This Earth Day was all about politics. Fewer events were scheduled and coverage was less meaningful than in years past.

As the Santa Rosa Press Democrat noted: "Some environmental leaders concede Earth Day has lost some of its 70s-era urgency as the conservation ethic becomes part of American culture and environmental organizations work year-around on issues."

Indeed, where once Earth Day was an occasion to focus the federal government's attention on key environmental problems, today non-profits and private companies are leading the way. And while they often do it with the assistance of state and local governments, the feds lag behind or even undermine the victories of years past.

Yet the environmental culture in the U.S. may be a mile wide and an inch deep in these tough economic times. The public -- and voters -- seem to have other priorities. A record number of Americans now say that environmental protection should be trumped by economic interests when the two come into conflict.

When asked whether "protection of the environment should be given priority, even at the risk of curbing economic growth" or whether "economic growth should be given priority, even if the environment suffers to some extent?" the country was pretty evenly split with 47 percent saying the environment should get priority, 42 percent saying the economy should be the priority.

But just four years ago 70 percent of Americans prioritized environmental protection and only 23 percent put the economy first over the environment. Indeed, this is the worst the environment has fared on this question since Gallup started asking it way back in 1984.

It could also be that environmental problems seem too big for us to overcome through individual action. The easy stuff has been done and now we're faced with problems of increasing size and complexity such as global warming and the destruction of the oceans.

As the Christian Science Monitor wrote:

"In the decade after the first Earth Day 34 years ago, people planted trees to fight smog, picketed toxic dumps...Being Earth-friendly meant giving $25 to save the whales...But in the new millennium...One of the planet's most pressing problems -- global warming -- looks to be one of its most intractable. And that is proving frustrating to would-be activists. Their challenge: How to get individuals to change their behavior for a problem that looms so large and is unlikely to be solved for generations."

If there was a single issue for this year's Earth Day event organizers to focus on, it was the 2004 Presidential campaign. A vote after all could make a big difference for the environment this year given the polar views of the two leading candidates.

President George W. Bush was in the wetlands near the family compound in Maine bragging about a plan to create and protect three million acres of wetlands in five years.

Sen. John Kerry noted that up until very recently the White House was pushing a change in policy that would have opened up 20 million acres of wetlands to development. Bush backed off that plan only in the face of a tremendous outcry from state governments, members of Congress and the public. Such turnabouts are likely to continue as Bush attempts to burnish his environmental credentials during this election year.

"But you know as well as I do, once they get re-elected, they'll walk away from that promise the same way they walked from all the others," Kerry said.

Bush touted a new Agriculture Department inventory of wetlands showing that there has been a slight net increase -- not a net loss -- of wetlands on private land thanks mostly to programs put in place by previous Administrations. Bush's wetland plan would provide no new effort, but would increase funding to those existing programs.

However, as The New York Times noted, "like much surrounding his environmental record, there is little agreement on the facts, much less the wisdom of his policies."

It turns out the touted Agriculture Department survey uses a looser definition of the term "wetland." It includes wetlands that are no longer wet -- also known as "dysfunctional."

In other words, there are more net wetlands out there, if you count the habitat that's been destroyed or drained. By contrast U.S. Fish and Wildlife surveys find ten million fewer acres of wetland habitat -- even when public lands are added in to the count.

If the environment isn't a priority for much of the public -- as the Gallup Poll suggests -- why all the Earth Day fireworks?

Bush knows that in key battleground states the environment can be the deal maker or breaker. Bush also has to worry about Republican moderates being turned off by his pro-pollution agenda. This presidency has gone out of its way to alienate moderates in its own party on other issues, but it knows that in key states like Oregon and Washington the environment could push swing voters to Kerry.

"When you drill down to swing states, such as Washington, Oregon, Arizona, Pennsylvania or Florida, Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry will spend a great deal of their time talking about the environment," said Jim DiPeso, policy director for Republicans for Environmental Protection told the Dallas Morning News. The Christian Science Monitor reported that the environment could also prove prime motivation for turning out college-aged voters.

Kerry says he'll attack Bush on the environment and try to make it major issue this year.

Al Gore had trouble discussing environmental issues in 2000 with Ralph Nader constantly attacking from the left. Nader's campaign also criticized environmental groups that offered support to Gore. This strategy helped marginalize the environmental movement with some Green supporters openly expressing hope that Bush would be elected -- thus drawing more disaffected voters from the Democrats. This time around the Greens aren't backing Nader, and environmental groups are united behind Kerry.

