The world after Earth Day

Friday was Earth Day, an opportunity to share clean-ups, concerns and celebrations of our blue-blue spaceship planet home.

Earth Day offers the chance to reflect on the critical changes we, the people, mostly of the United States, but truly all of us across the earth, must embrace and enact if the planet we say we love and cherish has a chance of healing.

The environmental – or more properly, existential – news was not good over the weekend. In our backyard a report from scientists came out that the Olympic peninsula glaciers will finish melting away, disappearing in the next 50 years. Our grandkids will look west, if there are clear days in 2070, and see dark, rocky peaks on the southwestern horizon. The world, forever changed.

South and east of here, forest fires rage, most horribly in New Mexico, but also in Arizona, Colorado, Nebraska, South Dakota and Texas. The numbers are really not good: on Sunday, one was zero percent contained, another 3% contained, one blaze was consuming 20,000 acres, another had destroyed 200 structures and at least two lives were lost.

It is the earliest start to the fire season, ever and there is no end in sight, New Mexico's governor says.

What are Skagitonians and La Connerites to do? Rejoice that gas prices have fallen a bit? Shake their heads at preposterous editorial proposals of gas free Sundays on First Street? Groan that there are two environmental themed editorials in a row? No one is saying that last week's editorial proposal was not radical enough, but what if it isn't?

Two or twelve or twelve dozen dramatic proposals leading to major policy and program changes are needed. Society needs to change, drastically, and now, because the climate already has. Editorials only provide more words. Maybe it is the editor’s job to wear everyone out. Maybe the editor succeeds a bit at nudging the community's citizens to action. Maybe editorials contribute by setting challenges and a vision and a goal to climb the glaciers in the Olympic Mountains 50 years from now and to help answer that grandchild's question "What did you do to save the ice?"