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.
