My Life in Environmental Movements
From the Montreal Protocol to Climate Deniers
When I was growing up in the 1980s, the environmental hot topics were the hole in the ozone layer, acid rain from Canada, pollution in the Hudson River and the clearcutting of Amazon rainforests.
The discovery of the hole in the ozone layer was made in 1985. The harmful ultraviolet radiation from these holes were destined to cause an increase in skin cancer and cataracts, reduced agricultural productivity, and disruption of marine ecosystems. Only two years later, the Montreal Protocol was agreed on by 197 countries to stop the use of 100 ozone-depleting chemicals, including chlorofluorocarbons, which were once commonly found in spray cans, refrigerants, and foam insulation and most rampant in Aqua Net hairspray. (We had very big hair back then.) The holes in the ozone have been slowly mending ever since and are projected to be gone by 2066. It’s hard to imagine such swift environmental action being taken today.
Acid rain, which has a frightening name that always made me think the rain would burn my face off, occurs when sulfuric and nitric acids form in the atmosphere and fall to the ground with precipitation. Most of the sulfuric and nitric acids that cause acid rain come from the burning of fossil fuels. Acid rain does not burn your face off, but it is very harmful to the soil, removing important nutrients and minerals that forests and plants rely on. It also has detrimental effects on freshwater, human health, animals, insects, aquatic life forms, and it erodes steel structures like bridges.
Acid rain still occurs, but its impact on Europe and North America is far less than it was in the 70s and 80s because of strong air pollution regulations, such as the U.S. Clean Air Act of 1970, the Canada–United States Air Quality Agreement in 1991, and similar measures in Europe. In the United States the first phase of emission reductions took effect in 1995, and successive reductions followed. However, as developing countries such as India and China have industrialized, their emissions of sulfuric and nitric acids have increased.
Growing up in the Lower Hudson Valley Region of New York State, we used to joke about throwing each other into the Hudson River, afraid we’d come out toxic mutants because the river was so polluted. Between 1947 and 1977, General Electric superfluously dumped 1.3 million pounds of toxic polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) into the Hudson from upriver factories, contaminating 200-miles all the way to the New York Harbor.
Singer Pete Seeger and Toshi Seeger founded Hudson River Sloop Clearwater in 1966, an environmental education organization and an actual boat (plus a cool annual music festival) that gained national recognition for its activism in the 1970s to force a clean-up of PCB contamination of the Hudson. In 1972 Congress passed the Clean Water Act and established a nationwide “discharge permit system” for all surface waters, which led to an overall reduction in pollutants in the river, as factories and power plants were now required to install wastewater treatment systems.
As for clearcutting the Amazon Rainforest for cattle, well, that hasn’t improved at all. Though it stopped me in junior high from eating burgers, unfortunately 20% of the Amazon rainforest is already gone and 150 more acres are lost every minute of every day
In high school, I started an environmental club with my friend Dori called People of the Earth or POE. I believed then that if we could hold Hands Across America, bring recycling to every home in the States, sing We Are the World, attend Earth Day festivals, and stop eating burgers, then we would solve the world’s problems. As I get older, my childhood seems like a much simpler time, when environmental battles could be isolated, fought and won. The modern world only gets more and more complex-- more technologies are introduced into our lives, more and more people are born into the world, there’s just more in general.
When I left for college in the early 90s, I learned about the concept of sustainable development from my boyfriend, Micheal, who was an Economics major. From an environmental perspective, sustainable development is about growth without depleting our natural resources, so that we could meet our needs in the present without compromising the ability for future generations to meet their needs. Soon after, the term sustainability became more widespread, particularly in the environmental movement.
In 2006, the documentary An Inconvenient Truth was released. Considering this was an educational movie of U.S. V.P. Al Gore giving a slideshow, it surprisingly and quickly gained popularity. An Inconvenient Truth has been widely credited for raising international public awareness of global warming. An additional unexpected effect of the documentary was global warming deniers. Climate change denial included rejecting science and insisting on unreasonable doubts about the extent to which climate change is caused by humans. The main reason for this was political. Fossil fuel lobbyists and their political puppets worked hard to undermine and discredit climate scientists and the scientific consensus on global warming.
This was so vastly different than the 1987 Montreal Protocol to save the ozone layer. When the world learned that there was a harmful hole in the ozone layer, all the countries of the world soon got together to phase out the production and consumption of ozone-depleting substances (ODS). It was the first treaty of its kind. The phasing out of ODS will prevent up to an additional 2.5°C temperature increase by the end of this century, a good amount of help in a vastly dire environmental crisis. What happened to this kind of cooperation? When did money become more important than our health and environment? When did we become so divided? (My theory: a parallel universe split off during Y2K and we’re in the one where the computers didn’t fail, but our moral compass did.)
The term Global Warming, quickly morphed into the term Climate Change for clarity, and now the terms Climate Emergency and Climate Disaster are more likely to be used to represent the new urgency of our situation caused by avoiding solving the problem due to greedy climate deniers.
