My First Earth Day April 21
Thirty-eight years ago I was a high school student. College campuses were afire with more protests than you could shake a stick at. At the risk of sounding like a “these whippersnappers today…” speech, kids today really don’t appreciate exactly how much general upheaval there was.
At the beginning of my sophomore school year an earnest young college organizer came to our school to form an environmental club. The club was a way for those of us still needing permission slips to attend anti-war protests to get involved in something “radical”. Our parents figured this whole environmental thing was nothing but an extension of Lady Bird Johnson’s Beautify America campaign and it seemed a safe bet a state trooper wouldn’t whack us in the head for picking up trash. For our part, we were excited more by the prospect of being able to skip class for club activities than about picking up trash.
The organizer spent his time telling us about environmental products available in the Whole Earth Catalog. Clearly, one day we’d all shower with water heated by solar stills and build our geodesic houses out of the cast off hoods of cars. Beer bottles, presumably since there were always so many lying around the commune, also seemed like a futuristic building material. We’d all crap in bio-composting outhouses too. Later, as I grew up, those meetings made it easier to understand why our cars weren’t flying, our robots weren’t sweeping our floors, and why Tang was the penultimate triumph of the recently won space race.
Ah Mom!
Over the months, the club began to disintegrate. Long lectures about composting dinner scraps - like your Mom would allow that - didn’t much hold the interest of a bunch of young horndogs trying to recruit cute chicks for the mostly male club. But in mid-winter our organizer started to talk about a huge celebration called Earth Day that would be another Woodstock. In April, millions of kids would descend on Washington and celebrate the Earth in a way no one could have ever imagined. We asked what there would be to do and our organizer simply said “celebrate” in that doe-eyed way true hippies had back then. They didn’t need no stinkin’ plans, everyone just “went with the flow”.
Ya dig?
April 22 came around and we all piled into the organizer’s wheezing VW Microbus - which spewed more pollution than a coal burning locomotive - and headed for Washington. The traffic jam was horrendous. Cars boiled over and many of the more laid back simply stopped in the middle of the street and wandered away to swim naked in the polluted Potomac. We were sure the Earth was being celebrated somewhere in the Washington Metro area, but it was something we took on faith rather than actual participation.
As with many 60s-era revolutions, the club ran out of steam. Our organizer didn’t show up to our meetings. Word had it he’d met a girl with hairy legs and flowers in her hair and they’d packed up the Microbus to move to Haight-Ashbury. We discussed merging our club with the primarily female student poetry magazine - Rutabaga Fudge - but stopped short of a real merger when it became apparent that listening to poetry might actually be required. We still got out of class to attend meetings, although our only further activity that year was to show up on picture day, hold up our stomach-churning green eco-flag, and pile atop one another to flip off the camera.
We’ve Come a Long Way Baby
Earth Day has come a long way since then, but it’s still more about style than substance. They teach environmental science in high school now. The classes are long on making posters about the far-off promise of wind farms and convincing your Mom to change the light bulbs at home. People still gather to celebrate the Earth, but the crowds are considerably smaller and no one runs off to skinny dip in the Potomac. Poor Al Gore has risen above his former wooden self to make movies and start a television network, making him look marginally hip. He uses solar panels at his palatial farm and buys carbon credits to offset things like the pumps for the swimming pool, but the global warming naysayers are getting the last laughs as this Earth Day rolls around.
Today’s Earth Day is still more about picking up beach trash than solar energy or wind power, but everything starts small and takes awhile to catch on - although 38-years seems a little glacial even by American societal standards. Picking up beach trash is better than nothing and a few Moms may have even been convinced to swap out the light bulbs (but only when the incandescents burn out). We still aren’t building houses out of car hoods or remembering that the Whole Earth Catalog turned into a middle-class chain of department stores. Earth Day isn’t dead, but it sure needs some life support.
Solar-powered life support, if we can manage it.
The Poobah is a featured contributor at Bring It On!
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Blu Man Chu Apr 21
funny, most of the few goons who were involved with me in the environmental area as kids still are working on it. must be the water.
daveawayfromhome Apr 21
Too much inertia. The supertanker of American society churns onwards, and few hippies in canoes pushing on the bow arent going to change its direction much, especially when you got the oil industry’s tugs pushing from the other side to maintain course. I expect it’s gonna take an iceberg to shift our course. Let’s just hope that we dont hit that ‘berg and sink.
daveawayfromhome’s last blog post..where credit is due
Omnipotent Poobah Apr 22
Rev,
I think those are the true believers. I’m afraid there is a low proportion between them and everyone else.
Dave,
Aw, you’re always such an optimist
Dusty Apr 24
Nice trip down memory lane there Poobie!
Dusty’s last blog post..McCain and the GI Bill..