Thank you, Gaylord Nelson, for giving us Earth Day.
Although Earth Day is always April 22, it is celebrated at various times around the end of April. This year’s celebration here in Sauk County will be held at the University of Wisconsin-Baraboo/Sauk County from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sunday. It is free family fun with music, food, exhibits, an exhibit of art created from recycled objects, and a kids’ creation corner.
There also will be workshops on local geology, prairies for yards, landscaping ideas and the importance of bees. Even if it is raining, it will be a day of ideas for spring and summer projects. Tours of the Baraboo Culver’s will be offered before and after the Earth Day fair, at 10:30 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. This Culver’s is a LEED-certified building, one of the most energy-efficient new buildings in Wisconsin.
Clearly, we need to spend more time relating to the Earth than just one day a year, but it is a start. When I look at all the garbage in the ditch along our high school in Reedsburg, I think they should have Earth Day once a week and have the students clean up the mess they have created. One important factor in Earth Day is responsibility.
We are all responsible for the mess we and the Earth are in. We already have altered the climate irrevocably, and we continue to compromise our future further. If we approve that filthy Keystone pipeline full of oil from the tar sands in Canada, we may well be sealing the coffin on civilization. Refining and burning that dirty oil will double the damage we already have done and heat the Earth to the point where vast areas will be uninhabitable.
“It got so hot in Australia in January that the weather service had to add two new colors to its charts. A few weeks later, at the other end of the planet, new data from the CryoSat-2 satellite showed 80 percent of Arctic sea ice has disappeared. We’re not breaking records anymore; we’re breaking the planet. In 50 years, no one will care about the fiscal cliff or the Euro crisis. They’ll just ask, ‘So the Arctic melted, and then what did you do?’ ”
This quotation comes from climate expert Bill McKibben in his article “The Fossil Fuel Resistance” in the latest issue of Rolling Stone magazine. I first read McKibben’s landmark essay, “The End of Nature” in the New Yorker magazine more than 20 years ago. Then he was the first canary in the mine, sounding the alarm about dramatic global climate change and its dangers. Now he is respected as the leader in the effort to slow climate change by modifying human behavior.
When Gaylord Nelson first brought us Earth Day 43 years ago, awareness of the toxic consequences of our industrial era blossomed around the country. Out of Earth Day came the Clean Air Act and the Endangered Species Act, both of which have since been weakened by industry lobbies. Green groups like the Natural Resource Defense Council, the Environmental Defense Fund, The Sierra Club and The Nature Conservancy gained momentum until the backlash from the conservative right-wing began. For the last 25 years, it has been almost impossible to get any significant legislation to deal with carbon and mercury emissions.
There are encouraging signs that the tide is again turning and our resolve to change our ways of living and polluting is growing once again. More and more people around the world are recognizing the dramatic climate changes of recent years, and now we are coming once again face to face with the entrenched corporate establishment that profits from fossil fuels and suffers from regulation.
Please, Gaylord, send us some charismatic environmental leaders who can win the day for us all, and for the future health of the Earth. And give us all the energy to stand with them against the climate change deniers and the corporations that care only for their own interests. How about Earth Year?
Mimi Wuest writes a weekly column for the Times-Press.
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