This week, you’ll see a lot green, celebrating the earth. Businesses will promote their purported eco-friendly products wrapped in plastic, plastered with pictures of happy trees. Corporate greenwashing, or the practice of dispersing misleading claims about a product, service, or company that make it seem more environmentally friendly than it really is, has infiltrated Earth Day.
However, Earth Day did not begin with an obligatory promotion of trees. After Rachel Carson’s publication of Silent Spring, in 1962, an enormous oil spill in Santa Barbara in 1969, and greater awareness about the links between pollution and the health of living organisms, Senator Gaylord Nelson established the first Earth Day in 1970. Protests rallied “against oil spills, polluting factories and power plants, raw sewage, toxic dumps, pesticides, freeways, the loss of wilderness, and the extinction of wildlife,” according to Earth Day’s website.
These issues are relevant, even today, and show that sustainability is important in many parts of the world, not just in exclusive forests. In addition, climate change could make the Earth unlivable, especially in communities where people do not have the resources and are not allowed the agency to move away or curtail the effects of global warming.
While paying tribute to our trees and natural ecosystems is incredibly important today (and every day), we also need to recognize that our environment is intimately connected to justice and equality. Pollution and the near effects of Climate Change have disproportionately affected minority and low-income communities. These same communities don’t typically have the resources to directly combat pollution or the effects of climate change. Seeking justice and equality is just as much a part of environmentalism as hugging trees.
Remember, on this Earth Day and every day, that Environmental Justice, Climate Justice, the ocean, the trees, the people, and the algae, are all important to protect and are all dependent on each other.