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Earth Day
I am reminded that yesterday was Earth Day. I should have thought of it: Earth Day coincides, roughly, with Muir’s birthday. I’d hoped to hike on Mount Wanda to celebrate John Muir’s birthday on Saturday, and didn’t. The last five days, today included, I have woken each morning after — literally — having dreams about Zeke’s last few breaths. April has been worse than February so far. It was only by a serious act of willpower that I got out this weekend at all. But I might not have remembered Earth Day even without the distraction. Seven years ago I landed a job with an environmental news dotcom, and when one of the Vice Presidents told me their target reader was someone who knew what April 21 was, I nodded blankly. I didn’t figure out what he was talking about until the next day.
Here’s a little secret: most employees of environmental organizations with which I am familiar don’t spend a lot of time thinking about Earth Day, excepting those who work in development departments. The general reaction of environmental organizations to the first of the modern crop of Earth Days, in 1990, was a mixed bag of appreciation for the excuse to do public outreach and fear that the likes of Chevron and Monsanto were buying their way into the celebrations. By Earth Day 1991, that leveraged buyout had been completed. The day now exists as a national holiday of greenwashing, a day of festivals at which homeowners can pick up biodegradable garbage bags — or to drop their non-biodegradable plastic bags into a bin for recycling, and never mind that the plastic is actually “recycled” into unregulated landfills in China and Thailand. (Jackets made of old soda bottles are a wonderful thing! All you need to do to make that work is to buy exactly as many jackets as your soda habit makes possible.) I spent my share of days in the early 1990s working at Earth Days, having earnest conversations with people who would collect a copy of every piece of literature on every table and then drive off in their 4Runner with the “Random acts of kindness” sticker on the back bumper. I suppose a few of them read the material, and a few of them were moved enough to do something.
We take opportunities for promotion where they exist, and if we set up a table next to the EPA’s Earth Day timeline, so much the better. When no one’s looking we can take up Sharpies to correct their posterboard displays where they laud Bush’s Clear Skies and Clean Air Mercury laws.
My problem is more fundamental: I object to the compartmentalization. What are we, if we are not Earth?
On Sunday I walked up into the hills, scant-dressed given the weather, hoping that the silt-laden wind would abrade me and scrape away all I no longer wanted, longing for that roadrash of the soul. I came upon a corpse, a skunk oddly odorless, vertebrae articulated and intact, the only flesh left a bloated bladder, beautiful striped tail still near-pristine. Skunk, dog, man, we all rot in turn, our hoards of nitrogen and calcium returned to the soil. There is no better antidote for ghosts: the pale tawn smiling shadow in my peripheral vision vanished, went back to its home beneath the oregano and Cynoglossum. None of it matters. We have our heads inverted. One day to take from our important lives to spend in consideration of the Earth? We spend all our lives on Earth, and it suffuses us. We are a transitory flicker on the Earth, a moment in a fever dream, and we will melt. The wingnuts are right, though not as they expect. A million species go extinct, one of them bearing iPods, and none of it matters. The Earth revolves and revolves again, around the sun, around the galactic core, and that messy cascade of dissipative effects we call “life” will continue until Sol goes Nova.
Earth Day? The Earth should pick one day in a million years to consider us sidelong.
I am not so dispassionate as I make myself out to be. I would mourn the loss of memory, of Beethoven, of frybread and chiles. I would leave words against the insane unlikelihood that sentience would again, one day, evolve, sometime before the serifs crumble with the stones. (A futile gesture, but what isn’t?) We are not built for the long view, really. We are best suited to the moment, the shiny object and the fleeting feel of strawberries on the tongue. It is an impossibly long time until the next April 22, and today the anise swallowtails drink from the thistles on the sunlit south face of Crescent Ridge.
Posted by: Chris Clarke
Yeah, you’d think that the planet on which we live, and the living networks we inhabit would warrant more attention than a single day out of 365 (366 in leap years).
Still, I have a sort of nostalgic fondness for Earth Day festivities, and I think it stems from the experience of being in a place where I am surrounded by people who believe in the same values as I do (and the ones who don’t at least give lip service to them). Most days, I feel terribly alone, a veritable freak according to the popular culture of the society we inhabit, and so I treasure the moments when I’m not the oddball, but part of a community.
But, yeah, I wish that this wasn’t a momentary, ephemeral thing, but just part of how life is in this country.
By: By Rana on 2007 04 23
Before we’re extinct, but after civilization falls, I will miss toilet paper, frozen pizza, and animation.
If I believed we humans were “meant” for anything, I would believe we were “meant” to be the planet’s intelligence. There’s some regulatory or protective role we could play, in the best of all possible futures.
So far, we seem more like some sort of large rodent – boundless appetite, but collectively lacking much in the way of intelligence.
I think that protective intelligence role still COULD happen, but it’s one of those “you can’t get there from here” things. Technically possible, but extremely low probability. Something radical has to happen first.
So: First, a singularity. A storm, an interval of chaos.
Coming up fast, seems to me.
I wonder if there’s room in my basement for 20 years worth of toilet paper?
By: By Hank Fox on 2007 04 23
the course of grief is not linear. just so you know. treasure the bad days, as opposed to the insupportible ones.
By: By jean on 2007 04 23
I’m reminded of that Far Side Cartoon where the creator accidentally tips open a laboratory jar and out scamper two humans. A voice from the clouds says “Oh oh!”
My lord. How patronizingly Hallmark Earth Day is. As a species, we really are King Dumbass. If there were anyone higher on the rung (we still stupidly regard as hierarchical, as if we aren’t dependent on bumblebees to name only one creature that is fast disappearing), this of all things might be the most embarrassing.
Bravo on this excellent post. I will be rubbing a few smug faces in it.
By: By Lesley on 2007 04 24
The Saint Report
http://www.goatview.com/february01.htm
“There is a difference between calling something a lameass celebration and calling it an insignificant cause.”
The idea of giving your life a greetings card, indeed.
By: By Nan McIntyre on 2007 04 24
=v= Earth Day for me is an annual event in which I rail at greenwash. There’s some new blood in San Francisco who made this year’s Earth Day something other than an excuse to sell cars. (Unfortunately, the car-sellers latched onto the previous weekend’s Step It Up National Day Of Climate Action. They were hyping plugin hybrids,
which are of course poised to use all the electricity that will be saved by all those compact fluorescent lights that other groups have been distributing.)
Overall, I think it’s better to celebrate Arlo’s Trash Day.
By: By Jym on 2007 04 24
On Sunday I walked up into the hills, scant-dressed given the weather, hoping that the silt-laden wind would abrade me and scrape away all I no longer wanted, longing for that roadrash of the soul.
Me too.
Beautiful essay, thank you.
By: By Theriomorph on 2007 04 24
Earth Day should be perhaps extended into a series of holidays with a unifying narrative. Great religions all seem to have festival calendars, symbolic progresses through a range of moods. I’d channel the energies of Earth Day into a revaluation of the solstices, dates that have meaning for the earth itself rather than projections of our irrelevant neuroses and needs.
Beautiful post.
By: By Jarrett on 2007 04 24
