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Earth Day

Apr 23, 2012 Editorial

In 1970, an American Senator, Gaylord Nelson from Wisconsin, became incensed with the inattention being paid by his Government (and officialdom on the whole) on the growing menace of pollution and its effects on the Earth.
Despairing of initiating any change in their posture from the inside, he launched a movement – Earth Day, April 22nd – among the ordinary citizens with the twin objectives of sensitizing them about the fragility of the earth’s ecosystem and persuading them to badger their officials to do something about it.
In the intervening forty years, the dangers posed to the delicate balance of the Earth’s environment by the activities of mankind has increased geometrically while the awareness amongst ordinary folks to the clear and present threat has, at best, increased only arithmetically.
Today, we have one model informing us that within fifty years, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will double and precipitate a rise in global temperatures between 1.5 degree Celsius and 4.5 degree Celsius.
Because of the cumulative rise since our factories started spewing carbon dioxide and other pollutants in the industrial revolution, we are already witnessing the collapse of the north polar ice cap, which may vanish in less than twenty years. All of this, of course, should be of great concern to us, who live on a coastland that is some four feet below the high tides of the Atlantic, since a melting ice cap means a higher sea level.
The food shortage that is now knocking over even the middle classes of the developed world, much less those that live below the poverty line in poor countries like ours, is caused by a confluence of several factors, of which global warming is right up there on the list.
Australia, for one, which was one of the largest producers of rice for the export market, has seen its output drop by an astounding ninety-eight percent.
So we come now to Earth Day 2012 –commemorated yesterday – with the theme “Mobilise the Earth’’. We have to do what we can to help in the struggle to literally save the Earth. Earth Day has spread and governments have woken up to the dangers of global warming but we still have a long way to go.
Guyana, small as it is has taken a lead, through its offer to sequester most of our forests and of course, the carbon in them. Our LCDS is a model for a national holistic approach to deal with the problem.
But we believe that Gaylord Nelson’s insight of almost forty years ago is still relevant: left to themselves, the governments of the world will continue to point fingers and drag their feet in the implementation of identified initiatives to reverse the threat of pollution and global warming.
There is still no successor regime to the Kyoto Protocol. There have been interminable meetings, the latest one being one in South Africa but we still have too much diddling and “passing the buck”.
The slowdown in the economies of the developed countries, have made them back off previous commitments and they are very skittish in taking new initiatives. Yet they continue to be major contributors of pollution.
They have been joined by China (now the largest polluter) and India – but in all fairness to these two still developing countries they have made serious efforts to incorporate technologies most sensitive to the dangers of pollution.
The thrust of Earth Day, to spread awareness and activism amongst the ordinary folks, will have to be intensified. Guyana has done more than most and it is the major countries – especially the US, where Earth day actually started, that will have to do better.
They are the ones that got us into the mess the entire globe in enmeshed in – and they have to take commensurate responsibility. It is no use pointing fingers at China.
The new motto will have to be “all for one and one or all” because this is literally the position in which we find ourselves.

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