Christie’s Earth Week in Review

This is the last installment in our series, and it will be brief.

Capturing the essence of the current meaning of Earth Day, we turn to that crumbling pillar of the main stream press, the New York Times:

At 40, Earth Day Is Now Big Business

By LESLIE KAUFMAN

Todd Heisler/The New York Times Peat the Penguin at F. A. O. Schwarz. The toy, made of soy fibers, teaches green lessons to children.

So strong was the antibusiness sentiment for the first Earth Day in 1970 that organizers took no money from corporations and held teach-ins “to challenge corporate and government leaders.”

Forty years later, the day has turned into a premier marketing platform for selling a variety of goods and services, like office products, Greek yogurt and eco-dentistry.

[…]

To many pioneers of the environmental movement, eco-consumerism, creeping for decades, is intensely frustrating and detracts from Earth Day’s original purpose.

“This ridiculous perverted marketing has cheapened the concept of what is really green,” said Denis Hayes, who was national coordinator of the first Earth Day and is returning to organize this year’s activities in Washington. “It is tragic.”

As we all know, over this same forty year period, sadly, much of politics and what now passes for “environmentalism” have devolved into similar “ridiculous perverted marketing” and propaganda, broadcast uncritically by a cowed and depleted media.

And I’m saddened to have to call out one “environmental group” for use of coded and offensive rhetoric in our current Tea Party racists tinged climate, by calling Obama’s off shore drilling plan “snake oil” and a “deal with the Devil“. As these “environmental activists” surely know, many in the Tea Party movement and even more extremists right wing groups really do believe that Obama is the anti-Christ.

The confluence of the ascendance of corporate marketing, crass political propaganda, environmental group opportunism, and media collapse played out in NJ all week (and check out my Wednesday photo and compare it to the Governor’s Thursday photo op on left below!).

The Culmination: With his daughter Bridget at his side, Gov. Chris Christie announced at the Surfrider Beach Club in Sea Bright on Thursday that he is opposed to offshore drilling. (STAFF PHOTO: BRADLEY J. PENNER)

Christie’s Earth Week: How Green Was My Valley!

Monday:

Christie’s Earth Week Preview

Tuesday:

Christie’s Earth Week: Day 1 – Red Tape Rollback

Wednesday:

Christie Earth Week Day 2: Back Door Man

Thursday:

Earth Week Day 3: Clean Communities Cover

Friday:

Christie Making the Shore Look Safe for Private Beach Clubs