The Green Blues

Growing up in the sixties and seventies I was surrounded by television ads from the growing environmental movement such as the legendary crying Native American commercial for Keep America Beautiful and Woodsy Owl’s advice to “Give a hoot, don’t pollute!” sponsored by the US Forest Service.

Those messages stuck with me.

To this day, I’m zealous about recycling and make sure the newspapers go out on Monday and the cans and bottles are by the curb on Thursday. I’m the guy that is constantly turning off lights that are wasting energy in empty rooms and lowering the thermostat.

Clearly, however, they didn’t convert everyone into environmental warriors. I’m extremely troubled by negative developments on numerous fronts in efforts to keep us from destroying the planet.

A disturbing fact shouted out at me in the November 2023 obituary of Brendan Sexton, the New York City sanitation commission who pioneered recycling in Gotham: the goal Sexton set for 25% of the city’s garbage to be recycled was never met. Today it’s about 17%, according to The New York Times.

That problem is not limited to New York City and the failure in most places to sharply increase recycling rates has many causes. Few municipalities have the capacity to recycle plastics other than category 1, 2 and 5. And markets for recyclable trash have largely imploded especially since China stopped accepting US waste in 2018.

Then there are issues related to power generation.

Ever since my college days when I attended “No Nukes” rallies and concerts, I’ve been hungry for solar power to achieve its promise. I can still remember John Hall singing out:

“Just give me the warm power of the sun

Give me the steady flow of a waterfall

Give me the spirit of living things as they return to clay

Just give me the restless power of the wind

Give me the comforting glow of a wood fire

But won’t you take all your atomic poison power away.”

Yes, solar and wind power have made great strides since the early eighties, but society is far from unified in supporting them. Even many liberals have succumbed to NIMBYism if they fear large-scale wind and solar projects will damage the aesthetics of their neighborhoods. And the ups and downs of oil prices and changing tax incentive schemes wreak havoc with the economics of renewable energy projects.

These and other environmental problems are contributing to global warming. Once it seemed like the impacts of those changes were largely theoretical, but record heat waves, flooding and wildfires have made it clear to me that we are endangering life as we know it.

As scientists from NASA put it: “The effects of human-caused global warming are happening now, are irreversible for people alive today, and will worsen as long as humans add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.”

Despite the fact that environmental degradation now threatens human beings, the environment didn’t even make it into the top five of voter policy concerns, according to a Harvard CAPS-Harris poll released in January.

Come on America! It’s time to give a hoot! Otherwise we’re all soon going to be crying, as Iron Eyes Cody did in that epic 1971 commercial, about the grave mistake we made in failing to save our planet.