Happy Earth Day, Mom!
 |
| Earth, from 6.4 billion kilometers (4 billion miles) away. Photo by Voyager 1, 14 February 1990. |
Dear Mom,
You’ve nurtured life on you for eons. We’re late arrivals and from the way we behave toward you and each other, I rather get the feeling we’re not going to be around forever, maybe not even for much longer.
That’s okay. It’s not just that we’re “unruly children who won’t settle down”, we have been actively engaged in matricide for much of the latter half of the the twentieth century all the way up to right now.
It’s not like we haven’t known. I remember as a kid the warning signs we’d hear about on TV. I also very much remembered waking up to orange skies and burning eyes from the effluents belched into the air by the refineries along the East Texas coast. Hell, the complex near the Houston Ship Channel looked like something out of Blade Runner.
A funny thing happened, though. Much to the chagrin of the petroleum industry, the National Environmental Policy Act was established in January 1970 and regulations came into force later with the Environmental Protection Agency. Richard Milhouse Nixon will not go down as a great man, but if anything saves his bacon from the fires of hell in the historical accounting, it might well be signing the NEPA into law and establishing the agency.
Mind you, there had been canaries in the coal mine (hm, apt) for decades, but Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring might have been the one that chirped the loudest and yes, regular folks were getting increasingly worried and vocal about the air they were breathing and the water they were drinking. By the seventies, it really did like things were changing. At least, in the so-called developed nations.
Of course, that didn’t ensure developing nations freedom from environmental exploitation by their better-funded and less scrupulous neighbors. Resource extraction around the world, whether by the US, the USSR, or the PRC proved to be too popular and remunerative to let go of.
Opening wounds across your mountain ranges and plateaux to rip out heavy metals seemed abstract enough to most people to shrug it off. The devastation to top soil and the leeching into arable land of toxic waste? Who knew? Plenty.
But the petroleum industry knew most of all and downplayed the effects of drilling both on land and offshore. Even after the Exxon Valdez spill, little was done to effectively rein in the corporations despoiling every place they touched.
And it wasn’t just Exxon, of course. There isn’t a petroleum company that isn’t complicit in destroying this world. Poisoning waters across the globe is part of the “unfortunate” effects of supplying the world with oil and plastics. No gas, no fuel for heating, etc., and you better believe the spin by these mega-corporations can hold a not-so-metaphorical gun at humanity’s collective cranium.
But here’s the thing. The industry knew what it was doing early on. And of course, with the rise of the Reagan administration and increasing deregulation on industry and the gutting of the EPA, we were back on a backward track.
Interesting things happened over the ensuing decades, though. Across the world, countries began investing in solar, wind, alternatives and renewable resources for power generation. Some have had remarkable success and many seem on track to continue the shift.
But not the U.S. Nope. Big steps backward. And we’re not alone. Across Central and South America, the Middle East, and with an eye toward drilling the Arctic, plenty of governments are still drilling and feeding the oil monkey.
And I haven’t even gotten to opening more areas of wilderness for lumber. Deforestation in the Peten, the Amazon, Southeast Asia, and the U.S. continues.
Of course, listing all of this mess doesn’t quite drive home the cost to the biosphere. While it is debatable just how many species are driven to extinction within any given timeframe, at least terrestrial species; the ocean is another matter.
Half of your coral reefs are dead. Ocean acidification is rising with the warming of the globe overall and no matter how we slice and dice diagrams, the threat to food chain that keeps all of us - human and non-human - perking along is real.
Which brings us to climate change. To global warming. And to the utter baffling science denial that characterizes our current environmental policies in the U.S., but even the denialism that seems endemic to our polity.
Mom, I fear we have - certainly in this country - grown more aggressively stupid. Some of it is by design. However, it astonishes me that we have shifted from a society that once was - believe it or not - intellectually curious enough and intrigued by science enough to promote STEM learning in the class (sadly, at the expense of the humanities and the arts), to a place where reading comprehension for adults is at an eighth grade level and for large swaths of even younger people, at a fourth grade level.
Thus, while many can present the case of how intricately connected the web of life is and point out the very real causal connection between fossil fuel extraction and use to environmental degradation and the warming of your atmosphere and waters, many more really, really just don’t get it and because they don’t understand, dismiss the very real danger at our doorstep.
A lot of us still fight the good fight, Mom. We show up in whatever way we can, but institutional and institutionalized stupidity is a Great Wall of Dumb to fight.
Years ago I was in a cafe in Somerville, Massachusetts and struck up a conversation with a fellow that had just written a biography about Hannah Arendt. He asked me what I thought was the greatest challenge facing humanity and it didn’t take a great deal of insight or time to answer that our continued assault on the environment was the single greatest threat to our shared survival.
We chatted about values, the lack of understanding the scope of the terror of the situation, and how education is failing.
To be clear, I really do believe that most people would rather we not kill ourselves and substantial populations of other species, but I also feel that most people feel impotent in the face of the catastrophe at hand.
Humans crap in their own bed the more they build and spread out over your expanses. It doesn’t need to be that way, but until national leaders recognize their complicity in this and until they understand that the atmosphere, the land, and the seas don’t recognize boundaries drawn on maps, we remain at risk.
Oh, Mom. I know, I know; even if all the major species that we recognize as “sentient” (most people think of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and aquatic species that they can see) were wiped out, maybe there is a chance that life might re-evolve from simpler organisms. Maybe even spit out a smarter version of humanity. Or maybe not.
I read of a theory some years ago that posits that intelligence - at least, as we describe it - has the seeds of its own destruction sown inside it. Grim, but I think the idea is that that kind of intelligence has some upward limit; beyond a certain point, it can’t really grow beyond itself and falls in on itself.
Maybe that’s why we still live in denial that our individual existences must end and we create fanciful stories about survival beyond our demises and base some of our more ridiculous public policies on promoting ancient myths as basis for behavior. We still haven’t learned to leave tribalism behind. We are afraid to.
However, if we keep ripping up your surface, polluting your air and even orbital space, and shitting in your oceans and waterways, it might be that afraid or not, you’ll decide for us just how much you’re willing to endure.
Anyway, Happy Earth Day, Mom. That might be small consolation from one tiny mite on your skin, but I mean it. I still love walking among your wonders and I still feel a kinship with soil and stone and tree and mountain. The oceans’ waters and those of the lakes and estuaries are havens from the turbulence of the technological web that we all get too stuck in.
To step outside and see the clouds above us and feel you supporting us beneath our feet is humbling and enriching. To try to feel your rotation as up spin around the sun, to feel something somewhat of what Bucky Fuller called Spaceship Earth, helps connect us to the vastness of the universe through which our galaxy spins, as well.
And then to bring all of that to an intimate stillness, strolling through a park or a forest or along a mountain trail only intensifies our connection with you. It seems that no matter how abusive we are, you still continue to nurture us as long and as far as you can.
Love you, Mom. Enjoy your day, and thanks for everything.
J
 |
"Earthrise"; December 1968, Apollo 8 Crewman William Anders |
More:
On "The Pale Blue Dot":
https://www.livescience.com/space/planets/pale-blue-dot-the-iconic-valentines-day-photo-of-earth-turns-35-today-and-youre-probably-in-it
https://www.planetary.org/worlds/pale-blue-dot
On "Earthrise":
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230511-earthrise-the-photo-that-sparked-an-environmental-movement
https://www.history.com/articles/earthrise-photo-apollo-8-anders-1968
On "Earthset":
https://phys.org/news/2026-04-artemis-ii-earthset-shot-revisits.html
https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/johnson/artemis-ii-mission-milestones-an-image-and-video-recap/
Comments
Post a Comment