In recent years, we’ve recognized that sustainability just isn’t enough anymore, and the idea of regenerative ecologies has taken root. You will most likely hear this term used in reference to agriculture and ranching. In ecology, regeneration is the ability of an ecosystem to renew and recover from damage. We have surpassed the point of sustainability. It is no longer enough to simply sustain what we have. We have ruined our environment to such an extent that now we need to fix and regenerate the damage we’ve done. It is no longer enough to stop the deforestation of the Amazon Rainforest; we need to start projects to restore the forests and degraded farmlands. We need to reverse the current destruction to begin to mitigate climate change and biodiversity conservation, but at this point we have barely been able to halt deforestation.
The newest environmental development that takes regeneration one step further is degrowth. Degrowth is a movement to stop growth to counter our modern world’s predilection for consumption. Whereas composting, recycling, renewing, circulating, reclaiming, reusing, repairing, and restoring are all great sustainable ways to take care of waste, where does it end? Is the purpose of these eco-solutions only to free up more resources for more expansion? Sustainability is meant to meet the needs of future generations, but if future generations’ needs remain the same as our current ones, or more likely grow with technological advances, how will we ever stop the mass accumulation of junk?
How can we take less from the Earth instead of continuously extracting more? It is no longer enough for humanity to sustain our carbon footprint; we must decrease it. Degrowth calls on humanity to practice restraint. This is a hard truth to wrap our heads around, especially in our capitalist culture that equates growth with thriving, sustaining with surviving and degrowth with degrading. We need to change the way we perceive success. Success can no longer mean the accumulation of more; it must instead be associated with the ability to live happily with less. We need to put value on collective wealth and prosperity over individual accumulation.
All beings are in a state of constant creation. That’s how life came into existence. We all have a natural drive to continue to create, so growth is a natural aspect to being alive. However, if we look to nature for answers, we see that things grow and then they die, and then new things come. Sometimes a meteor destroys an entire planet, a tsunami wipes out a coastline, a fire decimates a forest, a virus kills a population. It’s hard for us to embrace these elements of nature because we reject death and destruction
Growth is natural, but can we grow in such a way that we allow things to then die back when they are no longer needed? A perfect example of this is adobe homes where we live in New Mexico. Adobe is a traditional form of building that uses clay from the earth to make bricks to build homes that have a great thermal mass and stay warm once they are heated. Adobe homes require a lot of maintenance. They need to be continuously cared for and replastered year to year or they will disintegrate. When the home is no longer loved or cared for, it returns to where it came from. The adobe bricks disintegrate back into the earth, and they are exactly as they were, just dirt.
This is like the chaiwallahs in India who sell cups of chai made from clay and when you are done with your fifty-cent cup of chai, you throw it on the ground, and it turns back to dirt. So, in this way there is no actual growth. Once something is no longer needed, it goes back to the earth. Just like our own bodies. Consider how essential death and destruction is to survival; every animal on Earth must kill something to survive, even vegans and herbivores kill plants in order to live.
For our ancestors, the temporary nature of existence and “things” was easier to comprehend because everything was made of natural materials, not synthetics made with chemicals. All their plates, their clothes and their homes were made from the elements they found around them and in their environment. When they were no longer of use, they could be dispersed and disintegrate.
Nowadays, however, we have synthetically created so many things that are toxic to the environment. They don’t biodegrade efficiently, and they end up being nothing but trash. Some of the homes in my neighborhood that have been neglected, like the old trailers, are just giant pieces of trash in the middle of the sagebrush that are a complete eyesore. Who knows how long they will stand there bleeding their asbestos into the land and the watershed?
So, can we grow, but in such a way that allows for death, destruction, and disintegration? Can we localize, decentralize, share, barter, build with our hands and only take what we need and no more?
I live off the grid because I was greatly influenced, as my parents were in the 1970s, by the back-to-the-land movement. At a time when we were all becoming more and more aware of the harms of a post-industrial world to our environment, the reaction was to return to the traditional ways of living companionably with our habitat, in a close relationship that naturally fostered sustainability. Though that movement was a short-lived trend, it continues in small pockets of the world, such as where I live in Northern New Mexico among adobes and Earthships.
Living sustainably, going back-to-the-land, minimizing individual accumulation of material goods, and finding ways to exist more communally are all ideals to aspire to as we face our future climate crisis. This includes buying less and boycotting whenever we can corporations that continue to pollute and engage in climate denial. We can no longer rely on politicians to be agreeable to sign treaties to save the environment or corporations to reduce their wealth for the greater good. Perhaps these saccharine, reductive lyrics to this 1980s anthem to humanity, We Are the World, mean more now than ever; “It’s true, we need to save our own lives.”
“We are the world
We are the children
We are the ones who make a brighter day, so let's start giving
There's a choice we're making
We're saving our own lives
It's true we'll make a better day, just you and me.”