The White House has also done more than anyone to make the environment an issue in the 2004 campaign by attempting to change key environmental regulations that Americans have taken for granted -- the Clean Air act and the Clean Water Act are just two examples. Both are products of Earth Day efforts and critics of the White House point to 30 years of evidence in their favor. The burden of proof is on Bush then to explain just how weakening these laws is better for the environment than simply enforcing the existing ones.

Bush said this week that: "good conservation and good stewardship will happen when people say, 'We're just not going to rely on the government to be the solution to the problem.'" Environmentalists believe that as long as Bush occupies the White House, relying on the government isn't much of an option.

We always start out at the Zupan's pastry counter, where today free samples of cinnamon rolls and pound cake are on display. I give one of each to my 7-year-old son and my 5-year-old daughter. Then we head to the produce section, where chunks of pineapple and orange beckon. While I bag lettuce and carrots, my children jostle over toothpicks and pieces of fruit, managing to gulp down two or three of each kind before we move on to the meat aisle. On top of the deli counter are plates of crackers and a bacon cheese dip. As it turns out, my kids love it. I dole out two slathered crackers each, while the woman behind the counter smiles indulgently.

For the past five years I've lived in inner city Portland, Oregon, a couple of blocks from both Zupan's, a gourmet grocery, and the Sunnyside Methodist Church soup kitchen. It was during one of our daily walks from home to school to grocery store that this revelation first came to me. My children are dumpster divers, albeit the type of dumpster divers who are sweet, adorable and irrefutably middle-class. In their lust for free samples (the calories consumed this way are not insignificant) my kids are the identical opposites of homeless people we see scrounging for discarded food in the garbage. Both reflect the twisted logic of a food supply that has less to do with scarcity than the twin specters of excess and waste.

For the past several years, Oregon has been the number one state in the country for hunger. According to a study released in 2002 by Brandeis University, 6 percent of Oregon households go hungry, compared with 3.3 percent nationwide. One in four children in Oregon lives in a household that is "food insecure," defined as having limited or uncertain availability of safe, nutritionally adequate food. That translates into 193,000 kids in the state who are either skipping meals or fending off hunger by eating poor quality foods.

Theories about Oregon's high hunger ranking abound. Most revolve around the current economic downturn. The reason Oregon is suffering more than the rest of the country, says Nick McRee, a sociologist at the University of Portland, is because of problems associated with the unique transformation of the state's employment base.

"Many states experienced a high-tech boom in the 1990s," he says, "but Oregon experienced a decline in natural resource production at roughly the same time. "

The social costs linked to the economic dislocation of loggers, millworkers, fishermen, were masked by the growing affluence of high tech workers in the urbanized areas of the state, he says. "But this meant that Oregon was exceptionally vulnerable to any disruption in the high tech economy." When people are poor, adds McRee, they tend to cut back on food expenditures first, rather than reduce spending for inelastic measures such as housing.

Here's the syllogism. People who don't have money don't have enough to eat. People who have enough to eat are people with money. But make no mistake. In 21st century America, we're all catenating on an out-of-whack food chain.

Thus in my own household, the problem is that we waste enormous quantities of food and have unfettered access to more. On a recent Saturday morning I awoke to the sound of a crashing noise, squeals of laughter and one long "Mooommmy." I stumbled downstairs in my bathrobe, to find four children under 8 (two friends were spending the night) and a pool of Grapenuts and milk all over the dining room floor. It was a new box and a fresh carton. "All right," I sighed, "give me a minute and I'll run to the store."

Then there was the time my kids and I were at Whole Foods, arguably Portland's most expensive grocery store. We had come from Powell's Books across the street, and I wanted to pick up something for dinner. "Can I have a sample, mama?" the children ask. Fifteen minutes later, I take inventory of the free food each child consumed:

-three pieces of chicken jalapeno sausage
-two rice crackers and hummus
-two slices of grapefruit
-three slices of orange
-a cup of Martinelli's apple cider
-half each of a chocolate and apple soy protein bar four sweet potato fries.

