Earth Day at 50: Pandemic Highlights Challenges Amid Progress

(Bloomberg Law) -- The 50th anniversary of Earth Day arrives in the midst of a pandemic that has killed tens of thousands. The global shutdown also has cleared the skies in major cities, cast new light on the dangers of endemic air pollution, and muted one of the biggest events on the calendar for environmental activists.

At its half-century mark Wednesday, Earth Day is being webcast only.

The absence of mass gatherings will drain some of the day’s messaging power, said John Oppermann, executive director of the Earth Day Initiative. But he and others also said the virtual format could expand participation by opening up talks and activities to people who wouldn’t have been able to attend in person.

“We have a lot of adjusting to do, but this is also a great time for people to dive into learning more deeply the skills they can use as climate advocates,” agreed Madeleine Para, vice president of programs at the Citizens’ Climate Lobby.

The activist groups are concerned because they don’t want to lose momentum for public engagement. But the public’s understanding of the threats posed by pollutants and human activities has spiked sharply since the first Earth Day in 1970.

“What is different is that environmental policy and environmental movements are truly global now, and intergenerational,” said former Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), who claimed the seat of Sen. Gaylord Nelson (D-Wis.)—the champion of Earth Day—12 years after he left office. “It started with a huge young people’s involvement in 1970, but it has really come into its own.”

Feingold is currently the global ambassador for the Campaign for Nature, an effort to convince nations to protect at least 30% of the planet by 2030.

Here is a look at key environmental areas and how they’ve changed over the past 50 years:

Clearing the Air

Before 1970, most U.S. cities—notably Los Angeles, and industrial areas like Pittsburgh—were enshrouded in smog. The EPA notes that scientists began linking air pollution and its adverse impacts on public health after a smog alert in the mill town of Donora, Pa., outside of Pittsburgh, in 1948 resulted in the deaths of 20 people.

The Clean Air Act—the basic structure of which was established in 1970, then amended in 1977 and 1990—led to the setting of national air quality standards that in turn required curbs on emissions from automobiles and factories.

“Fifty years on, air quality in the United States has improved dramatically by controlling common pollutants such as sulfur dioxide (SO2) and nitrogen oxides (NOx) and placing restrictions on dangerous air toxics,” the U.N. Environment Program said in a recent analysis. “However, in recent years, there has been an increase in dangerous air pollution levels accompanied by demands for stronger air quality regulations to mitigate health risks, combat the climate crisis and support economic growth.”

Between 1990 and 2018, the U.N. said, carbon monoxide has fallen 74% in the U.S., while ground-level ozone has declined by 21%. It also noted that the $65 billion worth of costs associated with implementing the Clean Air Act’s measures “has been more than paid for through reduced medical bills and increased worker productivity.”

Nevertheless, it said, the U.S. remains a leading country for premature pollution-related deaths.—Amena H. Saiyid

Cleaning Up the Water

The burning of Ohio’s Cuyahoga River in 1969 is seen as the turning point that galvanized the movement to address water pollution. The grassroots efforts culminated in the Federal Water Pollution Control Act of 1972, now known as the Clean Water Act. In 1998, President Bill Clinton declared the Cuyahoga to be one of 14 American Heritage Rivers.

The risks of drinking water contaminated by lead pipes had become clear by the early 20th century, though skepticism was common even then. A 1938 article in the Journal of the American Water Works Association said lead’s “bad reputation” wasn’t deserved, and that the heavy metal was less harmful than people thought.

The Safe Drinking Water Act, signed into law by President Gerald Ford in 1974, gave the newly formed EPA the authority to set nationwide standards for drinking water. Over the years, the law has been modified to require the EPA to consider additional risks to human health, like lead in plumbing and emerging contaminants.

The act’s 2016 amendments helped the city of Flint, Mich., with funding to respond to widespread lead contamination in the water supply that leached from lead pipes. The EPA also continues to develop lists of unregulated contaminants under the act to determine whether more regulations are needed.

In recent years, those lists and resulting water utility monitoring tests have revealed the prevalence of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, in drinking water across the country.

Though PFAS is not known to come from plumbing, its sources are more widespread, ranging from cookware to carpeting to firefighting foam. The agency has committed to developing safe drinking water standards for two of the chemicals to create a nationwide limit. —Sylvia Carignan and Amena H. Saiyid

Chemical Hazards

Chemical concerns were integral to the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970. Days before and under public pressure, President Richard Nixon began to restrict the widespread spraying in Vietnam of Agent Orange, a defoliant that contained a very toxic contaminant called 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin, or dioxin.

At home, Rachel Carson’s 1962 book “Silent Spring” about the damage from widespread spraying of pesticides such as DDT was resonating with ordinary Americans.

“Only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh,” Carson wrote. “On the farms the hens brooded, but no chicks hatched.”

DDT and similar pesticides alter the way birds break down calcium. The result: paper-thin eggshells that can’t support the weight of incubating baby birds.

The military stopped using Agent Orange in 1971, and the EPA banned DDT in 1972, but the chemicals’ footprints remain.

