Earth Day is stupid.
I wrote a lot of this last year, but I really don’t feel like I can improve on it too much. Consider this an update/retooling.
I mean, originally it was a good idea. Now it’s a wishy-greenwashy way for your favorite local major corporation to “participate” in doing absolutely nothing, other than to promote their self-aggrandizing nonsense. Here we have Monsanto celebrating Earth Day, informing us that “Every Day is Earth Day on the farm!” “Every Day is Earth Day” doesn’t mean that much any more, now, does it?
And that’s the whole point I’m trying to make: once you set aside a single day as “Earth Day,” it becomes a consumable, possessive, orderable thing, perfect for take-over. “Oooh, a new Google Doodle! I’ve done my duty to the ‘environment’ today by clicking it!” Meanwhile I got to hear a story a while back about someone who now has incurable cancer after her property was sprayed with insecticides by the National Forest Service. Round and round and round….
But, this is to be expected. It doesn’t matter if we set aside one day or 365 days per year to “honor the Earth”– as long as the systems we’ve put into place continue to churn ahead with capital and efficiency as the goal, there’s nothing we can do to stop the degradation of human existence other than doing our best to participate in our environment as harmlessly as possible in our own way.
The marriage of capital and “environmentalism” will always end in an abusive relationship, but by learning the skills needed to stay afloat in a sea of nonsense, and by fostering environments that practice those skills, we’ll be able to keep moving.
Don’t celebrate Earth Day; mourn it. Mourn the fact that the things being said on Earth Day are just things being said, for 24 hours, a single day each year. Then, get out there and water your plants.
