Earth Day -- New Orleans and Gulf Coast (excerpt) -- do people care?

Parts of a much longer article -- www.nola.com/t-p/ by Jonathan Tilove of Times-Picayune

Forty-two years since Earth Day was founded by Sen. Gaylord Nelson, a Wisconsin Democrat, to harness Americans’ dawning environmental consciousness — and two years since Louisiana and the Gulf suffered through arguably the worst environmental disaster in the nation’s history — environmentalism has never been a more polarizing, partisan issue.

The organized environmental movement is largely viewed as a project of the left. It is mostly Democratic politicians who sound environmental themes. If you want to hear a thundering denunciation of the heedless, profit-squeezing negligence of BP and other oil companies, try Massachusetts Democrat Ed Markey, the ranking Democrat on Natural Resources.

But for most Republicans, as epitomized by the Louisiana delegation, environmentalism is a kind of bugaboo, climate science is suspect at best, alternative energy is mostly pie-in-the-sky craving the a la mode of a federal subsidy, and electric cars are a joke. The EPA — the agency founded by Richard Nixon the same year Senator Nelson created Earth Day — is a symbol of tyranny and anti-competitive interference, and the Gulf oil spill  was, in the end, a more lasting economic disaster than an environmental one.
. . .
The rub comes, said Don Boesch, a New Orleans native and environmental scientist who served on the Spill Commission, if the rest of the nation, being called on to help restore the Gulf, views the indigenous political leaders as feckless stewards.

“I’d like to amend Congressman Landry’s sign to read, ‘Safe Drilling = More Jobs,’” Boesch said.
The good news this Earth Day, and this second anniversary of the BP spill, according to Mark Davis, executive director of the Tulane Institute on Water Resources Law and Policy, is that there is much greater political consensus about the urgency of coastal issues than ever before, and far more serious efforts under way to grapple with them.

“The true legacy of Earth Day is not symbolized by the political discussions,” Davis said. “You have to look past the political speeches that one tends to hear today and what you hear on whatever brand of talk radio you listen to. There’s a huge amount of work going on that I don’t think anybody would have contemplated 42 years ago. I don’t think there’s any going back. After all, nature bats last.”
http://www.nola.com/environment/index.ssf/2012/04/earth_day_points_up_divide_bet.html