Commentary: Earth Day Thoughts on Science and Survival

  • Photos by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) began to change worldwide awareness about the small blue and green island in space that is our home.

    Photos by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) began to change worldwide awareness about the small blue and green island in space that is our home.

By Patric Hedlund, editor

We need all the tools we can get our hands around to grapple with the challenges confronting us this year. This week marked the 45th anniversary of a strange pre-internet, pre-wireless meme that went viral before most of those words in their present form existed.

Earth Day sprang into being in 1970 as a reflection of our ability as humans to let our imaginations and our science guide our vision and mobilize our action. To have seen the NASA image of the earth taken from Apollo 8 was, for many, like falling in love. There was an inevitability of the knowledge that one single picture gave to us. In 1968 Stewart Brand published that photo on a volume he called The Whole Earth Catalog.

It was the ultimate coffee table book. It was very thick, but the real message is that one picture on the cover. Science had taken human beings into space. Technology had enabled them to take a photograph of our mother planet and bring it back to share.

I was in New York City in 1970, in love with being a photojournalist, taking photos in a city rich with creative wit. It was the first Earth Day celebration in Manhattan. A carnival atmosphere on Fifth Avenue celebrated the rich birthright we had all been born into.

Now, rapidly changing climate is beginning to twist our lives and the world around us into unexpected loss, and unexpected confrontation with our own limitations. Since I took photos of that first Earth Day, 52% of vertebrate species have disappeared from this globe.

Our fifth year of drought here in California is accompanied by bizarre weather patterns elsewhere on our small blue jewel of a planet.

You’ve heard some of it. Island nations are already losing land. Their people are being forced to seek refuge in continental nations. Saltwater is advancing on the Everglades of Florida just as growing human development pushes people into places where drinking water is becoming brackish and unusable. Animals and plants can’t buy Evian. Human migrations and warfare in Africa are not coincidental. Desertification of continents has consequences.

The colorful coral reefs and bioluminescent creatures that I loved for so many years as a card-carrying scuba fanatic are now dimming. Their lights are vanishing as the temperature of ocean currents change.

Our planet’s amazing glaciers and snow packs are simply disappearing. As Californians know too well, alpine snow packs are the source of irrigation water for our food-producing farms and drinking water for our cities.

This is not happening in geologic time. It is not the slow movement over hundreds of thousands of years of the past. These things are happening in just four decades. It is precipitous change.

As a species, we are being confronted much too soon with a final exam about our own sanity.

If we wish to indulge in magical thinking and denial, that is our right. The consequence for failing the test is simple. We won’t survive, at least humans won’t survive with the beauty and lushness Nature has lavished on our home in epochs of the past.

I personally dislike dystopian fiction. I’m an optimist. I have faith in the spiritual wisdom of our species. But are we listening to all the whispers in the breezes around us? Or are we listening to paid propaganda telling us not to believe our own eyes?

Is it possible for any of us to drive along Frazier Mountain Park Road and view the dying piñon forest without acknowledging that something is happening? Yes, change is part of nature. But so is our science. So is our intellect.

This week, I was prepared to report about Earth Day activities taking place in the Mountain Communities.

But guess what? There are none here that are organized and promoted. Why is that? The responsibility for action is on your shoulders and mine. Let’s start by believing our own eyes.

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This is part of the April 24, 2015 online edition of The Mountain Enterprise.

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