest Earth Day celebration anywhere that year). Pioneering landscape architect Ian McHarg, of the University of Pennsylvania, chaired the event.

One of my distinct memories is of a speaker asking participants to pledge never to buy a new internal-combustion-engine car. We knew about the air pollution and resource extraction impacts of oil (though not yet global warming), and automobiles were correctly recognized as one of the major culprits. I didn’t join that pledge—suspecting, rightly, that I would indeed buy a new car somewhere along the line. But all of us cheering the speakers from the broad expanse of lawn at Fairmount Park that day knew that reducing our addiction to oil was important.

Unfortunately, our enthusiasm didn’t get us very far.

By the time Earth Day came along in 1970, the world had consumed roughly 240 billion barrels of oil since the dawn of the petroleum age (when oil was discovered in 1859 in Titusville, Pennsylvania). That cumulative total consumption is now up another 860 billion barrels—to 1.1 trillion barrels. That’s right, of all of the oil consumed in the world since the dawn of the petroleum age, an astonishing 78% of it has been consumed since Earth Day in 1970—that day when environmental awareness reached the mainstream! (Early data from “The Oil Age: World Oil Production 1859–2050”; later data from the

BP Statistical Review of World Energy, June 2009.)

Three years after the first Earth Day, in 1973, and again at the end of the 1970s, the world was hit with the “energy crisis”—another incentive to conserve—but still our petroleum consumption climbed. And in the process we’ve released all of that stored carbon—carbon that took hundreds of millions of years to accumulate—into the atmosphere, contributing to global climate change.

We can’t go another 40 years without dramatic reductions in oil consumption. Indeed, most experts say we can’t go even another 20 years on our present course. We’re long past the time for serious action on our addiction to fossil fuels. While I didn’t pledge to never buy a new car 40 years ago, I did make a personal commitment to doing what I could to make a difference. One of the ways I’ve tried to do that for nearly half of the years since the first Earth Day has been through

Environmental Building News. Clearly, there’s still a lot left to accomplish, and I look forward to continuing our efforts to effect change through the pages of

EBN.

– Alex Wilson