Earth Day Seen in a New Light

By Rick Margl, Great River Coalition

With a relentless but reassuring regularity enacted by physics and celestial motion, spring has come again.  As the days pass the breezes play and gust, alternately cool and balmy, like the fretful indecisiveness of youth.  The sky is full of moving wings and melodious songs. Buds swell on tree branches and blossoms thrust up from warmed patches of soil.  Water everywhere, previously held in bonds set during weeks of long, cold nights, now gathers and flows down, down and ever down.  We walk the river trails with eager senses, delighting in awakenings of the natural world.  They herald the approach of summer, but also bring memories of past springs and the loved ones who peopled them.

Sadly, this springtime is different.  We’re confronting an infirmity let loose by carelessness, transported across the globe and through communities by our lifestyle and exacerbated by preexisting social inequities.  As the populations of developing nations grow and seek a ‘modern’ standard of living, vast tracts of primeval forests are being cut and burned.  In this process, people are encountering viral pathogens outside of previous experience, many of which have a nasty tendency to mutate.  Our encounter with this virus is illustrative in a larger sense of how we’ve come to interact with the natural world, which as a result is becoming less ’natural’ every day.

On a related front, NASA has determined this winter to be the warmest on land in the northern hemisphere over the previous 140 years.  This warming climate is also facilitating the spread of disease via mosquitos and other insect vectors.  In Minnesota, increasing temperatures and associated insect infestations have decimated the iconic North Shore birches, felled hundreds of thousands of acres of tamarack, diminished the northland moose population and will eliminate the over one billion ash trees currently growing in our state.

Can individuals affect these trends?  Certainly, but it requires a broad vision.  One of the primary goals of the Great River Coalition is to support healthy populations of pollinator species. Though rightly considered to be a ‘keystone species’ with disproportionate effect on the ecosystem, pollinators are also just one compelling instance of the critical importance of all species in maintaining an environment that will support us. John Muir once wrote,  “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe." Over the eons, a vast and complicated web of species interdependence has developed through the evolutionary process. We wouldn’t expect our car or computer to continue operating while one component after another is removed and we shouldn’t imagine that our environment can remain vital as large numbers of species are diminished or eliminated. To paraphrase John Donne, ‘no species is an island’.

Though as Homo sapiens we are styled as ‘wise man’, there is clearly not enough of wisdom in how we care for the world we inhabit.  Perhaps a more accurate nomenclature would be Homo rationalize, as we seem particularly adept at making excuses for our behavior.  We labor under a stilted perspective that is both parochial in its interests and ineffectively short-term in its scope.  It hinders our ability to exercise the wisdom we claim as our namesake.  15,000 years ago the present site of St. Anthony Falls was covered with ice over a mile thick.  Paleoindians entered the area following the retreat of the glaciers some 12,000 years ago.  Civilization arguably began in lands around the Mediterranean Sea around 5,000 years ago and not until 1680 AD did Europeans first encounter St. Anthony Falls.  Societal decisions being made today will have environmental impacts along similarly lengthy timelines.  

In another ten or a thousand millennia, what will remain of our bustling and ambitious 21^st Century?  Maybe an AI version of Elon Musk philosophizing under a well-appointed dome on Mars.  Perhaps our plastics, almost all of which that have been produced in the last 70-odd years still exist.  They may be found in landfills, ravines, blowing along roadsides, in the flesh of marine creatures and in ugly millions of tons spinning lazily in one of several tropical oceanic gyres scattered around the globe.  When future archeologists come across them locked in sedimentary strata, won’t they wonder just what in the world occurred during those few short centuries that man now calls the Industrial Age? 

Thankfully, time remains to take effective action and a particularly opportune day for doing so approaches.  Fifty years ago, in an era of protests, sit-ins and social introspection, a consensus developed among citizens, businesses and government that our natural environment must be protected.  Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin conceived of setting aside an ‘Earth Day’ every year to demonstrate support for our environment.  Earth Day is now celebrated annually by over a billion people in some 190 countries and has evolved from a day of education to a day of action meant to drive behavior and policy changes in support of the Earth.  Through community action, mindful consumption decisions and appropriate application of technology we can satisfy our needs without enacting needless degradation of our natural world.

As fellow travellers on this planet, each of us has a responsibility to consider how our actions impact the environment.  Remember, the Earth will be fine regardless of whether our species survives or not.  We will have changed it without a doubt, but a new environmental equilibrium will soon be reached even as the visible evidence of all our achievements and failures are inexorably erased from sight.  Perhaps it would help us make wiser choices if we were to think of Earth Day in a new light – as Humans Day, since our fate is surely and inextricably linked with that of the planet which has been our home through the eons.  On this Earth Day, let us together exchange our usual hubris for enlightened self-interest.  We cannot survive a mortally impaired environment.  The decision to take action is incumbent on us all.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree

If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,

Would scarcely know that we were gone.

From ‘There Will Come Soft Rains,’ by Sara Teasdale

From The Language of Spring, edited by Robert Atwan, published by Beacon Press, 2003.

The Great River Coalition is a 501 (c) (3) non-profit organization that advocates for preserving, protecting and promoting the historic, commercial and environmental significance of the Mississippi River, the City of Minneapolis and its relationship to the people and their communities.