People's climate march 2014 NYC. South Bend Voice/Flickr. Some rights reserved.20 million Americans turned out on 22 April 1970 for what would be the largest demonstration in American history. While critics warned of an unpatriotic distraction from the Vietnam war, the first Earth Day was the culmination of a growing wave of scientific and public awareness of the adverse effects of cars, pesticides, and industrialised society more generally on human health and the natural world.
The subsequent wave of popular legislation, which included the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the Clean Air Act, heralded the modern environmental movement’s new central role on the American political stage. This role would soon be emulated across the Atlantic and throughout the world.
Democracy and the modern environmental movement are inextricably linked. Environmental issues, for example, played a central role in bringing down Lenin’s undemocratic legacy. The environmental movement in the GDR was a central pillar of opposition and the arrest of activists at the Environmental Library in Berlin in 1987 by State Security set off popular protests. Protests that would draw on and amplify the growing waves of resistance that would ultimately bring down the Berlin Wall.
Why, with environmental challenges threatening citizens’ health, livelihoods, and natural heritage as never before, have we not seen an equally vigorous responses from today’s citizens and their democratically elected governments?
To understand we need a more recent history, one not often told, but one that should be known by any citizen concerned about the environment, as well as other things. It is best understood through the lens of U.S. national politics where what was once a mass movement often finds itself on the defensive against demagoguing politicians. And it is best understood through the lens of an outsider, in this case that of an environmental philosopher who found himself bewildered among the lawyers, engineers, ecologists, and economists who are responsible for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (US EPA’s) daily operations.
“You can’t get there from here”
There are many myths about how the US EPA ended up housed in a bizarre composition of poorly connected towers in a dangerous quarter of Washington, DC. Rumours still circulate that Nixon’s corrupt Vice President, Spiro Agnew, held an interest in the odd towers that constitute Waterside Mall and thus, while unfit for safe or productive work, they secured him a nice profit before the bribery charges caught up with him.
When Dr. Bryan G. Norton, one of the world’s top environmental philosophers, arrived there, he was impressed that senior level management would come down to meet him at the reception. He soon learned however, that this practice stemmed not from a warm culture of hospitality, but rather from more practical concerns, the unescorted guest would become quickly and irretrievably lost in the “Kafkaesque” and “disconnected towers of Babel”. “You can’t get there from here,” was often the refrain when one queried how to navigate the buildings.
These bizarre structures were not, however, the outgrowths of some unholy real estate deal. Rather, they’d been built for, and grown with, the EPA itself. With time, Dr. Norton began to see the towers as a metaphor for US EPA as a whole, and the problems of US EPA as endemic to all democratic systems trying to formulate and implement environmental policies.