It doesn't take a licensed nutritionist to verify this constitutes a full meal for a 5-year-old -- and a reasonably balanced and healthy one at that. Here's the catch. My kids had just eaten lunch and weren't at all hungry. There is more than one way to disrupt the natural relationship between hunger and eating. One is to starve; the other is to stuff. In the United States, these are two sides of the same coin.

As we exit Whole Foods, a man stands outside the door selling Street Roots, the homeless newspaper. I fumble in my purse, but have to decline. All I have is my debit card, no cash. I ask him if he ever shops at Whole Foods or has come in to eat the free samples. No, he says, when he buys food, he goes to Fred Meyer. (As my kids will tell you, Fred Meyer rarely has free samples; nor do Albertsons and other stores who cater to a less affluent, albeit hungrier, clientele.)

Ron Hill, a business professor at the University of Portland, is the author of "Surviving in a Material World: The Lived Experience of People in Poverty." "There are lots of ways in which people in poverty are ostracized from mainstream consumer establishments...and their benefits," he says. He gives me a shortlist: cafes that welcome well dressed loiterers but prevent homeless people from waiting out a temporary downpour, grocery stores that destroy foods to avoid (human) scavengers.

As Hill points out, hunger in the 21st century is rife with paradox. The growing number of "food insecure" households, for example, coincides with a skyrocketing increase in obesity and diabetes rates, as well as the supersizing of the American meal. "It's an oxymoron, that someone could be obese and not have money," he says. But two decades ago, observes Hill, the McDonalds Happy Meal weighed in at approximately 500 calories; today, its supersize analog is 1,500 calories. Although it's relatively cheap to buy these calories, he says, they are high in fat and of little nutritional value.

University of Portland Education professor Ellyn Harwood elaborates. Harwood, who has conducted research on students who try to learn while hungry, says that many kids in poverty get their only sustenance from fast food. "That's too much caffeine, preservatives, dyes, in an already fragile learning system," she says. She cites studies showing the brains of malnourished children to be two-third the size of a normal child the same age. "We also know that problems with a lack of iron can cause motor coordination, attention, and lack of intellectual development," she says.

The kids get hungrier, yet the demands for school accountability grow louder. Scarcity in a time/place of abundance is always about contradiction. According to Metro, the Tri-county region threw away an estimated $327 million in edible food in 2001, and spent over $12 million to truck it to the landfill. The majority of the food came from restaurants and grocery stores. That same year, over 500,000 people in Oregon received emergency food assistance from the Oregon Food Bank . Nearly half that went to children under 17 years of age.

"When people think of a stereotypical hungry person they think of a homeless wino Vietnam vet," says UP senior Katie King, who twice a week brings food from the UP commons to clients of transitional housing projects downtown. "Now, because of the lack of a living wage, we're seeing more and more families."

To keep food out of the garbage and back in the mouths of the hungry, several food service businesses have begun to participate in food donation programs. Between March 2002 and September 2002, for example, Whole Foods donated more than 60,000 pounds of leftover food to the Oregon Food Bank. In a model program now being replicated around the country, Mentor Graphics and Bon Appetit cafeterias make weekly donations of approximately 140 leftover meals to the Seventh Day Adventist Church.

That's what happens to food after it has lost value as a commodity. As for free food that's consumed before it becomes a commodity, well, Genevieve Lynch, Whole Foods marketing and communications director puts it this way: "We have ample amount of money for free samples," she says. "It's a compliment to the products if they get eaten quickly." Brian Rohter, CEO of New Seasons Markets, concurs. "We have as comprehensive sampling program as any store in the city," says He doesn't reveal the dollar amount. "It's not material relative to the benefits we realize," he says.

Last month, I made my second visit to New Seasons in as many years. The samples were top notch. The kids ate free crepes with Nutella, tombo tuna with fresh pineapple salsa, and chunks of fresh fruit. It was getting late in the afternoon, and l wondered which of the store's perishable items would end up being trucked to the food bank, and which ones would end up in landfill and/or the dumpster.

Something is out of sync in Oregon, just like the increasing number of malformed fish and amphibians cropping up in our polluted waterways. Poverty-stricken children are both obese and malnourished. Rich kids feast on free samples of pork tenderloin and seared clams. Children of laid off high-tech workers wait in line at the food bank. We pay money to bury nutritious food in landfills.

As for me, I hardly ever eat the free samples, myself. Like most well-fed women in this country, I'm on a diet.

Linda Baker is a freelance journalist in Portland, Oregon.