Mother Earth loves it when we reduce, reuse, and recycle!
Please spend some time today thinking about what you can do to help the earth, preferably by buying and using less! Remember, reduce and reuse come before recycle.
I took the photo in this post.
Today is Earth Day.
According to http://www.earthday.org/earth-day-history-movement,
[e]ach year, Earth Day — April 22 — marks the anniversary of what many consider the birth of the modern environmental movement in 1970.
The idea came to Earth Day founder Gaylord Nelson, then a U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, after witnessing the ravages of the 1969 massive oil spill in Santa Barbara, California. Inspired by the student anti-war movement, he realized that if he could infuse that energy with an emerging public consciousness about air and water pollution, it would force environmental protection onto the national political agenda. Senator Nelson announced the idea for a “national teach-in on the environment” to the national media; persuaded Pete McCloskey, a conservation-minded Republican Congressman, to serve as his co-chair; and recruited Denis Hayes as national coordinator. Hayes built a national staff of 85 to promote events across the land.
As a result, on the 22nd of April, 20 million Americans took to the streets, parks, and auditoriums to demonstrate for a healthy, sustainable environment in massive coast-to-coast rallies. Thousands of colleges and universities organized protests against the deterioration of the environment. Groups that had been fighting against oil spills, polluting factories and power plants, raw sewage, toxic dumps, pesticides, freeways, the loss of wilderness, and the extinction of wildlife suddenly realized they shared common values.
Earth Day 1970 achieved a rare political alignment, enlisting support from Republicans and Democrats, rich and poor, city slickers and farmers, tycoons and labor leaders. The first Earth Day led to the creation of the United States Environmental Protection Agency and the passage of the Clean Air, Clean Water, and Endangered Species Acts. “It was a gamble,” Gaylord recalled, “but it worked.”
As 1990 approached, a group of environmental leaders asked Denis Hayes to organize another big campaign. This time, Earth Day went global, mobilizing 200 million people in 141 countries and lifting environmental issues onto the world stage. Earth Day 1990 gave a huge boost to recycling efforts worldwide and helped pave the way for the 1992 United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. It also prompted President Bill Clinton to award Senator Nelson the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1995) — the highest honor given to civilians in the United States — for his role as Earth Day founder.
I hope Earth Day actually helps the earth. I’m afraid it’s just a day to make people feel better about their shopping habits when in reality their other 364 days of the year are anti-earth days. I’m not saying I’m an environmental angel. I drive a gas guzzling vehicle, I use electricity, and I love me a long hot shower. However, I’m also not walking around feeling like it’s ok to empty eight 8 oz plastic water bottles a day because I recycle them.
And on a side note rant, why does recycling get all the publicity when reduce and resuse come first? Hey, I actually know the answer to my own question. If consumers reduce and reuse first, big business isn’t going to make as much money off of us. Recycling is an afterthought. Corporations do NOT want us to buy less, so we’re made to feel a bit better about what we do buy when we’re told the empty container can be recycled.
Do we know how much of what can be recycled actually is? I tried to find a statistic to share, but couldn’t find much information on this topic. According to https://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=47701,
[d]epending on the [public recycling] bin and on the city’s recycling system, between 60 and 80 percent of recycling is actually recycled. Those numbers have probably improved over the past few years…
The article goes on to compare single stream and multi-stream recycling programs in New York City and Phoenix at the turn of the 21st century. Of course, this article gives information only about what people put into public recycling bins, not what percentage of everything that can be recycled actually is.
Here’s my #1 tip for saving the earth: Stop buying all that brand new crap you don’t even need.
Image courtesy of https://www.pexels.com/photo/sky-earth-galaxy-universe-2422/.
Ok, so this rant isn’t actually about Earth Day. Rather, it’s a rant about an image I found when I was looking for images to go with my Earth Day post. Honestly, I had no plan or desire to write a rant. I just wanted to say hey everybody, it’s Earth Day, think about what you can do to help the environment, here’s a little history of Earth Day, thanks for reading.
But when I scrolled through the images that popped up when I did a Google search on Earth Day, I saw this:
Hey everybody! Let’s use an image of a basically naked woman to save the earth! (Caption mine)
Really? It’s the 21st century, and that’s the image some folks are using to celebrate Earth Day? First of all, who is the intended audience of this image? Probably not a classroom full of 3rd graders. (However, certain members of a middle school environmental club might be very excited by this picture.) Is this an image somebody thought would get men interested in Earth Day? Even if this illustration is aimed at men/teenage boys/lesbins/fairy fans of any gender, will it actually influence anyone? I can’t imagine someone saying, I used to not give a fuck about the earth, but then I saw a picture of a naked chick covered in flowers, and now I CARE!
Is the woman in the picture supposed to be Mother Earth? I can halfway accept the image as Earth Day propaganda if someone can make a case that the woman is Mother Earth. But wouldn’t Mother Earth be fatter? Super models and actresses aside, most mothers do not have bellies that flat or breast that perky and full. Perhaps I’m mistaken and this is not Mother Earth, but Maiden Earth. (But really, have you ever once heard one single person refer to “Maiden Earth”?) Give me a picture of a chubby gal with stretchmarks (and extra points for body hair) representing Mother Earth on Earth Day, and I’ll get behind that.
I think this is yet another example of using a socially acceptable, beyond natural (and I’m not talking about the pointy ears and the flowers for hair), “perfect,” skinny, young woman’s body to sell something. I don’t think this is an acceptable way to sell anything, but especially not Earth Day.
This gal is more what I have in mind when I think of Mother Earth.
(Both images from http://www.magickalgraphics.com/earthday2.htm, where they “offer beautiful free Earth Day graphics, animations, comments, glitter, pictures, Images and codes.”)