'Dirt Day' it was called

Yesterday, in case you hadn’t noticed, was so-called ‘Earth Day’. Actually, nothing new about Earth Day – which of course leads us to realize that, despite the armies of the ever-so-precious-and-young-and-concerned that are scolding us constantly these days, environmental concern wasn’t invented when Al Gore had his epiphany – it has been around since 1970.

At my newspaper back in the 1980s we always referred to it as ‘Dirt Day’, both to show how cynical and above faddism we were, and also in reference to the hippies in the local boonies who, even back then, were making a kind of religion of it. Ha – they’d come into town in their clapped-out, oil-burning VW vans and proceed to tell us how we were all doomed and the big threat from all the worldwide pollution ‘Korporate Amerika’ was creating (as opposed to fume-spewing vans) was going to lead us into a glacial winter. Yep, global cooling was the big threat then.

Anyway, I remember going to cover meetings organized by local eco-groups and listening to what they had to say. The predominant attendees at these meetings were those aforementioned, gum-booted hippies from Merville, Black Creek and the offshore islands, and some wonderful venerable ladies of a certain level of scholasticism, sensitivity, and very left-of-centre politics.

In my opinion, that was why proto-enviro-consciousness never really captured the mainstream. It was too politicized. If you support the environment you must be a pot-addled admirer of Che Guevara, so how on earth were Mr. and Mrs. Suburbia, with their three cars and water-ski boat with the biggest honkin’ outboard to be found, to embrace the cause. “Buncha hippie shit, nuthin’ to do with me.” Too bad, because we’ve latterly found out that it has a lot to do with us.

In my own defence, I’ll say that I think I’ve always been environmentally conscious, even before it was fashionable:

- I gave up driving cars with big V-8 engines in the late ‘70s. Fun as they were, they were too costly to fuel, and that was back in the days when gasoline was about 50-cents a gallon.
- I have never littered.
- I have never used chemical herbicides or pesticides.Well, not a lot, and now none at all.
- I began separating my garbage into trash and recyclables a long time ago.
- I detest the despoliation of the wilderness for the sake of fancy-ass golf courses – I mean, how many of those damn things do we need? – ski resorts, and great big parking lots at those resorts and golf courses.
- I walk when it is a reasonable distance.
- I don’t fish or hunt, but accept the fact that such animals as deer actually do need culling on occasion; I just don’t want to be a part of the cull.
- I grant bears and cougars the right to wander into ever expanding suburbia, and am disdainful of those who would poop their pants at the presence of such animals in ‘their’ neighborhood. Sorry, folks, we’re in the animals’ neighborhood, not the other way around.
- And so on.

I heard yesterday that a lot of ‘serious’ environmentalist (those who take no prisoners in their scolding of us) have become disdainful of Dirt Day because it has been co-opted by the spurious and has become a groovy, trendy thing with little substance.

I suspect they’re right. Once Vanity Fair started running its pukey ‘green’ issues – ‘What Madonna is doing for the environment’ – then I knew something had gotten lost in the process of raising consciousness. The environment as marketing ploy! What an idea!

That ties in with doing carbon trade-offs (Al’s big on those), and whatever other easy-peasy compromises we can make. Isn’t that sort of like making bargains with God or shaking hands with the devil? Just asking.

Anyway, Earth Day 2008 has come and gone and Hummer owners can relax for another year.