Note: I included this piece in the Free Fredonia Times, issue #42, the Earth Day issue. Click here to see a PDF (on Google Drive).
The first Earth Day was held on April 22, 1970. But let me
take you back to Earth Day of 1971 and the launch of one of the most powerfully
effective TV ads of all time. Senior citizen readers I’m sure will remember it.
Probably inspired by that first Earth Day, the “Crying Indian” ad was a public
service message sponsored by the nonprofit Keep America Beautiful. The Indian paddles his birchbark canoe to
shore, where someone in a passing car throws out a bag of garbage which breaks
open at his feet. Camera pans to a close-up of his face and the tear trickling
down his cheek. The narrator intones, “People start pollution. People can stop
it.”
Shown repeatedly in the 1970s, the ad was most successful in its hidden,
unannounced purpose: to stop a then-growing effort to promote reuse and
recycling of drink containers (and thus reduce roadside litter) by requiring
deposits on the containers. The ad was funded by the Advertising Council of
America and backed by beer bottlers, can companies, and soft-drink makers.
Shifting the responsibility for litter to “people” protected the profits of the
corporations making throw-away containers.
I think the Crying Indian probably did persuade some to stop
throwing their trash out the car window. I’d like to show it to some of the
people who travel 267 and 222. You can see the ad yourself at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGu4AwL5Kho.
Being intentionally deceptive “greenwashing,” pretending to sell us
something environmentally beneficial but actually something else, makes the ad
typical of a great deal of today’s advertising. But isn’t all today’s
advertising, or all successful advertising, fundamentally (also often
creatively, beautifully, and/or hilariously) deceptive? And about protecting
the corporate profits, what’s wrong with that? It’s a legal requirement of
corporations. And it’s our culture, our way of life. Any proposal to protect
“the environment” (aka our planetary life-support system) that might “hurt the
economy” (that is, reduce profits or slow economic growth) gets shot down.
Getting back to the ad and the containers, does recycling or not-recycling
matter that much if we are committed in either case to eternal
over-consumption, consuming ever more and more?
Getting back to Earth Day – The “official” Earth Day
website, earthday.org, says “We are now entering the 46th year of a
movement that gave voice to an emerging consciousness, channeling human energy
toward environmental issues.” The original focus was on littering, along with
air and water pollution. Today it’s clear that awareness of the serious global
harming done by burning fossil fuels has (at last) entered the global
consciousness. On this specifically April 22 Earth Day, leaders of over 150
nations are at the UN to sign on to the first international agreement that
might actually reduce global emissions of that super-pollution, and so avert
the environmental catastrophe that scientists are warning us is on the way
unless we change our ways.
A recent report in the highly respected journal Nature
outlines the impact of climate change over the next 10,000 years: “The next few
decades offer a brief window of opportunity to minimize large-scale and
potentially catastrophic climate change that will extend longer than the entire
history of human civilization thus far.”
Will we – can we – change our ways? I hope so. I like that
“window of opportunity.” But it’s forecast to be brief. And the changes needed
are fundamental. Beware of deceptive advertising, proposals that either lie to
us or deflect our efforts away from what is really needed. The current official
Earth Day website lists as one of its major goals “to plant 7.8 billion trees.”
Would that be good? Of course. But if the greatest threat to our Earth’s
habitability is the burning of fossil fuels, planting trees does not cure the
disease or solve the problem, it only lessens the symptoms. Do I smell some way
that someone’s profits are going to be enhanced by the planting of 7.8 billion
trees? What’s really needed?
Stop burning fossil fuels.
