Gar Alperovitz - Environmental Movement at a Crossroads
April 25, 2012 This Sunday marks the 42nd anniversary of Earth Day. I was privileged to be legislative director for Senator Gaylord Nelson, who had the vision in 1970 for Earth Day’s “national teach-in on the environment,” and who helped make that vision a reality. Over the past four decades, I have witnessed and cheered the growth and development of the modern environmental movement. Yet, even as the achievements of the movement are honored, we should also be honest: viewed with any serious attention to long and deep trends, the environment is in serious and ever-growing danger.
This is in no way to minimize the successes of the movement. There have been significant gains in connection with air quality, the incidence of lead, and water pollution, to name three issues that were the subjects of an explosion of public concern around the time of the original Earth Day. Between 1970 and 2010, concentrations of six principal air pollutants declined by almost 71 percent; and in just the first 20 years of the Clean Air Act, an estimated 200,000 premature deaths and 700,000 cases of chronic bronchitis were prevented. The percentage of children with elevated blood-lead levels dropped from 88 percent in the 1970s to just 4.4 percent in the mid-'90s. Similarly, lead air pollution decreased 98 percent by 2000. Prior to 1972, industrial waste and sewage had made approximately two-thirds of waterways unsafe for recreation and fishing use. Three decades later, in 2004, 53 percent of assessed river miles and 70 percent of bay and estuarine square miles were safe for recreation and fishing.
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