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Wednesday 23 April 2008

Did anyone notice?

Yesterday was officially Earth Day, Google had a nice little logo, the papers all had there little logos announcing it. Am sure they even had the happy public interest moments on the various news shows. But that seemed to be about it, did I miss some thing along the way? I remember Earth Day being this big huge thing.


  • Local Native groups would hold sunrise ceremonies at the Forks and events through out the day. The forks is a shopping mall and public parks space here in Winnipeg built around where are two rivers meet.

  • They would have events at the Zoo

  • Tours at the Musuem

  • A ralley or two promoting some Enviromental Cause or another

  • Multi page articles in the local papers showing ways people can be more environmentally friendly.

Where did it all go? I went on line and did a couple of Google searches trying to find events on Earth Day to post to our Communitas Paganus discussion list there was nearly the amount of things I was expecting. There was a event on Sunday the 27th, and another last night(As part of a two forum on Climate Change) I was stunned by the lack of build up and the lack of excitement surrounding Earth Day.


I think we have become so desensitized to the Environmental issues that people just don't care anymore. Every other month there is a new issue cropping up and a new movement or something to try and resolve it. So many people are starting to be told do this and not do that. The media doesn't know what to promote and report on any more. To make matter worse Environmentalist often get lumped together with other fringe groups. Let me give you an example from the Monday edition of the Winnipeg Free Press. The headline reads

"Thousands celebrate love of Earth, weed"

The article which took up about half a page of the paper, with several pictures and only a single column written. It was roughly about 400 words in total and of those 400 words 34 were given over to the Earth Day event. While the remainder focused on the people who gathered at the Manitoba Legislative building to light up and smoke a joint at 4:20 on April 20th. Clearly the Free Press showed their opinion that people getting away with illegally smoking pot and getting away with is more important then the Environment.

With everything going on around us? and the Environment being about the most important challenge facing how could people not pay alot more attention when Earth Day comes around.

1 comment:

Howling Hill said...

I think we have become so desensitized to the Environmental issues that people just don't care anymore.

No, I don't think it's desensitization at all. I think it's more about consumerism and how embedded it is into our psyches. We've all grown up in the age of consumerism and to undo those lessons taught to us by our parents and grandparents takes too much thought from the average consumer.

Individuals think it's other people who create the problem. Few realize *they* are the problem, or at least a large component of the problem.

You should write a letter to the editor about that article and say exactly what you just said. Very profound and truthful.