The 40th anniversary of Earth Day arrives this week to relatively little fanfare. We’re focused on other things: high unemployment, a moribund economy, residual sniveling over health insurance reform. But 40 years is an important milestone.

我是40年前宾夕法尼亚州韦恩初中的地球日协调员。我记得在学校的模仿机上肆虐地球日传单，仍然可以记住，使用的化学品的甜味（无疑的毒性）香气。我也回忆起，在费城的巨大庆祝活动Fairmount Park(I believe the largest Earth Day celebration anywhere that year). Pioneering landscape architect Ian McHarg, of the University of Pennsylvania, chaired the event.

我一个独特的回忆之一就是一个扬声器，要求参与者承诺永远不会购买新的内燃机汽车。我们知道石油的空气污染和资源开采影响（虽然尚未全球变暖），汽车被正确被认为是主要的罪魁祸首之一。我没有加入那个质疑，正确地说，我确实会在沿线某处买一辆新车，我买了几个。但我们所有人，那天欢呼来自Fairmount Park的广泛草坪的发言者，知道减少对石油的成瘾很重要。

Unfortunately, our enthusiasm didn’t get us very far.

By the time the first Earth Day came along in 1970, the world had consumed roughly 240 billion barrels of oil since the dawn of the petroleum age (when oil was discovered in 1859 in Titusville, Pennsylvania). Today, in 2010, that cumulative consumption is up another 860 billion barrels — to 1.1 trillion barrels. That’s right, of all of the oil consumed in the world since the dawn of the petroleum age, an astonishing 78% of it has been consumed since Earth Day in 1970 — that day when environmental awareness reached the mainstream! [Early data from“The Oil Age: World Oil Production 1859 – 2050″; later data from theBP Statistical Review of World Energy，2009年6月。

在第一个地球日之后三年，1973年，世界被“能源危机”击中了“能源危机”，然后在20世纪70年代末击中了第二个。这是保存的另一种动机 - 但我们的石油消费仍然攀升。而且，在此过程中，我们已经发布了所有储存的碳碳 - 碳碳，花费数亿年累积 - 进入大气层，有助于全球气候变化。

We can’t go another 40 years without dramatic reductions in oil consumption. Indeed, most experts say we can’t go even another 20 years on our present course. We’re long past the time for serious action on our addiction to fossil fuels. While I didn’t pledge to never buy a new car 40 years ago, I did make a personal commitment to doing what I could to make a difference. The company I founded in 1985 — 15 years after that first Earth Day —BuildingGreen, LLC, is one of the ways I’ve tried to make a difference — publishing information on reducing the environmental impacts of buildings and the built environment.

Clearly, there’s a lot left to accomplish, but I remain guardedly optimistic that once our nation really gets it, we will be able to employ the sort of focused determination and drive shown in the retooling of our entire industrial sector during World War II while Americans accepted dramatic reductions in personal resource consumption necessary to divert resources to the war effort. With the growing solar and wind industries, with know-how in weatherizing and insulating existing buildings, with new models about how to create pedestrian-friendly communities, and with the best universities in the world pushing the technology innovation, we have the potential to solve these challenges once our nation collectively decides it’s finally time to take action.

I invite you to share comments on this blog.

Alex Wilson is the executive editor of环境建设新闻and founder of BuildingGreen, LLC. To keep up with his latest articles and musings, you cansign up for his Twitter feeds.