Earth Day - 2022

 Hard to believe how the years have passed, 52 of them since the first Earth Day.  I recall Earth Day  was not a big event because the anti-war protest occupied our attention and TPP was a senior trying to graduate from college and start graduate studies.  And it wasn't easy.  You had to cross picket lines to go to class, if indeed you had to go to class. Now it seems that Earth Day is not enough; more change is needed than it seems can make in the short term especially in today's political atmosphere will allow, and it leaves TPP feeling rather defeated. I can't wait for the waves to start lapping at the door of Mar-a-lago. Keep the faith people, but I doubt religion is going to play any useful role. TPP needs a beverage to revive his attitude. 

Earth Day 2020 - 50 years !

Happy Earth Day everyone!  TPP was finishing his last semester in college, before the people got shot at Kent state, and the shadow cast by the student anti-war strikes sort of blotted out Earth Day.  And we are marching backward, as the current administration is making our air and water dirtier by cutting or relaxing environmental rules.  Does this make us "great again"? Apparently.  And if T-rump is willing to throw the health of the American people under the economic bus, the environment has no chance at all.  Golf courses are not natural things, lots of organisms get displaced so that a monoculture of grass can take their place.  Remember the Earth Day wisdom of Pogo the Possum.

"We have met the enemy, and he is us."

Those are the words from Pogo (Walt Kelly) from the 1st Earth Day poster, an event that TPP doesn't really remember well because the campus was in the throes of anti-war demonstrations and he was finishing a tough schedule of courses for a hoped for graduation.  Wasn't sure what to do blog-wise for Earth Day 2018, but attended a great lecture last night by Doug Tallamy, and his thesis (see the link) is that biodiversity is only going to be saved if everyone gets involved.  He advocates a small scale, grass roots (sorry, he earns TPP's admiration for hating grassy lawns.) approach using native plants, especially trees.  At his website you can get his book (of course) and get a list of plants that promote biodiversity.  The huge attendance at his lecture was most impressive.  He argues that most land is privately owned, so public "wild" areas are not enough to reverse the loss of biodiversity.  Get rid of grass; plant an oak.  The biggest problem is that finding a good source of native plants isn't easy.  That's why us native plant people are working to set up a nursery.  

Happy Earth Day!

Yesterday was Earth Day and for the most part that message was overshadowed but not inconsistent with the Marches for Science.  Our local, not well organized, last minute effort resulted in a couple of hundred people showing up and making a scene about 100 feet from our GnOPe reps office, but he's been staying away from anyone not deemed extremely sympathetic, but he's turned into a T-rump bobble head especially on health care and the environment.  So scientists and people who actually think science knows something are not going to be best of friends.  Unfortunately the Earth Day message got a bit lost or at least distorted by the denialism of denialism message.  The best part were all the signs, some of which were very clever. 
Somehow T-rump thinks he can ignore what we know and still claim to say science is important, just do it without any money, and don't provide us with any inconvenient facts.  Now those must be countered by alternative facts, or the world the way our ideology would like it to be. Why is it that our conservatives think that the only way to make money is to despoil the environment?  This is the most discouraging Earth Day that TPP has had in a long time except for all the Marchers.  It's important for our "leaders" to know how many people out there know just how wrong they are and are willing, perhaps at last, to invest enough time in letting them know.  It was interesting to see that a couple of  the march's ring leaders and most out spoken people are both immigrants who hate to see what's going on in the USA. 

Happy Earth Day!

It's Earth Day and TPP doesn't know whether to celebrate or cry. You see TPP remembers the first Earth Day because he was a senior, and it was spring, and he was going to graduate school, and he had a great girl friend who he had figured out he was going to marry one day. But all that hope and good fortune was tainted by the protests over the Vietnam War that led to Kent State and all the rest. All these things remained inextricably linked in memory. Environmentalism seems to be losing ground as corporate power over government increases, and while corporations might have a religious conscience that they are allowed to impose upon their employees as if their religious freedom meant nothing, few have any environmental ethic at all. It's a cool, but actually quite pretty spring day here in the upper midwest; a good day to enjoy all the flowering trees. Yet, here in Lincolnland GnOPe legislative bubbas from the far southern reaches of the state are proposing, successfully so far, hunting bobcats, a non-game species just now recovering its population due to long-standing protections. The bobcat boys legislators know nothing about how big the populations are ("I've seen lots of them every time I'm out in the woods.") or how much hunting the population can stand, or even what is know of bobcat biology ("They're blood thirsty killers of dogs and cats."). This is just plain stupid legislation based on ignorance and willful disregard for what bobcat biology is known. But then they don't care. Such is their regard for nature that their only thought upon seeing wildlife is shooting it. Locally another gun-owning lover of nature shot an eagle nesting above a nearby river. The news keeps reporting about the drought in California as if changing weather patterns (a prediction of global warming models) were not wide spread and having a global impact. Your water rights don't automatically provide you with precipitation, so farmers fight over the scraps and no one seeks real solutions.  Helpfully (not) religious conservatives bray that it is God's punishment for the wickedness of giving people equality and since the end times are so near (a former GnOPe congressperson said it) no need to protect nature at all.  How can we elect such pathetic non-leaders?  TPP finds it all too depressing at times especially on Earth Day. Now to spend the rest of the day doing something hopeful.

Earth Day 2014

Wow, has it been that long?  Yes, the 1st Earth Day was 44 years ago, a whole academic career ago, and at times you wonder what was accomplished?  What the frack is happening to the Clean Water Act of 1972?  Well, Walt Kelly's Pogo had it right all along. Too many papers, too much field work, and other semester debris piling up too quickly to write much more.  Too depressing to think about many of our pressing issues. 

