Earth Day Turns Fifty

So already, I know this doesn't look like much to you. But it's such an important place for me. This is the area where, as a ninth grader at the Newman Junior High School in Needham, Massachusetts, I planted a tree on the first Earth Day in 1970. 

Back then, this space was an empty lot between the school and a baseball diamond at the edge of a town park. Today, the baseball diamond is still there, but it's been invisible from the edge of the school campus for many years. 

Whenever I can, I come back here on Earth Day just to see how things are going with the trees. One year, I brought my mother with me, and as we surveyed the growth together, she asked me which tree was mine. 

I explained that I had no idea whether my tree had actually survived, given that it no doubt had had to compete with all the other ninth graders' trees for sunlight and other resources: we must have planted more than one hundred trees that day of educational social-action activities connected to saving the Earth from people's mindless or short-sighted missteps.

I can't remember what kind of tree I planted that Wednesday in 1970. And I have no idea what a fifty-year-old tree looks like as compared to trees that are younger. But I can remember it was a gray, balmy afternoon--as we planted, we talked about how good it would be to get the trees in the ground before the rain started. Today I stood out there in my winter jacket and my anti-coronavirus latex gloves, and the gray of the sky wasn't the kind that heralded a warm spring soaking; it was the all-too-usual pale gray of these days that impress with their sameness.

According to an Earth Day restrospective article in Coolook News written in 2018, Walter Cronkhite referred to the first Earth Day as "'a unique day in American history … a day set aside for a nationwide outpouring of mankind seeking its own survival.'" And twenty years later, according to that same article, Charles "Kuralt referred to the planting of 59,000 trees as 'an apology to the Earth.'" I don't know if I felt the need to apologize in 1970--I mean, I was only fourteen--but I did know air pollution was an expanding problem.

That said, Cronkhite's words about humans being a species seeking its own survival rings oh so true in this pandemic moment. In "The parallels between the coronavirus and the climate crisis" published in today's Boston Globe, John Kerry not only illuminates the similarities between the urgent COVID-19 and climate change situations, but makes clear that there's at least a partial causal connection between the two. 

If ever there were two issues that require global cooperation to foster the coherence and creativity that might mean human survival, these are the two. Staggering as the challenges are that we face, we can meet them--and thus survive them. That's if we're allowed to meet them, and if those in charge help rather than hinder the survival efforts. We have no shortage of smart people who know how to solve these problems. Unfortunately, maybe even tragically, we're still short on people who are really good at getting people to change their behavior on the basis of what those smart people know to be true and useful. And we're still short on people who know how to create and support a systemic effort generally. Then there are those who don't believe change is needed and/or oppose systemic change that would benefit all.

In a blog post entitled "Earth Day 2020: Recognizing the Positive Improvements on Our Environment,"* Institute for Integrative Nutrition's content editor Rebecca Robin says the following after detailing the positive effects that so many people's sheltering at home has already had on the environment:

"Over the past month, we’ve felt and experienced a great deal of loss that cannot be compensated nor justified by environmental improvements. However, these improvements can serve as inspiration to help us reflect on the way that we live and treat our earth every day and how we want to treat our earth moving forward. . . . This catastrophic event has shown us that our changed behaviors can have a crucial impact on not only our personal health but also the preservation of earth and everything it offers us."*

So here's the challenge: what will it take to get us to stick with some of our changed behaviors--more collective than ever--that are having a positive impact on the environment? Will we fervently re-embrace our old habits--so many that are pleasurable and social--and forget all those solitary, "slower" habits we've discovered and developed during isolation--and actually come to enjoy? Will we pressure one another to "get back to normal" or will we give one another the space and time to decide which old and new aspects of ourselves we want to integrate and bring forward into the post shelter-at-home world? 

Some of this is going to be a matter of leadership--many of our current leaders will first and foremost want us leave our homes and to start spending money fast and everywhere. But the more difficult part of it on a daily basis is going to be intrapersonal and interpersonal. Rest assured that we will feel pressures, some coming from other people, some from ourselves.

On Earth Day 1970, it was easy and pleasurable to do something good for our stressed planet--even though I don't think I focused much on why we were planting trees. I think I've gone back over the years because I've increasingly understood what's at stake. On Earth Day 2020, I understand more than ever how interconnected our destinies are. That's why even though it takes so much energy to leave home and be safe these days, I still did my annual errand. And I still love the memory of that first hopeful, hands-on Earth Day.

*Robin, R. (2020, April 22). Earth Day 2020: Recognizing the Positive Improvements on Our Environment [Web log post]. Retrieved from https://www.integrativenutrition.com/blog/2020/04/earth-day-2020-recognizing-the-positive-improvements-on-our-environment