Photography Editor- Soren Sackreiter
What is the true meaning of Earth Day? Is it a time to recognize the work that we have done, or reckon with the work yet to be done?
Consider the irony of a person driving their gas car to an Earth Day clean-up event next week, stopping on their way to get a coffee made from beans grown on displaced rainforest, throwing away their disposable cup as they arrive. At the event, this hypothetical person will probably get a free t-shirt made from hundreds of gallons of water that will sit in their closet until they move houses. Did the trash they picked up from the highway actually show their appreciation for the earth, or just make their commute a little less ugly?
It’s generally known that the celebration of this holiday began in the 1970s, but the seeds were planted almost a decade earlier with the writings of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962. Up until that point, writing on the environment had focused on romanticizing nature; From Emerson to Leopold, Thoreau’s idealistic Walden, and John Muir’s National Parks. Nature was an invincible force that held beauty and mystique, whimsy even. Carson took that idea and flipped it on its head, starting the second wave of ecocriticism that showed how humans and the environment are intertwined. Her book brought national attention to the concept of pollution and the harsh reality that we are to blame. All through the 60’s, this idea began to simmer and, when the Santa Barbara oil spill happened in 1969, a lobby began to build around the idea of honoring the Earth, the concept of peace, and education on environmentalism. Keep in mind that the Cold War and Space Race were also high on public perception; people were more aware than ever about the massive and minuscule scales of the Earth and humanity’s capacity for destruction.
After the momentum of this original Earth Day, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was formed later that year, and environmental legislation took off throughout the 70s in the US. I’m not going to go through the fifty-some years since then, but it held momentum, eventually becoming a globally recognized event as the concept of climate change became increasingly relevant. For the 40th anniversary, more than a billion people took action, and the Paris Agreement was signed a few years later during Earth Day 2016. And yet, despite (or maybe because of) all this positivity, I would like to challenge the way we celebrate Earth Day today. If you take a look at the individuals and groups who are leading the rallying cries, they are making a difference every single day of the year, not just on April 22nd. If we use Earth Day as our moral justification to not pick up the trash we see on the sidewalk the other 364 days of the year, we are doing a disservice not just to the Earth but to the cleanliness of our lives. Wouldn’t it be great if Earth Day could be a time to appreciate the work being done and to absorb the wonder of our planet? The Artemis II astronauts just reminded us what it means to be living on this blue dot—that we can rally for positivity and innovation, not just war and destruction.
We’re all to blame for the pollution of our planet, and we can all be part of the solution. If that means you want to show up to the Earth Day cleanup here at Gustavus (meeting at 3 p.m. and 4 p.m. in Johns Courtyard), that’s wonderful, but think about a place where you might pick up trash on the 23rd as well. Bring an old shirt you don’t wear to stamp it with a new design. Ask those with whom you are volunteering what they are doing to make a difference in their daily lives—have they considered electric cars, is their coffee shade-grown, what meats do they eat? Last of all, educate yourself: read the news, ask professors questions, be curious. The irony of Celebration of Creative Inquiry being held at the same time as Gustavus Earth Day cleanup is almost fitting in that we are taking the day to appreciate the work people are doing to make our planet a better place. We’re throwing back to the teach-ins that started this 56-year-old tradition of honoring the Earth, not just acknowledging our human impact, our pollution, but the power we have to come together for peace and to solve problems so that we still have a planet to appreciate.