Thoughts on Earth Day.
Ocean Vuong in his extraordinary novel, “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous,” wrote of the American Mythos that “something is only valuable once we have tamed it or conquered it or dominated it.” I find this observation extremely cogent on Earth Day. Since the first Earth Day, fifty years ago, we have increasingly tamed, conquered and dominated the Earth, believing that we have been creating a more valuable world. But where has this taming, conquering and domination truly dumped us? We now have polluted the air to the extent that climate is changing. We have polluted both fresh and sea waters to the point that many living creatures can no longer use them. We have eroded and polluted the rich top layers of soil, so that they are increasingly more sterile. We have conquered, tamed, and dominated biologic ecosystems so that whole plant and animal species have become extinct.
On the first Earth Day, many people came to recognize that pollution of air, land, and water existed and needed to be corrected. And legislation was enacted to correct the things that almost anyone of us could see in our daily lives– foul air, dirty waters, and urban sprawl. Good for us!
But we then often said that’s enough because to do more we would have to stop getting or creating more goods and services–luxuries that not even royalty had but a hundred years earlier. But if we stopped “progress” we also have less “free” time, which we could use to travel to new places and peoples and to visit distant family and friends. And certainly we shouldn’t slow efforts to create more jobs–whatever these jobs might be. We had to pit “Environment against Economy” in which Economy usually won. So the question, “can man survive?” and the brief prospects of “saving the Earth” have been overwhelmed by the creation of more human goods and services without much thought about how that creation has affected the natural world of which we all are a part.
But today we are enmeshed in a global pandemic caused by the letting loose of a tiny, tiny virus. We realize that we are not able to dominate or conquer even one of the smallest elements in our ecosystem. With great efforts we may tame this virus. But we cannot tame, let alone conquer and dominate, all of the pollutants that we create in our natural environment.
I would hope that this pandemic would let us, on this Earth Day, see that we are part of a unimaginably intricate web of life and environment beyond our control. I would hope that we can humbly imagine, look for, and direct our actions towards feeding, housing, and educating healthy and fulfilled humans. Can this be the time in which we recognize the folly of our actions of the past fifty years? We can no longer value the taming, conquering, or dominating the world around us. We must reimage the basic myths by which we live.
Al Urquhart