Christina Jarvis - Lucky Mud & Other Foma: A Field Guide to Kurt Vonneguts Environmentalism and Planetary Citizenship

So how did we get from that humility before lifes precariousness to Bransons game of planet beach ball? One person who saw it all coming was the irascible American novelist Kurt Vonnegut.

NAOMI KLEIN , This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

I think one thing thats really loony is that people would be perfectly content and think weve stolen something if life goes on for another hundred years.... I think that its reasonable to suspect that the world is ending and to propose ways of preventing this.

KURT VONNEGUT , Library of Congress Address, February 1, 1971

When Kurt Vonnegut took the stage in New York Citys Bryant Park for the 1970 Earth Day rally, the crowd was jubilant.the speaker platform. Noting the joyous mood, Vonnegut opened his speech with a joke: It is unusual for a total pessimist to be speaking at a spring celebration. Anyway, here we all are. He wasted no time getting to his central point: that the Earth Day demonstrators needed to get President Nixons attention, because he has our money and he has our power. Responding to Nixons decision to sit out the events, Vonnegut wondered which sporting event the president was watching.... Perhaps a boxing match by satellite television.

This jab at Nixon was personal for Vonnegut, who had participated in the Washington, DC, Vietnam Moratorium march the previous November while Nixon watched college football, deliberately ignoring the crowd. Critiquing the administrations decision to prioritize military spending over environmental protection, Vonnegut soberly declared that Nixons worries over being the first American president to lose a war were misplaced. He may be the first American president to lose an entire planet, Vonnegut declared. Like the thousands of other Earth Day speakers, who called for science-based, ecological perspectives, Vonnegut leveled his most urgent critique of Nixon at his profession: I am sorry hes a lawyer; I wish to God that he was a biologist.

From the grand scale of national policy change and planetary survival, Vonnegut shifted to the small actions that nearby marchers were making while the Vietnam War continuedpicking up trash missed by the Sanitation Department. These efforts, Vonnegut feared, would be no match for the pollution masked by great advertising campaigns, the Nixon Administrations inattention, and an economic model where polluters are looked upon as ordinary Joes just doing their job. Vonnegut predicted, In the future [polluters] will be looked upon as swine, and he had final, comforting words for his audience: Those who try their best to save the planet will find a loose, cheerful, sexy brass band waiting to honor them right outside the Pearly Gates. What will the band be playing? When the Saints Come Marching In.

What all these characterizations miss is that beneath Vonneguts surface pessimism lay deeply held beliefs in planetary citizenship and engagement. They also miss the fact that much of Vonneguts writings was richly conversant with, and sometimes ahead of, environmental approaches throughout his career.

Read in the context of the more than fifty speeches collected by Environmental Action, the group coordinating Earth Day, Vonneguts speech seems neither out of place nor particularly gloomy. Nixon got off light in Vonneguts remarks compared to the scathing critiques leveled at the president by politicians Adlai Stevenson, Gaylord Nelson, Richard Ottinger, and Frank Moss. Vonneguts criticisms of anti-litter campaigns and corporate greenwashing, meanwhile, were in line with those of key Earth Day organizers, including national coordinator Denis Hayes. Environmental Action flatly refused all corporate funding, and Hayes condemned the politicians and business leaders who tried to turn the environmental movement into a massive anti-litter campaign.