Environment: Earth Day: Will the Ballyhoo Go Bust?

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As the marketing monster called Earth Day lumbers toward April 22, hapless journalists in its path are desperately dodging a barrage of press kits, news ( releases and alerts. Thousands of Earth Day happenings, from ladybug releases and the building of garbage monuments to corporate "We love the environment too" advertising campaigns, have become an undifferentiated blur as everyone tries to wave the green flag at once. Nobody is against Earth Day, but the very breadth of this looming mega-event raises the question: What's the point?

Certainly demonstrations and mass events have an honored role in history. Sheer, chanting force of numbers has served notice to dictators from Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines to Nicolae Ceausescu in Romania that their time was up. Back in 1970, activists capitalized on an outpouring of environmental sentiment during the first Earth Day to unseat seven of a targeted "dirty dozen" politicians and spur the passage of clean-air-and-water legislation. Today Eastern Europe, perhaps the grimiest industrial region on earth, could use Earth Day to focus newly aroused democratic forces on their poisoned air and land. So could much of the Third World, where billions of people grievously stretch the capacity of forests and other resources.

In the U.S., though, Earth Day 1990 comes at a time when environment is a motherhood issue. Since polls show that Americans want environmental protection regardless of costs, the problem is not so much awakening the nation to ecological threats as it is getting people to face the difficult choices entailed in dealing with those threats. For a number of reasons, Earth Day might actually thwart that end.

Mass events are crude instruments, useful for delivering slogans and chants but not well suited to deciding subtle issues that confront environmental converts who are trying to translate their concerns into practice. Whether people should buy biodegradable or recyclable plastics or switch from disposable to cloth diapers will not be settled on April 22.

Earth Day fits into a troubling American pattern of responding to crises with rhetoric and theater. So far, it has been easy to be an environmentalist: one simply has to claim to be one. Just as middle-class voters routinely condemn "welfare" while opposing cuts in the social programs that constitute such spending, a good portion of the voters who claim they would pay for environmental improvements balk when the bill is presented. If consumers truly insisted on cleaner air in their individual buying and voting decisions, Detroit and Japan would vie to deliver less polluting cars, and it would not take ten years of struggle to amend the Clean Air Act.

Instead of making hard choices, it is easier to blow off steam. April 22 will offer people an opportunity to purge accumulated anxiety over wounds to earth's life-support systems. Worn out by weeks of buildup and an accompanying media blitz, many people will return to business as usual on Monday, hoping not to hear the E word again for weeks. It is possible that the environment might be better served if consumers had no such outlet, and were forced to do some quiet soul searching about how their individual choices contribute to the world's environmental problems.