WBEZ 91.5 Chicago

Since Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson proposed the first Earth Day more than 40 years ago, the day of environmental action has morphed into something quite different — not unlike the environmental movement itself.

Greenwashing is ubiquitous year-round, but it’s especially in bloom around April 22. Take the particularly brazen example of an Earth Day poster contest in Utah that asked schoolchildren to sing the praises of oil, gas and mining. It’s enough to turn some off to the idea entirely, as it has for writer Marc Gunther:

So why do I hate #EarthDay?

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In response to years of what he views as dithering and ineffectual responses by government to the problem he helped identify, climate scientist James Hansen cited a moral obligation in leaving his post at NASA to campaign more actively for political and legal efforts to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

Hansen spent more than four decades forging the scientific basis for manmade climate change. In 1988 he was among the first to sound off on global warming’s hazards, and earlier this month he announced his next paper would be his last for NASA.

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Raise a cold one this weekend and make a toast to the Clean Water Act.

That’s the advice of the Natural Resources Defense Council as they team up with 21 craft breweries in an effort to raise awareness of threats to the key ingredient in beer.

As any beginning homebrewer’s kitchen floor will attest, the brewing process requires a lot of water. Beer is 90 percent water, and including all the water it takes to clean brewing materials and rinse the packaged product, it can take 7 gallons of water to produce one gallon of beer.

“When you talk about beer, you have to talk about water. It’s not as sexy as talking about hops and malt,” said Jason Spaulding, co-owner of Brewery Vivant in Grand Rapids, Mich.

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New evidence suggesting Asian carp may already be in the Great Lakes basin has renewed fears that the invasive species could pose an existential threat to the area’s lucrative fishing industry.

“The fact that fish may already be in the lake does not mean it’s game over,” said Lindsay Chadderton, aquatic invasive species director for The Nature Conservancy. “The real risk is that if we continue to debate and don’t act, we may lose that opportunity.”

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The last barge carrying coal to Pilsen’s Fisk Power Plant lumbered up the Chicago canal in late August, dumping a final 1,500 tons of coal to burn in a community whose members were more than happy to see their industrial neighbor go.

Before they shut down, the Fisk and Crawford coal plants were among the state’s largest emitters of toxic chemicals. In 2010, the latest year of data available in the EPA’s Toxics Release Inventory, the power plants were among the leading sources of barium compounds, hydrochloric acid, hydrogen fluoride, mercury compounds and sulfuric acid.

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Against the backdrop of some 154 solar panels and Chicago’s first freestanding (and only utility-scale) wind turbine, Gov. Pat Quinn drank in the green roof atop Testa Produce, a south side wholesaler of fruits and vegetables that is the first LEED Platinum facility of its kind in the nation.

The $24 million refrigerated food distribution center was the site of Quinn’s debriefing of sorts from a trade trip he just took to Mexico — the first time an Illinois governor had made such a visit in 13 years. Water technology, he said, would be a key industry for both nations as they grapple with economic and environmental challenges.

With 1.6 million Mexican-Americans in the state, Quinn said, Illinois has a special relationship with its second largest trade partner (Canada is first). And in parched Mexico City, water technology is a growth industry.

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Yoga pants really have nothing to do with environmental ethics. But to hear Lululemon, Apple or any number of companies appropriate terms like “ecosystem,” you might start to think all CEOs are green thumbs.

Most are not, but Sophia Siskel, CEO of the Chicago Botanic Garden, thinks more should be.

“Gardening has the power to heal the world’s economic and environmental problems,” she said Friday at Northwestern University, well aware of how that admittedly tall order might be received.

“Someone could say that’s flowery, flighty or naïve,” said Siskel, who got her master of business administration degree from Northwestern, but “we have to stop being embarrassed about the things we’re passionate about when they don’t have hardcore quantitative metrics.”

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