By Mireille Vermeulen
Yesterday was World Environment Day, or Earth Day as others call it. As it is every year on 22 April. Did you notice something special? Was there any event organised in your community to bring the earth under your attention? Did you take a walk, felt the heat of the sun and smelled the flowers? Stepped in a big heap of dog shit and enjoyed the beauty of nature? I wonder what it means to people, Environment Day. I’m sure that there were lots of conferences with a link to climate and the environment, like the one on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Bolivia. But for many people it was a day like any other. It is a bit like International Women’s Day on 8 March. I remember that day being intensively celebrated in Benin. National holiday, women and men nicely dressed up, parades broadcasted on television, but also numerous festivities in the villages in the north where I lived (OK,OK, our development organization pushed a little and supported it financially). But International Women’s Day definitely meant something.The first 8 March I experienced back home was a big shock: not even an article in the newspaper!
 Environment scores better. In one of the free papers (tons of paper spread all over the train, even on Environment Day...) I saw 5 pages of "green" articles! They dealt with eco-bees in the city, shoes made from fish-skin and vertical farming. The latter is astonishing if you have never seen it before: professor Dickson Despommier invented a building, constructed from boxes with vegetables, herbs and small fruit trees. The boxes are piled up to 30 stores. Every store has its own watering system and each plant its own chip to register how much water and what nutrients it needs. Amazing! Still science fiction, but the idea is nice. In a simplified form it could work everywhere and it would mean fresh vegetables at zero food miles for a lot of people. Good news on Environment Day! But the fact that an invention like this is presented in such a sophisticated way, shows what is happening with environment: it is big business. Leslie Kaufman concluded the same thing in yesterday’s New York Times. The environment movement took the initiative for Earth Day 40 years ago, but it has been completely taken over by business. But how bad is that? Green has become part of our life, is even interesting from commercial point of view.
How can we take up the idea of promoting an alternative lifestyle by making it a special day first? I know we cannot celebrate every special day, for every day is special. That would fill the calendar with only national holidays, which is positive for the ambiance in local communities, but too negative for the economy, probably. But do we already have Family Farming Day? And isn’t it time to have Family Farming Day? Maybe we can choose the day that the UN announces that there will be an International Year of Family Farming... that will be a good day to memorize.