A New Day For Earthly Concerns : With 5 Billion Aboard, Time For The Next Revolution

Earth Day is at its best at the neighborhood level, with nature hikes and trash pickups--but it’s bigger than that. It brings forth resounding speeches by politicians, some of them sincere, but it’s bigger than that, too. There are Hollywood events, TV specials and ads telling us how various corporations love the planet, but it’s much bigger than that.

Every school in Thailand is planting a tree; every church in Costa Rica is giving an Earth sermon; there are concerts in the Soviet Union, a rain-forest roadshow in Japan and a beach cleanup in Tanzania--but I think, and hope, that Earth Day is bigger than all that.

If we’re wise and lucky, Earth Day 1990 can be one of those peoples’ demonstrations, like the ones in Berlin and Leipzig and Wenceslas Square, that launch a revolution. The revolutionary opportunity is not the turnover of one government for another, nor even the establishment of a new idea of government. It’s bigger than that. The potential revolution is equivalent to only two others in human history--the Agricultural and the Industrial revolutions.

About 8,000 years ago, when there were just 10 million people in the world, some hunter-gatherers started domesticating animals, cultivating plants and founding humanity’s first permanent settlements. They altered the face of the planet and the thoughts of humankind.

For the first time it made sense to own land. People who stayed in one place could accumulate things. The ideas of wealth, inheritance, trade, money and power were born. Some people lived on excess food produced by others and became full-time potters, toolmakers, musicians, scribes, priests, soldiers or kings. Thus arose, for better or worse, the division of labor, experts, armies and bureaucracies.

As its inheritors, we think of that revolution as a great step forward. At the time it was a mixed blessing. Agriculture was not a better way of life, but a necessary one, because of increasing population and decreasing game. Settled farmers got more food from an acre of land, but the food was of lower quality and less variety and it required a lot more work. Farmers became vulnerable, as nomads never were, to weather, disease, pests, invasion and oppression from their own emerging ruling class. Since they no longer moved away from their wastes, they experienced humankind’s first environmental problems.

The Industrial Revolution was also a brilliant adaptation to the problem of populations growing beyond their technology and resource base. Agriculture was a response to wildlife scarcity; industry to land and energy scarcity. Around 1750, when there were 800 million people in the world, the Industrial Revolution began with science and coal and led quickly to steam engines and capitalism (and later to capitalism’s dissenting offshoot, communism).

Again, everything changed. There were roads and railroads, factories and smoke. The cities swelled. Again, the change was a mixed blessing. Human labor became harder and more demeaning. The environment turned unspeakably filthy. The standard of living for most workers was far below that of a yeoman farmer. But work in a factory was better than starving on the crowded land.

It’s hard for us to appreciate how profoundly the Industrial Revolution changed human thought, because we still think its thoughts. Historian Donald Worster described the thought-revolution:

“The capitalists . . . promised that, through the technological domination of the Earth, they could deliver a more fair, rational, efficient and productive life for everyone . . . . That meant teaching everyone to treat the Earth, as well as each other, with a frank, energetic, self-assertiveness . . . . People must . . . think constantly in terms of making money. They must regard everything around them--the land, its natural resources, their own labor--as potential commodities that might fetch a profit in the market. They must demand the right to produce, buy and sell those commodities without outside regulation or interference . . . . As wants multipled, as markets grew more and more far-flung, the bond between humans and the rest of nature was reduced to the barest instrumentalism.”

That bare instrumentalism engendered incredible material success and, in a world that now holds more than 5 billion people, severe environmental degradation. It created the necessity for the next revolution, the one we celebrate with Earth Day.

Few of us picking up trash and carrying Earth banners think we’re participating in a thoroughgoing revolution in human culture. But some of us suspect that’s the direction our concern will take us. We know it is impossible to go on finding, moving and wasting oil, leveling forests, paving land, dumping poisons and multiplying our numbers. A new way of life, a new set of thoughts must be found.

Earth Day coordinator Denis Hayes clearly hopes to launch a thought-revolution: “I would really like to create a situation where people become more introspective about themselves and think more carefully about purpose and meaning in life. There is a sort of mindless, heedless rush--an enormously acquisitive preoccupation with more and more and more. I hope people will begin to question our purpose and come up with more satisfying answers.”

A more satisfying answer is already here in the idea of sustainability-- a word that has just surfaced in the discourse of the industrial world. It means using the planet’s resources in a way that permits future generations to have some, too.

It’s as impossible for us to describe a fully sustainable world as it would have been for the farmers of BC 6000 to foresee present-day Iowa or the English coal miners of 750 to imagine a Toyota assembly line. We only know that a sustainable world would be highly efficient in its energy use. It would respect, reuse and recycle materials. It would have a stable population. Human needs for community, identity and self-respect would be met directly, rather than with expensive material substitutes. The thoughts in people’s heads would be about harmony with nature, rather than conquest.

Like the other great revolutions, an environmental revolution will require sacrifices and lead to enormous gains. It too will change the face of the land and human institutions, hierarchies, self-definitions, cultures. It will take centuries.

If it happens. There is no guarantee, of course. There were hunting-gathering tribes who spurned the idea of agriculture and either died out or were engulfed by powerful settled neighbors. There are agrarian societies that still resist the industrial mind-set. An environmental revolution can’t be piecemeal, however, because the ecological problems it must solve are global. Humankind has to pull off this revolution as a whole--or sink as a whole into the ecological and economic impoverishment of a culture that has failed to adapt to historical necessity.

William D. Ruckelshaus, former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, recently wrote about the enormous nature of the challenge:

“Can we move nations and people in the direction of sustainability? Such a move would be a modification of society comparable in scale to only two other changes: the Agricultural Revolution of the late Neolithic and the Industrial Revolution of the past two centuries.

“Those revolutions were gradual, spontaneous and largely unconscious. This one will have to be a fully conscious operation, guided by the best foresight that science can provide . . . . If we actually do it, the undertaking will be absolutely unique in humanity’s stay on the Earth.”