Earth Day then, now and to come

Happy Earth Day week.

Monday marked the 49th anniversary of Earth Day. Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin was a primary force behind the April 22, 1970 celebration.

And a celebration it was, back in the day of tie-dyed shirts, bell bottoms, crowns of daisies, torn jeans and pot smoking. Some things don’t change.

While optimism was the order of that day, festivities took place under the shadow of an unpopular president (Nixon) and a divisive war (Vietnam).

A long and unbroken harmony has not been my generation’s or my elders’ lot.

Forty-nine years ago youth wanted to believe they ruled, Senator Nelson notwithstanding. Youth will want to lead 49 years from now. And youth will seek to lead us out of the morass we are in today. Either our young will leave the status quo behind and lead us forward to a sustainable way of living or they will be leading us like immigrants across the desert – not a pretty image but a reality that is frightfully possible.

If the first thrust of Earth Day was cleaning up the planet and the second recognition was reduce and recycle, the evolution has been to reverse the effect of humans’ abuse of the planet. Going forward, survival will depend on our having the patience and the foresight to use less. Advancing to a sustainable hum that puts us in rhythm with the planet’s capacity and cycles is our challenge if our grandchildren are going to celebrate Earth Day as a present day moment and not a historical artifact.

Well before 49 years go by our future will either be a stark Mad Max existence or a collective sanity will be the new reality.

In 1970 this editorial would have been typed on a manual typewriter. The leaps in technology have changed our toys and our weapons but not our ways of thinking. What Einstein wrote of nuclear weapons: “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe,” is as profoundly true of the power of fossil fuels.

Our ways of thinking are not much different from 1970 or 1914 or 1870.

Nine months before the first Earth Day, on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon. The miracle of that accomplishment was not the computers or the rockets developed for the trip but the human endeavor of tens of thousands of people working together from different points around the country on a single purpose for almost ten years to be able to say mission accomplished.

Earth Day 2070, the centennial celebration, will only dawn as a success if we unify, nationally, and then join in international harmony, reaching together toward the sun as we did the moon.