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Last year, the U.S. ranked 39th on the Environmental Performance Index (EPI). This year, 61st. Happy Earth Day.
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The index, LiveScience reports, "ranks 163 countries based on 10 indicators of environmental protection, such as levels of air pollution, marine protection laws, water quality, and their rate of planting new trees."
The leading countries are not a huge surprise—Iceland came in first, Switzerland second, Costa Rica third and Sweden fourth.
LiveScience quotes one of the project leaders, Columbia University's Marc Levy: "We're the only country that has a significant amount of people that don't believe in climate change." It's unfair to hold up year-to-year results as a simple comparison, Levy noted, because the methods for data collection vary, but for the last 20 years the U.S.'s efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions, air pollution, and climate change have consistently lagged behind Europe's.
He also recognizes the complexities involved in judging a country's recycling habits, but makes an important, far-too-underestimated point: "The countries that are really trying to reduce waste are working to change people's behavior so that they use fewer materials."
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As we can see from all the Earth Day paraphernalia and "green" sales pitches, the recent explosion in green consciousness has been focused more on how we fit the environment into our current lifestyles, rather than how we can fit our lifestyles into what's best for the environment. Buying more things, just because they're organic or renewable, still consumes resources from the earth, creates waste in their manufacture, needs them to be transported around, and probably means replacing other things, which means more waste sent to the landfill.
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As Levy said, "it's not just about recycling but also about managing waste and limiting how much is produced to begin with." Behavioral change is the real issue—if we can address that, maybe we can start moving up in the Environmental Performance Index, rather than plummeting down. 40 years after the first Earth Day, there's still lots of work to be done.
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