Editorial: Earth Day is over. Take a clod to lunch.
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1995:
The Editor’s most original contribution to the initial Earth Day, 25 years ago,
may have been coining the slogan, “Today is Earth Day; take a clod to lunch.” In the 1970
atmosphere of Berkeley, California, where the Editor was then a cub reporter, it went
without saying that the lunch would be vegetarian. The radical idea was not that meat-eat-
ing was and is the most fundamental environmental issue. Already Food First author
Frances Moore Lappe, Population Bomb author Paul Erlich, and Silent Spring author
Rachel Carson had delineated the links between meat production and depleted topsoil, star-
vation, and overuse of pesticides. Every incipient environmentalist in that particular time
and place at least paid lip-service to the ideal of vegetarianism. Disagreement arose, rather,
over the affirmation that the path to change lay through breaking bread instead of heads;
that environmental problems were due not to inherent flaws in the capitalist system, but to
rectifiable ignorance, which could be overcome more easily through discussion than
through fulminating about smashing the state.