Earth Day 1970 Memories. Earth Day 2020 Realities.

April 22, 2020 is the 50th anniversary of Earth Day.

What I had imagined this anniversary to be is quite different given COVID 19.  Kindred spirits will not gather physically to celebrate the steps forward in environmental stewardship that these decades represent.  Nor will we be able to collectively mourn the too frequent and recent steps backwards especially under the current administration that values nothing but the dollar.

1970
I was 8 years old in 1970.   Only recently I realized that the Kent State murders happened weeks following the first Earth Day and that college campuses were consumed by war protests more so than environmental awakenings.

My 15-year-old sister, somehow, got the message that the first Earth Day was a thing.   I recently learned that she has no memory of this, which is ironic given that she holds the corporate memory of the family and too often recalls in detail what the rest of us wish was forgotten.  I was her prop for an Earth Day educational event at Gilbert Linkous Elementary in Blacksburg, Virginia.  She dressed me in yellow cardboard wings tied to my arms, a yellow cardboard tail tied to my waist, and crumpled yellow tissue paper pasted all over to simulate feathers.  I remember there being a red bird too, similarly feathered.

Perhaps the memory is seared in my brain because of the humiliation I experienced in my 8-year-old self in a classroom full of ferocious fourth graders.  Turning between the aisles of desks, my cardboard tail knocked over a row of Dixie cups spilling the soil and seeds of the Earth Day activity across the carpeted floor.  I was ushered out, feeling exposed as a clumsy bird.   But bigger than the embarrassment of the moment, I remember feeling deeply that I was a part of history.

Much later, I learned that it was months after Earth Day that Nixon established the US Environmental Protection Agency to begin enforcement of newly emerging environmental regulations and ethos stemming from 1970's National Environmental Policy Act.  By 1972, the Clean Water Act was in place, a compass for so much of the work I've undertaken throughout my lifetime.

Return to Harrison Lake National Fish Hatchery 40 years later.

By 1977, I was widely proclaiming that my purpose in life was to pursue an environmental vocation.  That summer, I joined a group of 16 teenagers to work and live at Harrison Lake National Fish Hatchery in Charles City, Virginia, as members of the US Department of Interior's Youth Conservation Corps.  We blazed trails, cleaned fish hatchery lagoons, and restored historic and natural areas. The composition of our YCC group included a handful of kids who, like me, felt a call to environmental work, intermixed with more reality grounded kids, who valued 32 H/week pay and three square meals a day for the summer, and for a few, a last ditch opportunity to avoid the juvenile delinquent system.

Though I grew up in Virginia, I always felt that my family was more connected to other parts of the country, like Pennsylvania and New Jersey.  Yet when I worked on one of the historic areas our YCC team restored, Drewry Bluff, I remember sensing a sacred connection to that ground. Years later, from Civil War era 1860s love letters, I learned that my great, great grandfather Philander, a Union soldier from Pennsylvania, had kept watch over the James River from Drewry's Bluff, referring to it as he wrote home and courted my great, great grandmother, Hattie.

1980
For the 10-year anniversary of Earth Day, my senior class at Blacksburg High School likely commemorated it, but I have no memories to share.  Instead, I remember that spring of track and field, dancing with friends, and wearing cowboy hats at graduation while "Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Cowboys" blared.

It was also the spring that I received word from the Izaak Walton League that I would be a fellow in their young conservationist program, assigned to the US Fish & Wildlife Services Leetown National Hatchery in West Virginia for the summer prior to starting college.   My essay in the national competition for the fellowship stated that I wanted to be an environmental journalist. I can still see in my mind's eye the misspelled words in that essay, thickly blotted over with whited-out, and a retyped correction over it.

It was my father who was the fisherman. I spent a lot of time in the boat, watching him and my brothers fish.  For years, every family picture was taken under the Muskie mounted above the fireplace, a fishing prize from the early 1970s when he won the Smith Mountain Lake fishing tournament.

Dad, Mom & my sons fishing, Pandapas Pond, c. 1995.

I had little interest in fish, but enormous interest in water quality.  Being immersed in the science and research underway at Leetown was thrilling even with the bulk of my job focused on cleaning of fish raceways and spawning tanks.  That summer of 1980, President Jimmy Carter was flown in by helicopter to fish the coldwater streams that laced throughout the secured complex.  A prolific trout population had somehow escaped the cultured for the wild, providing a fly fisherman's paradise.   After his visit, I found a Fanta can on the grounds that I kept for years, thinking that the President of the US had consumed it.  A newly registered voter in the fall 1980 presidential election, I threw away my vote on John Anderson.  To this day, I regret not voting for a faithful, trustworthy public servant like Jimmy Carter.

1990

I remember well the 20th anniversary of Earth Day.  It was my coming of age of sorts.   Then Senator Al Gore, son of Tennessee, brought to Nashville where I lived and worked, a faith-based invitation to environmental stewardship.  By this time, I had worked post college for six years in regional environmental planning and then environmental consulting.  I was an emerging, early career environmental professional.  The concept of integrating my faith and spirituality (which were important to me) with my professional pursuits seemed like a church-state clash and mismatch.

