Earth Day 2010

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Today is the 40th Earth Day and from where I am standing the world has gotten a lot worse. The earth is polluted, overcrowded, and overused. The need to consume and destroy has increased. The people on Earth act as if they have another planet to go to. Somewhere along the way the idealists and demonstrators of the 1960’s and 1970’s have lost their way. Many have become politically conservative and worship the god of conspicuous consumption. In the past few days I have read reports of oil spills, roads and dams being constructed in the Amazon, destruction of old growth forests, and poverty in the mostly densely populated areas in the world. Locally, the news reports focused on the amount of trash left behind by people attending Thunder Over Louisville, a local business dumping remodeling debris in a ravine near their building, and warnings not to swim or eat fish in the Ohio River. I don’t have to look further than my own back yard to see evidence of global warming; the birds are returning earlier each year and flowers are blooming two weeks before their “normal” bloom date.

When I was in college 40 years ago the young people of my generation were in a position to make changes that would benefit the world. They protested against the Vietnam War, supported equal rights for women and people of color, and for a moment believed in the ideas discussed in books such as “Diet for a Small Planet” and "The Silent Spring”. They used catch phrases like “Zero Population Growth” and “Make love, not war” and I thought they were sincere in their beliefs. Greed and profit appear to be stronger than altruism and common sense. My husband remembers participating in the first Earth Day Parade held in the small town where we both attended college. He says he and a friend drove to the site of the parade in the friend’s GTO, walked three blocks, returned to the car, and drove back to their fraternity house. We had an opportunity to change the world and we threw it all away.

Mother nature is beginning to show signs of her wrath. In the last few years reports of earthquakes, intense hurricanes, mudslides, ice, snow and rain storms, and most recently volcanic eruptions seem to be on the increase. If humans are unable to control themselves and realize that the world was not made for them to use and abuse, maybe they need a wake-up call.

“For a moment, or moments, it was as it had been in the beginning, before fear, before evil, before death, at the time of the creation, when the earth was new and living things flourished therein, where the earth was fair and all living things dwelt together as kindred. For a moment, or moments, beasts and children were friends, there in the sweetness and silence of the night, there in the calm and lovely fields of the Lord.”~Glendon Swarthout
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