What Earth Day means in 2024?

April 22 of each year since 1970 has been set aside to mark Earth Day.

The occasion hosts a range of events supportive of environmental protection. As many as a billion people across the 193 countries of the planet are believed to participate in observances.

The theme for 2024 is Planet against Plastics, a particularly resonant idea in a country which continuously clogs its rivers with plastic waste and fills its dumps with non-biodegradable packaging material.

After 54 years, the planet is more tangibly aware of the impact of the ongoing abuse of the global environment. Low-lying islands have disappeared under rising oceans. Coastlines are under threat as high tides reach even more dangerously inland.

Earth Day seems to have devolved into a ritual of generalised worry that barely registers on the day itself.

Planning Minister Pennelope Beckles was the principal guest on April 22 as UWI St Augustine hosted exhibits, talks and awareness sessions for young people.

Education on issues that climate change and environmental abuse pose to the country and the world is important, but while Ms Beckles laments the continuing threat of ocean-borne plastics to nesting turtles, the government of which she is a part does little to address the problem at origin.

She sits in a Cabinet that pays little more than lip service to the work necessary to begin reducing the production of non-biodegradable packaging, or enforcing litter laws that might keep some garbage out of Trinidad and Tobago’s waterways.

The government is leaning into an effort to exploit existing gas-producing fields while seeking more production capacity through partnerships with our beleaguered neighbour Venezuela.

Trinidad and Tobago is in the confusing situation of coping both with floods and dry taps as it proves unable – after years of struggling with both – to harness rainfall for effective water retention.

Efforts at changing the national taste for petrol have fallen to private concerns and quasi-independent state agencies.

The National Gas Company recently announced Toni Sirju-Ramnarine as the new head of its Green division, signalling a high-level commitment to using its commanding position as a natural-gas supplier to improve fuel options.

Automotive importers, both brand representatives and roll-on, roll-off vehicle suppliers, are shifting their offerings to hybrids and electric vehicles, though more for the tax breaks than out of commitment to an improved environment.

Far too many projects are easily identified as examples of greenwashing, that pernicious, PR-friendly expression of environmental concern that isn’t backed by any real change.

We need education and sensitisation for young people on Earth Day, but April 22 should also be a day of accountability, when private and public sectors account to citizens what their efforts to address environmental sustainability have delivered.

It’s what the country and the planet desperately need.