Live for a World We Love
This week in 1970, environmentalists celebrated the first Earth Day in commemoration of our shared home — a home that had been scarred by oil spills, industrial pollution, and ecological destruction. “Our goal is not just an environment of clean air and water and scenic beauty,” said Gaylord Nelson, US senator and Earth Day founder, in a speech on that first Earth Day. “The objective is an environment of decency, quality, and mutual respect for all other human beings and all other living creatures.”
Taking stock of that goal, 51 years later, can be “a complicated dance between hope and despair,” as Tia Nelson, the senator’s daughter, recently told journalist Ruth Conniff. This week also marked the 11th anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill — bigger and costlier than the Santa Barbara oil spill that inspired the first Earth Day. Meanwhile in Idaho, lawmakers approved legislation that aims to kill 90 percent of the state’s wolves. And while George Floyd’s murderer was convicted, in a just world, Floyd wouldn’t have been killed in the first place.
This morning, I returned to one of my favorite pieces in Orion Magazine, a conversation between climate activist Tim DeChristopher and farmer-poet Wendell Berry. On Berry’s porch in Kentucky, their conversation almost falls into an argument from either side of this "complicated dance.” Berry, true to form, advocates for the little actions — supporting neighbors, living according to place — without indulging “the big despair.” DeChristopher, more confrontational, pushes back: “What is localism’s answer to refugees? To those whose homeland is not livable anymore? Whether that place is underwater, has turned to desert, was destroyed by American imperialism and our desire for more resources?”
“The argument for despair is impenetrable,” Berry concedes. But then, a bit later in the transcript, mid-sentence, Berry points out a warbler on the grapevine, and the tone of the conversation changes. Let’s cast aside despair, the two agree, because when it comes down to it, what choice do we have but to live for a world we love?
If anything, this 51st Earth Day is a good reminder that there’s still work to be done today out of love for our shared planet, notwithstanding despair. Lyndsey Gilpin of Southerly summed it up best in her newsletter this week: “Multiple things can be true at once: This world is beautiful, and it is unjust. The future feels hopeful, and also bleak. The solutions are often fairly simple, and yet they often feel out of reach. The country is exhausting, but our people and places are worth the fight.”
Austin Price
Contributing Editor, Earth Island Journal
Photo by: Dawn / Flickr
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