Earth Day has outlived its usefulness

April 22 has come and gone, and with it, a great deal of fanfare, brouhaha and other derring-do with tons of municipalities, schools and other institutions showing off how green they are for Earth Day.

And frankly, all of it is hooey.

Showing off your 'green cred' for the cameras and media on April 22 has become de rigueur for many and it's starting to upset me a little.

Earth Day is a nice idea, but it's so very 1990, don't you think? Back then, there was no Inconvenient Truth, no teeth-grinding over carbon emissions and only a small hole in the ozone layer. Areosol cans were simply on the way out and CFCs were everyone's big concern. That first Earth Day ushered in a new era of acceptance of environmental themes and all of a sudden, it was cool to be green. Today, we have environmentally-friendly cleaning products, municipalities are providing larger recycling bins, composting and organic-waste curbside pick-up. We compost, rinse out milk bags so they can be recycled and generally spend more time considering the fate of the world and its environment than our parents did.

And that's why as far as I'm concerned, Earth Day should really just pack its bags and go, like an house guest who has stayed too long. It's not needed, it's not really wanted (I mean come on, do we get a day off? No.), and it doesn't serve any purpose now that our consciousness levels have been raised.

Sure there are some people who feel that as long as we drive cars anywhere or live in a home that's not a treehouse, than we're not doing our part, but the reality is a massive ship can't just turn on a dime – and neither can human behaviour. We've started the turn and we are starting to get ourselves moving in the right direction.

Now, if we can just get 115-pound women to stop driving Cadillac Escalades to the Star bucks drive-through and idling for 20 minutes while waiting for their triple-caramel cauppuccino macchiato half-caf nonfat latte, then we'd really be onto something.

Riverdale High School teacher Brent Callahan agrees. His students have been working on a personal project all year with the ultimate goal of setting up a composting and recycling centre somewhere in Pierrefonds, in collaboration with partners Servomax, Eco-Quartier Pierrefonds-Roxboro. The class has also campaigned to rid the school cafeteria of Styrofoam – thus making the environment a year-long campaign that will remain in the students' consciousness forever. "It's important to back up talk with action," said Callahan, who describes himself as a 'pit bull for the environment,' and plans on meeting with Nelligan MNA Yolande James to possibly a site for the recycling centre. "(The environment) is something people must concern themselves with 365 days a year. Earth Day allows a lot of people to pretend they care about the state of the environment, but it's just talk."

I couldn't have said it better myself. For all our families and the families that come after it, we owe it to ourselves to make every day Earth Day.