Famed environmentalist Denis Hayes spoke at Colorado College last week, and it was very tempting to ask the creator of EARTH DAY what he thought about speaking to an audience which had eliminated theirs. Oh, we have Earth Month, and CC has Earth Week, to make room ostensibly for the growing plethora of environmentalist activities, to a thinning crowd unfortunately. Shrinking the party is a curious strategy, don’t you think? Obviously the Earth deserves more than a day’s commemoration, but the point of an Earth Day, is to concentrate popular attention toward building global community. Perhaps the new “Earth Hour” attempts to recapture that focus, you’d think there might be a happy medium, such as… Earth Day?! We’re content with holidays of a day duration. America’s uber-patriots would have expanded the 4th of July to Independence Month, if such a thing was really meant to be effective. We do not have Memorial Month, or Veteran’s Month, or Christmas or Easter Months either. Oddly, Pikes Peak environmentalists chose to expand their drinking hours to last a month, encompassing more eco-themed happy hours to please their members-only. Local common folks looking beyond the usual corporate media antagonist apathy on subjects environmental, find themselves on April 22 with no Earth Day.
It more and more seems that in the US, at least, the Environmental Movement has been completely degraded down and even totally co-opted altogether by corporate forces.