by Karen Telleen-Lawton, Noozhawk Columnist (read the original in Noozhawk by clicking here)
Without the usual Earth Day festivities in Alameda Park, you may not realize that Earth Day 2021 has come and gone.
If you were lucky enough to tune in online, you were treated to a plethora of webinars, updates, forums, and hopeful ideas from local groups such as ChannelKeeper, Community Environmental Council, Environmental Defense Center, Channel Islands Restoration, and others. These groups weighed in on where we are and ways forward.
What can be distilled from Earth Day 2021?
The worldwide theme this year is Restore our Earth. Embedded in the theme is the recognition that it’s no longer a matter of taking care of Mother Earth before something bad happens. We are irreversibly in a world of human-caused climate change; we need to plot a new course.
Even the official nomenclature has changed: it’s a climate crisis, not climate change. “Reduce, reuse, recycle” has been subsumed in more R’s: “restore, repair, rot, refuse, repurpose, and rethink.
I’d like to add “remind:” gently offer each other alternatives when our current choices increase our footprints on earth.
Along with staggering stories of loss, Earth Day offered hopeful signs. On the global platform, China has pledged to quit using coal and South Korea will stop funding coal overseas. Japan, Brazil and Canada improved their targets for achieving carbon neutrality.
The United States has rejoined the Paris Accord, pledging to halve its emissions by 2030 from 2005 levels.
“This is the decade we must make decisions that will avoid the worst consequences of the climate crisis,” President Joe Biden declared.
In fact, it’s these institutional level declarations that give me the most hope, because that’s where change can have big effects.
Financial media such as Reuters and Forbes reported on Earth Day as if it were — because it is — financial news. One report published that same week warned the global economy could lose nearly 20% of its economic output by 2050 if the climate crisis continues unchecked.
Climate change already has caused economic dislocation, such as increased migration of desperate people fleeing increased droughts, fires, floods, monsoons and hurricanes.
One idea, brewing since the 1970s, has emerged as a reachable target essential for sustaining human activity on earth. Conservation groups from BirdLife International to the Nature Conservancy and National Geographic Society have endorse the idea that 30% of the Earth’s surface should be protected by 2030.
Indeed, most see that goal as intermediate to conserving half the planet by 2050. Indigenous people are acknowledged as integral in this conservation goal, in that biodiversity has generally been greater in indigenous-controlled land.
In addition to the need for institutional changes, consumer-level steps continue to be essential for education and broad-scale implementation. Everyone cares now. It’s normal to haul our own grocery bags. It’s becoming commonplace for shoppers to bring mesh bags for buying veggies instead of grabbing plastic ones.
What can you do now that we’re well into the Anthropocene?
Check out our local environmental groups to find one that matches your interests.
Do your part: find yourself among the new Rs and stretch into another R.
Donate your talents and resources.
Keep the conversation going all year long.
Karen Telleen-Lawton, Noozhawk Columnist
Karen Telleen-Lawton is an eco-writer, sharing information and insights about economics and ecology, finances and the environment. Having recently retired from financial planning and advising, she spends more time exploring the outdoors — and reading and writing about it. The opinions expressed are her own.