I enjoyed Joe Romm’s blast against the New York Times Magazine’s “Low-Carbon Catalogue”, although with no coherent purpose this series of articles, I thought, still had a gem or two.   But as the media hoses us down today in all things green, it probably makes sense to contemplate if there is any value at all in marking, noting or  celebrating Earth Day.

Like personal carbon-offsets, a consumer’s purchase of “green” products is doing nothing to halt the accumulation of green-house gasses in the atmosphere, and arguably, many consumers in this country and other developed nations, with their preference for such things as fresh, if organic, vegetables in the winter and bigger, if “greener” houses, are inadvertently adding to the problem with their well-meaning purchasing.   Michael Pollan, in his opening essay in the Times Magazine, “Why Bother,” spells out this dilemma of personal responsibility:

“Whatever we can do as individuals to change the way we lives at this suddenly very late date does seem utterly inadequate to the challenge.”  Pollan correctly nails the essential problem as cheap energy.    Abundant fossil fuels, which were derived from the sun’s energy and cooked over millennia, have been so aggressively harvested since the beginning of the last century that they are becoming depleted .  As a species, we’ve been like the trust -fund kid who comes into millions at the age of 21 and blasts it all in a weekend in Vegas.  And I do mean species: while the developing world has gobbled up most of the fossil fuels, the human need for heat and fire is endemic:  I’ve met women in Africa who risk their lives to leave a protected camp for firewood. 

This is also, of course, a universal crisis.  Perhaps that’s the most fundamental and overwhelming part of the story, as vast and crushing to contemplate as the inevitability of our individual deaths.  We can adopt some practices of environmental responsibility personally, and as Pollan suggests/hopes, this change in our individual behavior will “go viral” much as the community networks our company builds do, eventually.  But it’s not too likely, or at least, not even with the miracle of internet ubiquity can we expect that our modification of lifestyle will soon thwart the construction of new coal-fired plants in China.  Even totalitarian governments understand that food and fuel are the non-negotiable deliverables that any government must provide. 

Instead, if anything is to go viral starting today, I would suggest that it be to get really, really pissed.  If we as a species are ever to address before it is too late our climatic self-destruction, we are going to have to get very angry at the short-sightedness of everyone from the suburban housewife who drives an over-size vehicle that gets 5 miles to the gallon because she can, to political leaders who blithely predict that technology will solve our problems at some point in some vague way.  The only way for us to reduce significantly our continued over-consumption of fossil fuels is for them to become either actually or artificially (through taxation) so expensive that we are willing to assess risks, like women in a refugee camp, in a wholly different way.  It will have to become scary to continue in our current state and that fear will have to translate into global, political action – where leaders will be just as concerned with telling their people that they are robbing the earth of cheap energy as they are of increasing food prices.  So here’s something that you as an individual can do for a day: decide to become scary yourself.

For a day, even if for a day only because like most of you I don’t think continual anger is psychologically “sustainable,” get good and cranky when confronted with any reminder that this is Earth Day.  Expletives could escape your mouths.  Perhaps commit a mild act an act of vandalism or two.  Be civilly disobedient or not, but register your anger and not your complacency.  Be like Moses when the Israelites were worshipping their Baals after he brought them out of Egypt.  Because green happy-talk just ain’t cutting it.