A waning gibbous moon over Logan Martin Lake in Alabama. When the sun sets on our planet, the moon rises. Maybe there is hope in that. Glynn Wilson

The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –

It is a sad time for Planet Earth, maybe the saddest of times since the first Earth Day 55 years ago today.

By the 20th anniversary in 1990, after news organizations developed specialty beats to cover “pollution” of the natural environment in the United States and around the world, and environmental non-profit groups formed to fight for clean air and water and first began talking about global warming as a major problem for the planet, public opinion began to coalesce around the issue.

A peak of 8 percent of the American public said pollution of the environment was the top problem facing the country in 1990, a year after the Exxon Valdez oil tanker ran aground in Prince William Sound, Alaska, dumping millions of barrels of crude into the bay. Pictures and video footage of oil-soaked ducks shocked the nation, and people wanted something done about it.

This placed concern for the environment up there with the economy, crime, education, health care and the federal budget debt and deficit, as indicated in my Master’s Thesis published in 1995, updated and presented at the Midwest Association of Public Opinion Research annual conference in Chicago on November 21-23, 1997.

Public Attitudes and Press Coverage of the Environment, 1968-1996

Proving that what politicians talk about and the press covers helps frame the issues and shape public opinion, concern for the environment is no longer on the national agenda or a major concern for the public, thanks in large part to Donald Trump’s campaign to call the whole problem a “hoax” and to use that to propel his presidential campaigns. He and Steve Bannon went on a crusade to make “immigration” the top problem, and it worked – because it was covered on a mass scale by the news media, right and left. Not just illegal immigration, mind you, a problem which has cried out for a legislative reform solution for decades but has never been dealt with by Congress. Immigrants became the problem, at least those with dark skin from Central and South America.

The government itself became “the problem,” because Republicans figured out how to exploit the public’s disgruntlement with taxes and bureaucracy to win elections.

One of the reasons I know a lot about this is because I was the first reporter in Alabama hired to cover the environment as a specialty beat in 1989, the year I wrote my first story about the problem of global warming. A national expert from the Sierra Club came to speak about it at a conference at an Episcopal camp down in Baldwin County, and I was there to cover it for a chain of newspapers on the Gulf Coast.

I pioneered framing threats to the environment as local, state and national problems, and the people won an impressive string of victories on several fronts, which I wrote about in my memoir, Jump On The Bus.

In the 1990s, President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore talked about this all the time, as well as addressing economic problems, reducing the debt and deficit. By the year 2000, at the turn of the century and the new millennium, we had a “Peace Dividend” because of it, and environmental problems were being addressed all over the place.

Unfortunately, conservative justices on the U.S. Supreme Court handed George W. Bush the presidential election that year, and Bush and the Republican Congress reversed years of progress with ill-conceived tax cuts for the rich and corporations, including Big Oil, and began their drive to “deregulate” the economy.

We knew this was a problem at the time, but no one much listened, until the economy began to crash in 2007, creating the Bush Great Recession, and then the BP Oil disaster took place in the Gulf of Mexico. At first the environment and the outdoors was not President Barack Obama’s thing, being raised in Chicago. But thanks to the influence of his daughters and their education, he took on pollution of the environment as a problem and made much progress.

Then Trump came along and wrecked it all with his giant, gold-plated wrecking ball.

Running against him in 2020, Joe Biden took on the problem of climate change in a major policy way, and used that to beat him at the polls. His legislative accomplishments in his first two years will be remembered as historic, unless Trump is able to carry out his plan to become dictator for life like Putin, and Elon Musk and his army of hackers and bots manage to obliterate actual history forever from the internet archives.

Fascism and Artificial Intelligence are now our most important problems, and nobody seems to be talking about these things as problems, or moving to do anything about them.

Our communications system seems now to be running on Meta and TikTok auto-pilot, taking us down to an idiocracy from which we may never be able to escape. Being uneducated and dumb is now trending hot, while being awake, aware, educated and “woke” has become the problem. Somehow with all their smarts, the experts at Harvard and Columbia cannot seem to win against ignorance and fascism.

Sorry for my pessimistic views on this Earth Day, a day when we should be celebrating the beauty and grandeur of Planet Earth. Mother Earth is crying today, as am I as I sit here by one of the most polluted lakes in the country, enjoying the view but knowing what problems lie beneath.

You can’t eat the fish.

But for some reason, some rich people are still building more Mac Mansions here. Funny, but many of the houses do not even have a view of the lake from inside the houses. Their front porches face the street, with a view of fields of planted grass that has to be mowed with gas powered lawn mowers.

The stupidity of human beings never ceases to amaze. After 13 billion years of evolution, and all the advances of the human species over the past 10,000 years since the last Ice Age, our fate comes down to this. Cutting the grass in a yard by a house with no view of the lake, where you can’t eat the fish.

I came back South for one more view of the place. But it is about to get hot for the next six months, so I’m headed north to higher elevation one more time – with your help. I don’t know if it will do any good or not. But I will keep trying as long as I can find the money for gas and a cheap or free place to camp.

Coming up on sunset at our campsite on Talladega Creek: Glynn Wilson

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