Every 26 years, I get invited to serve as master of ceremonies for the St. Louis Earth Day Festival. I emceed an Earth Day program in 1989 at Creve Coeur Park when I was publisher of The Riverfront Times. By popular demand, I assume, festival organizers brought me back to kick off this year’s program, April 26 at Forest Park.
This is a good interval, actually. There’s no danger of over-exposure, and it’s nice to bring a little perspective to the situation.
Both the 1989 and 2015 events enjoyed beautiful weekend weather at a park. Both were intended to do something positive about the environment. Both had “Earth Day” in the title.
That’s where the similarities ended.
The 1989 version was an earthier Earth Day. There were no corporate sponsors. Almost exclusively environment-alist groups filled the booths. There were some left-leaning speakers and a long list of bands and musicians. It wasn’t billed as a family event.
A funny thing happened on the way to Earth Day 1989: The authorities essentially shut it down.
Citing concerns about crowd control, St. Louis County park rangers allowed a few hundred people into the park at any one time while turning away many hundreds more.
At the time, I wrote an RFT column headlined “Whose Park Is It, Anyway?” in which I related how the rangers told me that the decision to turn people away was made by the Maryland Heights Police Department out of concerns for neighboring homes and businesses, but a policeman there told me the city didn’t have anyone on the scene with authority to close a street.
To be fair, the unpolished organizers had been late in getting their permits, and Wayne C. Kennedy, the legendary director of St. Louis County Parks, apparently had made a special effort to allow the event to happen at all. But we weren’t buying that the outcome was acceptable.
“As part of the disappointing and disappointed throng, I’m not convinced that the county had its heart in hosting a day full of rock music and speeches by environmentalists (who incidentally have been at odds with the parks department over Queeny Park development and other issues),” I wrote. “And as an eyewitness, I’m here to tell you that Creve Coeur Park could have accommodated lots of those folks who were turned away (rudely, it appears) at the front gates.
“But that’s how it works in 1989. No scenes, no protesters, no nasty confrontations, no charges and countercharges. They just quietly turn away large numbers of cars at the gates to a public park, and the people in the cars go do something else.”
It works a little differently in 2015.
This year’s Earth Day festival was sponsored by the city of St. Louis, along with 10 other governmental and corporate entities, and none of the many thousands who showed up at Forest Park had any difficulty getting in. The mayor of the city gave a speech at the event, rather than a department head in the county giving an explanation afterward.
There was plenty of good music at this year’s event, but it was a backdrop to the overwhelmingly family-friendly theme—not what the focal point had been in 1989. Environmental organizations were in attendance as passive booth participants, not main-stage speakers.
The event is now presented by St. Louis Earth Day, a nonprofit with a staff of five full-time employees and a mission that includes a green-dining alliance for restaurants, as well as a program to help other public events with green practices. It’s still a modestly sized group—with an annual budget of $419,000—but what a contrast to 1989, when a couple of unknown fellows bankrolled it out of their pockets.
I’m a little sentimental about the 1989 organizers. That’s probably because I’m also a little sentimental about the original Earth Day, in 1970, in which some 20 million Americans staged peaceful demonstrations—across party and economic lines—calling for environmental reforms. It was activism at its best.
But in fairness, there was no pretending that 1989 looked anything like 1970. There’s no denying that rock music had been expected to drive attendance, not collective bipartisan outrage about environmental issues. The world had already moved on from the headier idealism of a generation earlier.
The sentimental me wants to be cynical about how things have evolved, but I think I’ll refrain (except to note that the presence of Republic Services as an Earth Day sponsor was a bit jarring, given the fires burning under Bridgeton). It is what it is, and I certainly think the event in Forest Park played a constructive role in educating families about green practices.
St. Louis Earth Day doesn’t pretend to be something it is not. It is not an activist group regarding environmental policies in the U.S., just as Earth Day itself is no longer about kicking butt and taking names like it was in 1970.
As I did in 1989, I’m doing an Earth Day postmortem, but this time my questions are not about the powers-that-be that held the event down. This time, I’m asking about the powers that be—specifically, the corporate ones—that lifted it up.
I asked Cassandra P. Hage, St. Louis Earth Day’s executive director, how she reconciles the divergent groups that make up the event. “We’re a middle-ground organization,” she said. “We really need the place to be where the environmental groups can be part of the same event as some of the corporations they’re suing. It’s important that we have an open-door policy to companies, but at the same time, no one can keep anyone else out. We want an event where we’re all celebrating the common goals and the common ground of overall sustainability of the environment.
“The consumer is the big driver, and our role is to educate the consumer,” she added. “They should think about environmental considerations every time they make a choice in the marketplace and in their lives.”
That works for me, as long as no one pretends that companies “greenwashing” activities at Earth Day means they should be given a free pass when they resist even modest efforts by government to clean up the air, to move to a cleaner energy future, and the like. I reserve the right to remain a subversive, liberal tree-hugger when it comes to environmental issues.
But it would benefit all of us to harken back to 1970 as a time of much greater reason and dialogue about the environment. The nonpartisan National Journal recently pointed out just how incredibly partisan environmental issues have become in the past four decades, citing the centrist League of Conservation Voters’ congressional scoreboard as Exhibit A.
The numbers are stunning. “In 1971, just 16 percent of House Republicans received scores below 20; in 2013, virtually the entire House Republican Conference—97 percent—received LCV scores below 20, and most of those Republicans received scores below 10,” noted the Journal. “In 1971, only 17 percent of House Democrats received LCV scores higher than 80; in 2013, 83 percent scored 80 or higher.”
The Journal pointed out that no Republican has even mentioned Earth Day on the floor of Congress since 2010.
In that regard, I was heartened to see that the very existence of Earth Day is still troubling to the likes of Rush Limbaugh, who continues to pollute St. Louis airwaves. He’s pointed out that Earth Day falls on Vladimir Lenin’s birthday. He thinks it’s “rooted in an anti-capitalist belief.” If a guy who once said the BP oil spill is “as natural as ocean water” despises Earth Day, then Earth Day must be doing something right. The middle ground isn’t a terrible place.
If we manage to come together enough to ignore climate-change deniers like Limbaugh and related fools, perhaps the air will still be breathable when I waddle up to the microphone to kick off Earth Day 2041.
SLM co-owner Ray Hartmann is a panelist on KETC Channel 9’s Donnybrook, which airs Thursdays at 7 p.m.