Earth Day - we have met the enemy

TPP has been around since the first Earth Day, and while a lot of people now pay at least some lip service to the topic, progress has been pretty slow.  Recycling has been a bright spot, here and there, and it's nice to see more thought being given to energy-efficient architecture.  In a few places wind energy has begun to have a presence.  But tough questions about carbon emissions, population, and climate change, go wanting largely because of gutless politicians, the media, and miserable state of politics just about everywhere.  So it's nice to see the Earth Day events, but the enormity of what needs to be done is quite daunting to the point of being depressing.  We seem to be a species that cannot act except in response to crisis.  Ah well.  Here's a reminder of how long Earth Day has been around as a "happening".  Although the famous phrase was first used in Walt Kelly's Pogo Earth Day poster in 1970, it was repeated the next year in a 2 frame strip where Pogo famously says ....

Every day is Earth Day

Today is the official Earth day, but what day isn't Earth day?  It's the only planet we've got and it's regularly and routinely mistreated as if another could be had for the asking.  The Phactor remembers the first Earth Day very well; it was my senior year in college, but another thing weighed heavy on my mind at the time: the war in Vietnam.  About 10 days later the shootings at Kent State happened and everything descended into chaos, and Earth day things were lost.  How nice it would be to recount all the wonderful things that have happened in the past 40 years, but so little progress and so much more damage.  Forty years ago we simply thought that all that was needed was education; explain to people what was happening, what action was needed, and things would turn around.  Back then some people used to ignore the facts, now they deny the facts by sowing disinformation thereby making more of a problem.  For an educator, this is very discouraging, so this year Earth Day finds my state of mind rather pessimistic, a bit depressed when thinking about how far humans have surpassed the carrying capacity of Earth. 

Earth Day – 1970 and 2010

Well, it’s been 40 years since my first Earth Day which I attended in my senior year in college. Unfortunately the impact of Earth Day was over shadowed by political events, the anti-war demonstrations culminating in the Kent State shootings and wide-spread student strikes at colleges and universities, including mine. As a graduating senior, I was more concerned about 1. graduating because that was a bit uncertain given the strike and crossing student picket lines to finish biology courses needed for graduate school that fall (having just been accepted), and 2. getting drafted and shipped off to Vietnam in the interim was a real possibility even though the Phactor was a “winner” in the 1st draft lottery by having a fairly high number assigned to my birthday. It had been a decade of considerable turmoil for people my age. At the height of the cold war this teenager helped friends build a bomb shelter in their basement and had my Father explain why that wouldn’t matter if the Russians dropped the big one. That was followed by involvement in social justice and integration straining race relations and landing me in the middle, quite by chance, of one of the race riots that left a city burning. Then fast forward to the Vietnam War and the loss of too many friends. For some reason a good grade in English literature (and many other subjects) just didn’t seem all that important.
And now Earth Day doesn’t seem as important any more either, and it's not because things have gotten a whole lot better, although many things have gotten worse much slower, and a few things like wild turkeys and the like are more common than they were. A lot of green-washing is going on; everyone is trying to cash in, our capitalist system at work, but the type of big changes needed do not seem to be in the offing. The average citizen, the type mesmerized by simple-minded rhetoric and easy-to-shout slogans, truly fails to recognize the types of changes and the magnitude of changes really needed to preserve our environment. It isn't plastic bags and water bottles that will make a difference, although they may be symbolic of the type of thinking needed. Most people wouldn’t think of water as our biggest resource problem, but it probably is, and we continue to waste it blightly in spite of rain barrels becoming a bit more common. And if people really understood the concept of a tipping point, climate change would scare the crap out of them because by the time to can convince the nay-sayers and politicians, it will be too late.
But mostly I'm reminded of a poster from 40 years ago that still speaks volumes. To quote Walt Kelly’s Pogo, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” (Earth Day Poster, 1970)

Everyday should be Earth Day

The Phactor remembers the first Earth Day in 1970; he was a senior in college and that does date him even if he was a bit precocious. Unfortunately it did not receive as much attention that year as it should have because there were so many distractions that revolved around anti-war protests (Vietnam), trying to graduate, and thinking seriously about a long-time girl friend.

In trying to think of something profound to say, I find myself simply saddened by the state of the Earth. The whole panoply of environmental issues always ends up being argued from a political perspective, but the ecological perspective is quite clear. Our species has exceeded the carrying capacity of our environment. Humans began the path to the present day when they stopped living as gatherers and hunters and shifted to making a living via agriculture. This is not an indictment, just history.

My own particular role in this has been the simple, but not always easy task of helping students understand how nature works and the place of humans in all of this, so that they may use that knowledge to make wise decisions. Of course the flaw in that is the assumption that knowing something is important to making decisions, which often has not been the case in politics. When ideology trumps knowledge it all goes out the window.

A great deal of the Earth’s natural communities have been altered, damaged, or destroyed, but there still remains a resilience that gives the Phactor some hope if we can abate the rate of destruction. Unfortunately so many people are so estranged from nature, from their food and resources, it creates an ignorance or indifference to the natural order of things. People just don’t know, care, or understand what living their lives is doing, insulated as they are by human technology. In the words of Porky Pine penned for Earth Day by the great Walt Kelly, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

Being ethical demands that our actions not harm others, and that principle must be extended to actions that do not unduly harm the ability of our environment to sustain us. So be mindful of the full impact we make, both on our own personal little hummock, and elsewhere, and try to help others know why it’s important to have a "green" ethic, otherwise you become an enemy of people.

PS Many people attribute that quote to Pogo because of an Earth Day poster made by Kelly a year later, but he didn't say it in the original cartoon.