Happy Earth Day!

Happy 40th birthday Earth Day!

After 40 years, the environment is, I think on the agenda for good, and thus that particular function of Earth Day is worn a little thin - raise your hands if you want another admonishment about how we're treating the planet?  How about another 500 top ten lists about how to green everything from your wardrobe to your sex life?  No longer do we need to use the day as a platform from which to cry out all of the problems going on in the bio-social matrix of the planet - if you're not aware of the precariousness of the situation, you probably aren't reading this.  In fact, you probably aren't reading anything.  As an example of how windows of interest function for policy-makers, our environmental policy prof showed us a sequence of magazine covers with specials on climate change: first Times, then Newsweek, then Business Week, then...Sports Illustrated?........then.........Vanity Fair!  Earth Day as an annual town crier's bell is a little outmoded by this point.

So on this Earth Day, I thought that I would contribute to the whole discourse by simply shouting out to the primordial  feeling of Awe that I often get just conceiving of the immensity and beauty of the World and all that it holds.  The following is just a brief foray into it.  Let's go back to the image that set the whole Earth Day thing in motion - the very first pictures of Earth from space, taken in 1968:

I grew up reading science writers who evoked wonder at every turn, whose goal was to turn the everyday observation into a meditation on the beauty all around us, who effected me so much that I have never stopped staring into the night sky with utter delight, never stopped chattering to whoever will listen about how wonderful insects and microbes are, and have never failed to, at least once a day, be humbled by the immensity of all I don't know.  Carl Sagan's reflection on the photo of earth from space comes from his famous Pale Blue Dot:

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

I don't know whether, on first hearing about the theory of Evolution, it struck me as odd - it certainly should have!.  I'd like to think that I got as excited about it then as I do now, but I have no way of knowing. I do know that Evolution is what tipped the scales towards the study of Biology when I was going into the third year of my undergraduate degree.  I was trying to decide between Biology and Physics - I loved them both - but in the end I just needed to study Life!  Joseph Wood-Krutch articulates why better than I ever could:

If I wanted to comtemplate what to me is the deepest of all mysteries, I should choose as my object lesson a snowflake under a lens and an amoeba under a microscope. To the detached observer - if one can possibly imagine any observer who could be detached when faced with such an ultimate choice - the snowflake would certainly seem the "higher" of the two. Against its intricate glistening perfection one would have to place a shapeless, slightly turbid glob, perpetually oozing out in this direction or that but not suggesting so strongly as the snowflake does, intelligence and plan. Crystal and collid, the chemist would call them, but what an inconceivable contrast those neutral terms imply! Like the star, the snowflake seems to declare the glory of God, while the promise of the amoeba, given only perhaps to itself, seems only contemptible. But its jelly holds, nevertheless, not only its promise but ours also, while the snowflake represents some achievement which we cannot possibly share. After the passage of billions of years, one can see and be aware of the other, but the relationship can never be reciprocal. Even after these billions of years no aggregate of colloids can be as beautiful as the crystal always was, but it can know, as the crystal cannot, what beauty is.

And finally, to second that feeling, the immortal closing lines to the Origin of Species (which I know by heart :-)

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

We have been given a wonderful, incomparable gift in our existence, in our planet, in our mysterious and often hilarious minds.  Today, I just want to say thanks.  I motion that Earth Day, from now on, be less a clarion call and more of a Great, universal Thanksgiving - I think it would do a lot more good that way.