Hard rain today. A soaker. I can hear the rain on the roof from downstairs. The wind blows the rain onto the windows. My pants get soaked walking the fifty feet from house to office. Dot refuses to come with me. But the grass appears to be growing now.
Today is the fiftieth anniversary of Earth Day. I attended the first Earth Day in Manhattan, my junior year of high school. It was just another demonstration in an age of demonstrations, just another reason to skip school for the afternoon. I remember a stage set up by the public library on Fifth Avenue near 14th street and speakers predicting dire consequences. I remember one in particular being that we would run out of oil by 1986. This seems strange because this was just six years before the Alaska pipeline began pumping and the north slope came on line. I don’t think anyone was imagining that we would run out of places to store oil and the price per barrel would be in the negative dollar range by 2020. But they would have predicted that the burning of carbon would have threatened the global climate. The air in southern California was horrible, and the water in Lake Washington in Seattle was unswimable. The East River in New York accepted huge pipes from Manhattan that funneled sewage direct from the toilettes of America’s Greatest City directly into the river and then the harbor. My friends and I used to stand at the dock and watch prophylactics as they floated to the surface by the hundreds. It was horrifying then and now as a memory.
There were more hikers on the Pacific Rim trail in the North Cascades of Washington then than there are today. More people hiked in the wilderness, then. More people took pack trips. Now more people mountain bike and run in the wilderness areas. More people do adventure sports than traditional camping, fishing and visiting. Not enough of a rush in flower sniffing. We have a much higher nature consciousness now, and our cities are cleaner. But less of a wilderness experience. We think more about the environment, and we watch more of it on our tiny devices than we used to. Fewer people work out in it. There are fewer farmers. There are fewer guides, and people who log, or gather, and work in sustainable ways out doors. Though in spots there are growing sustainable farming and boutique food producers, which make money for the hard working who are willing.
Lake Washington is now a good place to swim and there are salmon swimming in it. Salmon have become a totem animal of sorts for the environmentally minded. We worry more about salmon now than we enjoy eating them, or than we worry about the upland farmers who Roosevelt wanted to save from the dustbowl when he electrified the great basin of Washington during the depression. Progress is a push and shove and I’m good with that. I like covering over the irrigation ditches to save on water for fish. I also like preserving wetlands and shallows for fish and birds, But it doesn’t do much further inland where the huge industrial farms still buy out the small farmers and turn all the small towns to gas stations and mechanics shops for combines and tractors, with no schools or real communities in sight. Rural America has become Industrial instead of pastoral.
The future is hard to predict. It always has been. When Alvin Toffler wrote “Future Shock” around the time of the first Earth Day, he was right about the speed of cultural change but he had no mention of the personal computer or the micro chip and the miniaturization of technology. Toffler was a friend of my Dad’s and I suppose they saw the future as just more of what they already had. More and better., sleeker and faster. Being a futurologist is a tough gig, for you rarely predict the thing that surprises everyone: The tiny computer that everyone wants. The Pandemic that wrecks the economy. The President that harnesses stupidity and anger. Nope, that’s why they call them surprises.
I’m no better and I’m not judging anybody harshly for not predicting how things turned out. Humility is the quality that is called for in the face of the future. The Greeks and Roman’s knew that. So too the native Americans. I would much rather burn some meat on an alter or dance in a circle than write a book and claim to be certain of what is coming.
But better than predicting we can act with common sense. We know that dumping poison in the air isn’t going to work out in the long run. We just know that. We’ve already done it long enough. We don’t need proof about what exactly is going to happen. It just can’t be good. If it kills you when you pump car exhaust into your garage then it can’t be good to pump it into the atmosphere forever with a bajillion cars. It just can’t be, and then if scientists who have studied it say, “Hey listen… it really is bad!” Then it doesn’t take a genius to believe them. Just like it didn’t take a flipping genius to know not to go swimming in the East River in 1971 with all the turds and the rubbers. Just one look told even the dumbest teenagers THAT.
I love this wild beauty of the Tongas National Forest. I also like being able to work out in it, and I’m certain there are ways to do both, we just can’t strip it bare at the cheapest possible price point. Something has got to give. Sure it was more expensive to treat sewage. But we woke up and we did it. We can protect the air and the climate. It’s not a matter of whether we can or not. We know that now. We can do it. We can restrain our selves. if this pandemic crap has taught us anything it teaches us this. We can restrain ourselves to make things better. Nature is what it is. It’s not playing with us, it just is what it is, and we have to deal with it, just as we have to clean up after ourselves. It’s not fancy, or political. It’s just common sense to me.
Yes, I am the prophet of the self evident.
Daffodils
filled with rain, like teacups
left out all night.
jhs
Here is a reading I did this morning of one of my favorite contemporary poets. Pattiann Rogers sings the praises of the earth and asks hard questions like no one else:
