How the celebration started
Sen. Gaylord Nelson
Two score and a few years ago, at the height of the Vietnam War, the progressive Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson called for an Environmental teach-in – the new in-word at that time – in which over 20 million people participated. Tomorrow that special day will again be observed as Earth Day, but this time by more than 900 million people in 175 countries. And yet, we all know that not too many people – only the couple dozen who’ve journeyed to the moon — have ever seen the full Earth view. Only those few have actually seen the curvature of Earth, its magnificent beauty, its fragility, and its lack of borders. Only they, from their spaceship then, have seen Earth as another spaceship moving across space at incredible speed.
Buzz Aldrin, who, with Neil Armstrong, formed the first duo to walk on the moon, remarked in his book Men from Earth that he knew “Earth has gone through great transitions and volcanic impacts and all sorts of traumatic things. But it has survived …” He was not even referring to human conflicts but to the physical appearance of Earth at a great distance. “It generally is mostly very peaceful looked at from a distance,” he said. The millions of others who did see the pictures of Earth taken by those few astronauts also saw a beautiful Spaceship “that spins and circles in frigid space with its warm and fragile cargo of animate life, ” as then United Nations’ Secretary General U Thant and philosopher Buckminster Fuller put it.
Watch your language
Ironically, however, to talk of “Spaceship Earth” is only partially accurate because it has the intrinsic danger of referring to an inanimate vehicle – which Earth is most certainly not. Yes, language is important here, some have pointed out. For instance, each of the other planets of our solar system has a proper name: Mercury, Venus, Mars, and so on. So does Earth. But do we ever hear people talking about “the jupiter,” “the mars,” or “the saturn.” Why, then, do we speak of “the earth”? To talk this way, using the definite article “the” in front of an uncapitalized “earth” not so subtly reinforces our bias that we are fundamentally different and separate from the planet. But this is not really the case.
On Earth Day, more and more scientists have manifested that from a purely scientific perspective, we humans are not so much separate beings on Earth as we are a mode of being, or an expression, of Earth.
The scientific evolutionary view is not different from that of most indigenous peoples’, which also theologians now take as true, including the group gathered together a few years ago by Pope Benedict XVI. This view says that we did not come into this world, we grew out from it. It is not that Earth came about and we were placed on it. Earth is not our surroundings, it’s our source. Earth is the larger body of which we are an organic, but by no means indispensable, part. You and I are not entities apart from but more accurately a part of Earth. To remember this truth always was what Ash Wednesday was all about (“remember, guys, that you are earth dust and into such you will return”).
When was your birthday?
Earth Day, then, is everybody’s birthday. You may want to know the year when Earth was born. We do live in an age when science can tell us with some accuracy about matters of this sort.
Jennifer Morgan
Get ready then as I borrow the language of Jennifer Morgan, favorite student of the late Thomas Berry: after the universe had expanded and developed for nine billion years, our Milky Way galaxy shocked a peacefully drifting cloud of a supernova’s remnants into giving birth to ten thousand new stars – including our very own Sun that itself showed self-organizing abilities – spinning out a multi-banded disc of matter we now call the Solar System. In this system, however, only Earth, due to its position in the structure of the system and its own internal balance, provided a creative chemical womb from which, four billion years ago, the first living cell arose.
You may want to confirm from your friendly neighborhood scientist about the evidence that still exists regarding microbe-like cellular filaments from almost 3.5 billion years ago, which they found in ancient rock structures in South Africa and Australia. He or she may tell you how biologists tentatively traced the most recent common ancestor of all life using the DNA sequences of modern organisms. As the physicist Brian Swimme is fond of saying, “Four billion years ago, planet Earth was molten rock; now it sings opera.”
Today, in you and me and through you and me Earth can sing Happy Birthday to herself.
But, no! Earth does not forget and today continues to be wary. The human species that she has spawned has taken the role of “exterminator” whose activity is the one main cause of the massive extinction of other species, animal and plant. In the 1800’s the rate of extinction was one species a month. The current estimate is unbelievably 100 species a day. No, extinctions do not signal the end of the world, just the end of an era. I really don’t think we humans are destroying Earth in a total sense. No, we are not destroying Earth, we are only destroying ourselves. We can extinguish this beautiful expression of Earth we call ourselves. We are one species intelligent enough to commit suicide, deliberately or through carelessness.
Changes in the horizon?
For instance, how many thousands of scientists from how many scores of countries have warned of the impact of greenhouse emissions on the atmosphere? Or is this gardener becoming too pessimistic like a gardener should never be? Aren’t changes looming in the horizon?
How very recently was it, if you could even remember, that so many people, especially business, tended to take a dim view of the idea that the climate was changing? The notion implied that industry had damaged the planet, and should therefore pay for the consequences. People didn’t like that – especially not business. That’s all changing fast (it seems). Suddenly, after decades of exposing global warming, and the notion took root that the fight against it must be won, people – including business people – are now falling over each other to prove, or at least show off, their greenness – particularly on Earth Day.
Fathering now a carbon-constrained future means global investing that has increased in little more than a few years from 20 to more than a hundred billion dollars. And the moment investors put real money into cleaner technologies, costs also fall. In a couple of decades, the price of wind power went down from 2 dollars per kilowatt-hour to 5-8 cents now. Didn’t the price of a watt of solar photovoltaic capacity drop from around $20 to $2.70 today? On the transport side, too, aren’t we seeing money flow into biofuels and electric cars?
Energy has become the hot new area for venture capitalists and universities. The fight against global warming has become like a religion and people want to be seen to be doing the right thing. Fathering in this area has indeed become quite prolific. For some, a move towards clean energy spells opportunity. They sell power-generation equipment and aircraft and train engines. New regulations require companies to adopt cleaner processes.
Maybe, as one goes back to work a bit and meditate in the garden, one may be allowed to celebrate while calling for more actions of care for Earth. Earth-savers, unite, we have no one to save but ourselves.
–FINIS-
Charles Avila -The Gardener
The Gardener’s Tales