Greenpeace

Earth Day. You’d think groups like Greenpeace would love a holiday-status occasion that's centered around Nature and Ecology. Truth is, as it relates to the greater environmental movement, Earth Day is something of a double-edged sword.

On the one hand, it’s great to have a day where everyone celebrates the earth and thinks about the environment. In classrooms across the country, kids are learning about ecology and issues that range from pollution and global warming to endangered species. Communities everywhere hold events to celebrate the planet and do something that’s good for it, with themes that include Clean the Park, Bike to Work and Plant a Tree. For one day each year, the environment is center stage, and issues pertaining to its health and well being are on the minds of just about everyone.

On the other hand, there’s an element of Earth Day that resembles the tradition of people who just go to church on Christmas Eve. How many individuals each year sit in the pews during this annual Yuletide church excursion and vow to be better people, only to conveniently slip back into their normal patterns of not-so-saintly behavior right about the time New Years Eve kicks off? Probably about as many as vow to do something good for the environment on Earth Day, then on April 23^rd continue to ride to work alone in their SUV’s, buy way too much plastic, chemlawn their yards and leave on every light in the house.

And of course there’s the corporate piece. At Christmas you have big business leveraging a spiritual holiday to increase sales and ramp up their bottom line. For Earth Day, polluting corporations annually attempt to use it as a marketing stage, to fraudulently convince consumers that they really are ecologically friendly despite the millions of pounds of poison they spew into the air and water every day. The common term for this is "greenwashing", which is the marketing equivalent of spraying whipped cream and expensive perfume on a steamy pile of horse dung.

Thus the "catch" to April 22. Everyone becomes more ecologically aware on this holy day of eco-freaks, but few carry it over into their daily lives. And the very corporations who are the biggest part of the problem use the occasion to disingenuously paint themselves green.

The way I see it, even with its flaws, anything that puts the environment on center stage and gets people around the world to pay attention, even if it’s only for a day, is a good thing. It’s certainly better than nothing. It’s always heartening for me personally when my kids bring home their Earth Day projects, and it’s even more encouraging that the environment has been a recurring theme in their curriculum throughout the year. If children are coming home from school talking about how global warming threatens polar bears, maybe parents will start to listen. Maybe that’s the seed that causes this year’s park cleanup to lead to a change in lifestyle. Maybe on the 23^rd, the Hummer gets swapped for a Prius , you rip up the Chemlawn contract, you stop buying gas from Exxon and tissues from Kleenex, and you install energy efficient lights in your home. This year, start living the line that every day is Earth Day. And do your part to take the catch out of April 22.

It’s official. Climate change has changed everything.

Sure, there’s the stuff you already know. More severe storms, melting polar ice caps, the projected year-round beach resort status of Nova Scotia. But what about the other stuff? Major League Baseball games are getting snowed out in April, the same year that January football games in New England could be attended in short sleeves. I played golf (at a goat field of a public course that doesn’t use pesticides because they can’t afford it) three times in January, and had my tee time this past Saturday cancelled due to frost.

Even politics is no longer predictable. Yesterday, Newt Gingrich and John Kerry were supposed to square off in a debate that was to resemble the 1984 World Wide Wrestling Federation title fight between Wahoo McDaniel and Ricky Steamboat. (McDaniel took the title when Tully Blanchard came to his aid with a steel chair). Instead of the projected smack down, Newt and John ended up all chummy when Gingrich unexpectedly stated that climate change is real, that "we should address it actively". To top it off, there was an unsettling moment where it appeared they might even hug.

One of the reasons why climate change is more recognized now than it was even two or three years ago is the emergence of so-called "poster children" for the issue. The polar bear has become the face of global warming, as its existence is now threatened by the melting ice caps at the North Pole. As evidence that the polar bear is raising the issue’s profile, more than 500,000 Americans recently urged the feds to list polar bears as threatened under the Endangered Species Act due to the effect rising temperatures are having on their habitat. That’s almost double the previous record for public comments for an ESA listing in US history!

But its not just the charismatic megafauna that are at risk. According to the international organization Save the Children, 175 million children will be affected every year over the next decade by climate-related disasters like droughts, floods and storms.

Okay, you say. The plight of children and polar bears is alarming and tragic, and it makes me care that much more about the urgency to stop global warming.  But it isn't exactly surprising. Not like the giggle fest between Kerry and Gingrich anyway. THAT was surprising. Tell me something I don’t know.

Well, here’s an emerging casualty of climate change you might not have already considered: Business. Not exactly poster child material, but it makes Wall Street and wealthy political funders take notice.

According to a recent study, financial losses from weather-related catastrophes have risen an average of two percent each year since the ‘70s. Economists are viewing climate change more and more as a classic "market failure", with potential repercussions in the business sector that could be considered catastrophic in their own right.  Many agree that the single largest cause of that failure is corporations and governments don’t place a price on spewing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.  The resulting costs, however, could be huge.

Up until now, climate change has been seen as the cause of lefty liberals who want to make the world safe for polar bears and kids. Now, its champions need to include sports fans, golfers, day traders, parents, CEO’s, property owners and political pundits who make their living stereotyping congress.

Did I leave anyone out?

I got a new snowboard for Christmas this year. Well, actually, I went out and bought myself one around mid-December, came home and told my wife she could take me off her list because I already had my present. Went over like mustard on peanut butter. Especially since, as it turned out, she’d already gotten me a bike.

So at the end of the day, I got a snowboard and bike for Christmas. Which is great, except that the present I got for myself was based on the silly assumption that there’d be snow at least somewhere on the East Coast. Even though I work on the issue of global warming every day, there’s still a part of me that’s in denial about the whole thing. I guess I just don’t want to admit that snow is a phenomenon that, in many parts of the world, appears to be on its way out.

The bike, however, has been put to good use since I found it perched by the tree Christmas morning. This past weekend it was 75 and sunny in our nation’s capital, in the middle of January. So instead of snowboarding, I went biking on Saturday and Sunday. Even got a bit of a tan to boot. But I felt guilty the whole time. Like I was peddling over polar bear carcasses or something. We might get a kick out of warm sunny days in the "dead of winter". But our furry friend to the north is facing the very real possibility of extinction as a result of the current trend.

And at Coca-Cola, that would be bad for marketing.

Speaking of which (polar bears, that is, not Coke), there might be hope for them yet, thanks to a lawsuit Greenpeace filed with two other organizations under the Endangered Species Act. Like a belated Christmas present to one of the season’s icons, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed on December 27^th to designate polar bears as threatened, due to the fact that the Arctic sea ice they rely on as a hunting platform is melting at an unprecedented rate. Unless the Bush Administration has the gall to assert that the Arctic meltdown is not a result of climate change (okay, so he asserted the Iraq War was justified based on weapons of mass destruction), an ESA listing of the polar bear would force the U.S. government to address the link between manmade emissions of heat-trapping gases and the increase in Arctic temperatures.

Bottom line: warm winter days in traditionally cold climates are not as desirable as they might appear. Whereas it’s not entirely accurate to say "this 75 degree day in January has been brought to you by climate change", it is true that what we’re experiencing is part of the pattern we’ll continue to see as the world heats up. Weather like we had this past weekend is the proverbial wolf in sheep’s clothing. Might seem nice on the surface, but what’s behind it should scare you.

Especially if you own a ski slope. Or think in your next life that you might come back as a polar bear.