On this day 18th of April 1989. The bigwigs in the “Earth Day 20 Foundation “delivered letters to President Bush, USSR Premier Gorbachev, China Premier Li Peng, and UN Secretary General De Cuellar. “
The letter, signed by Gaylord Nelson, Barry Commoner, Elliot Richardson, John O’Connor (National Toxics Campaign), Gene Karpinski (U.S. Public Interest Research Group), Peter Bahouth (Greenpeace), Cordelia Biddle, and me called on the leaders of the superpowers to convene an environmental summit under the auspices of the UN (source – Furia, 1990, EPA Journal).
And this is all part of the performative pressure effort, what we would now called virtue-signalling, Cynically, it’s what you would expect to happen. And this is trying to fill the problem and policy streams and the politics stream and put pressure on people who might otherwise not do as much as they should.
Why this matters.
It doesn’t, really. “Nothing matters very much, and very much matters not at all” as someone (Arthur Balfour) once said.
What happened next?
We got Earth Day at 20. And lots of old hippies who have made their peace with the system, got jobs had gotten jobs, wishing they were 20 years younger. And here we are. Now. It’s unclear what impact the letterhead if any, the these people who write memoirs don’t admit that they were particularly influenced by this or that And it’s all wishes and begging of Our Lords and Masters. Building effective movement organisations and movements that grow, learn, organise and win – that’s beyond our wit, it seems.