Through this faith-based environmental stewardship training, I began to understand the dualism I had imposed upon self.  Until then, I understood myself as 1) a science-based environmental professional and 2) a spiritual being, essentially two separate people instead of an integration of one.  Yet, these two parts of me had always been intertwined, from childhood excursions into the streams and woods, through ecological studies, fieldwork, and even in the office.  I simply had not claimed it for myself.

Summiting Katahdin at the start of my son's SOBO thru hike.

I recall time growing up, family camping, countless trail miles with loved ones, summiting the Peaks of Otter, Katahdin, Colorado Rockies, and the inevitable spiritual high when I sucked in the cool air at the top of a mountain.  Earth Day 1990 freed me to integrate love of creation, love for science and wholeness of spirit.  As a new wife and mother, Senator Gore's outreach to the faith community gave me a fresh way of recognizing that my work, no less than my divinity school-bound spouse, was a call to vocation.  Our first born son was named "Clay", of the Earth.

A few years later, the US EPA actually issued a memorandum encouraging its regional offices to connect with faith communities to improve place-based environmental protection.  When I received that notification, I thought to myself, our world is changing and for the better.

2000

One of Jim McClure's many witty environmental cartoons.

I don't remember the 30th anniversary of Earth Day.   I hope I planted trees with ClearWater Conservancy in Central Pennsylvania, took three little boys to Penn State's EcoAction's events on the lawn of the HUB, and spent the rest of the day flipping rocks in creeks to look at macroinvertebrates together, as we often did.  I recall fondly my interactions with Jim McClure, one of ClearWater Conservancy's founders, who shared with me that he had been a keynote speaker at Penn State's 1970 Earth Day event.   The quintessential political artist, Jim had penned many environmentally provocative messages that have fostered thought, sometimes anger by the powers to be, but always with humor and deep intelligence. Jim and other leaders of ClearWater Conservancy, inspired me to recognize the importance of elderhood in the environmental movement, and mentoring the upcoming generation of environmental leaders.

2010
The 40th anniversary of Earth Day was marked by an environmental movement that seemed, well, ubiquitous.  If you weren't already calculating your carbon footprint, planting trees to offset your own consumptive actions, and cleaning up watersheds, then you weren't paying attention. 

Penn State brought amazing science mentors into my life.

That spring, I gave a talk at Penn State's Environmental Forum titled “Improving Lives, Protecting Resources: The Challenge of Environmental Justice".  By this time, we were two decades out from Robert Bullard's damning call in "Toxic Waste and Race", and the burden of harmful environmental exposures continued to impact communities of color far more than any other people in the US.  Even knowing that environmental racism existed, I was unaware of some of its worst manifestations.  For example, how could I not have known that the mass incarceration of young, African American men in the 1980s-2000s correlated so closely with the lead exposures of children growing up in our cities in the 1960s and 1970s?  What an immense loss to humanity we incurred through poisoning of children by the unnecessary infusion of lead into gasoline, paints, and other materials.  Countless people were imprisoned for behaviors fueled by lead-poisoning, playing into the hands of a wicked system dependent upon populating new prisons with free [enslaved] labor.  The irony, I later learned, was that many of our higher education institutions benefit from imprisoned labor to furnish classrooms, perhaps even the very place where I gave a talk on  "the challenge of environmental justice".

2020

A view of the James from my stay-in-place window.

And here we are at the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, April 2020.  From my stay-in-place window at this moment, I see the James River flowing from the west  across the fall line from whitewater in Piedmont to the slow, wide movement through Tidewater.  The James River is a poster child of the environmental movement.   A survivor of vast deforestation imposed by energy and industry hungry European forefathers, the up-welling of urban-river bound populations and unbridled wastewater discharges including the dumping of kepone and other toxic chemicals, the James River is in recovery.  As it traverses through the heart of Virginia, the evidence of its recovery is visible with the return of migratory fish like shad and sturgeon and the food haven for the prolific community waterfowl and birds of prey, enjoying their feast on myriad fish and shellfish populations.

In the recent weeks of reduced traffic, my husband noted that spring smells different this year.  It is a seductive smell fostered by the current reprieve from higher vehicle emissions.  A reduction of particulate matter, carbon monoxide, NOX, the things that drive the higher incidence of asthma and other respiratory ailments is a silver lining for city dwellers at this moment. And with the transportation sector contributing nearly 30% of the US's global warming emissions, who knew that a pandemic would counter slightly the irresponsible action of a president who withdraws from a sacred promise (climate treaty) to the Earth's nations and people?

And as we seek to protect one another through this critical time of stay-in-place, the president of the United States is immorally, systematically, and, I believe, criminally, disassembling the very programs that have helped heal rivers, improve air quality, and provided a path forward to combat climate change.  Ten short years ago, I would have strongly asserted that at least the foundation for our work is in place, a vision planted on Earth Day 1970.  In real time, at this 50th anniversary of Earth Day, I fear that the foundation has never been more threatened than it is at this moment.

And then there is this.   John Phillip Newell, former warden of the Iona Community, softly, gently recalling the voice of John Muir.

"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to the universe"

In this, I hear the voice of my 28-year-old self speaking to the woman at this 50th anniversary of Earth Day.  Integrate.  Integrate your science self, your yellow bird self - unafraid to turn boldly in the aisles even if it means tipping a Dixie cup or two-,  and your sacred spirit self.  Integrate and know deeply and always, that hope for our Earth, the world, the Universe, is the human way.