The number of federally recognized illnesses Vietnam veterans can have from Agent Orange exposures has steadily grown. DDT remains in at least 375 of the EPA’s 1,854 contaminated Superfund sites, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But awareness of the chemicals’ potential to harm people and wildlife has grown and society is demanding safer, environmentally responsible chemicals and other technologies, said John C. Warner, a chemist known as one of the founders of the field of green chemistry. But the training of young chemists hasn’t changed as much.

“The demand has significantly outpaced the supply of safer and environmentally responsible technologies,” said Warner, who co-founded the group Beyond Benign to help fill that educational gap. —Pat Rizzuto

Environmental Justice

Some liberals criticized Earth Day 50 years ago as an effort by privileged whites to divert public attention from what they saw as the vital issues of the day: opposing the Vietnam War and demanding more progress on civil rights.

Not everyone agreed, however. Environmental justice became a movement among environmentalists to highlight the burden of pollution and other problems faced by minority and low-income communities.

“Environment is a problem perpetuated by the expenditure of tens of billions a year on the Vietnam War, instead of on our decaying, crowded, congestion, polluted, ill urban areas that are inhuman traps for millions of people,” said Sen. Gaylord Nelson (D-Wis.) in an April 1970 speech.

“For the first time in our lives, there’s something that can’t be divided: the air,” Freddie Mae Brown, who founded the St. Louis Metropolitan Black Survival Committee, told a reporter in 1970.

Yet despite successful efforts to reduce air pollution, and research the EPA and National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences have funded to call attention to environmental justice concerns, minority populations remain highly exposed to air pollution, said Noelle Eckley Selin, an atmospheric chemist and associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in a podcast summarizing her research.

Asthmatic children of color experience higher rates of emergency room visits, hospitalizations, missed school days, and deaths due to asthma complications, according to a 2017 report by West Harlem Environmental Action Inc. Air pollution contributes to asthma attacks.

The report also found that 20.4% of Puerto Rican and 18.7% of black children up to age 17 are living with asthma, compared to 11.7% of white children.—Pat Rizzuto

Consensus on Climate

At the time of the first Earth Day, many scientists already understood the link between greenhouse gas emissions and a warming planet. That work was kick-started in the late 1960s, with the rise of the first numerical simulation models of the global climate, said Naomi Oreskes, a climate science professor at Harvard University.

But no broad consensus had yet formed. Some early theories argued that particulate matter could have a cooling effect because particles reflect sunlight, said John Cook, a research assistant professor at George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication.

Since then, scientific measurements have painted an increasingly bleak picture. In 1970, the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii recorded 325 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. As of February 2020, that figure had reached 414 parts per million.

The five warmest years from 1880 to 2019 have all occurred since 2015. Nine of the 10 warmest years have occurred since 2005, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Global sea levels are also rising at a faster pace, more than doubling from 1.4 millimeters per year throughout most of the 20th century to 3.6 millimeters per year by 2006, NOAA said.

Those increasingly accurate measurements have been made possible by giant leaps in computing power, Cook said.

The disagreements on climate change in the 1970s were also far less politically charged than today’s debates, said Geoffrey Supran, a research associate at Harvard University’s Department of the History of Science.

“The difference between then and now is that global warming hadn’t yet entered the general public’s consciousness,” Supran said. “A scientific consensus was already emerging, but scientists’ warnings fell largely on deaf political ears.”

Pushback from the corporate sector began soon after former National Aeronautics and Space Administration scientist James Hansen testified about climate change before Congress in 1988, according to Oreskes.

“I think that so long as climate change was a prediction about the future, [companies] weren’t too alarmed,” she said. “But when it becomes something that is happening now—a fact, something that can be observed and measured—that is when they shift mode.” —Stephen Lee

Unprecedented Species Loss

Earth Day was founded in part to highlight the connection between human well-being and biological diversity, and it was part of the movement that inspired the Endangered Species Act.

But 50 years later, global biodiversity is on the verge of collapse, scientists warn. Centuries of human fossil fuel use, industrialization, and deforestation have put climate change on a trajectory that is expected to lead to the extinction of more than 1 million species by 2100—an unprecedented loss, according to a U.N. 2019 report.

The report found that human actions have led to a 20% decline in the global abundance of native species on land since 1900.

“Biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people are our common heritage and humanity’s most important life-supporting ‘safety net,’” Sandra Díaz, an ecologist at the National University of Córdoba in Argentina, and co-chair of the U.N. report, said in 2019. “But our safety net is stretched almost to breaking point.”

Climate change-driven mass extinctions are expected to be sudden and catastrophic after 2030 as plants and animals are exposed to high temperatures they’ve never experienced before, University College London research published April 8 in the journal Nature shows.

“It’s not a slippery slope, but a series of cliff edges, hitting different areas at different times,” study lead author Alex Pigot, a researcher at the University College London, said in a statement.

And as Earth Day turns 50 with much of the world in lockdown, the pandemic that caused it, Covid-19, is believed to be linked to another biodiversity issue, wildlife trafficking. —Bobby Magill

To contact the reporter on this story: Stephen Lee in Washington at stephenlee@bloombergenvironment.com
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Gregory Henderson at ghenderson@bloombergenvironment.com; Chuck McCutcheon at cmccutcheon@bloombergenvironment.com

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