50th Earth Day

50th Earth Day
by Aaron Fairchild

The arrival of this Earth Day comes during a punctuated time of hardship and crisis felt across the Earth.  On the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, our connection to Earth and our celebration of life may perhaps feel stronger as a result.

With Earth Day occurring during a historic global crisis, it may help highlight our need to change to a society that is more just, equitable, and resilient.

Hopefully our collective attention will shift to areas of greatest need throughout society. To help those of greatest need in balance with all life on the planet is a tall and encompassing order that requires us to behave differently. And while change is difficult, in order to realize a better future for all, change is what is required.

To fully embrace the 50th anniversary of Earth Day and all that it stands for, there may be no better manner than to read the manifesto of change that helped to usher in the first Earth Day in 1970.

I came into my twenties reading the poet philosopher, Gary Snyder. One of the fondest memories of being with my father was when he and I sat on the edge of an alpine lake together and read Gary Snyder’s Pulitzer Prize winning book, Turtle Island. In the back of what is largely a book of poetry, he embedded a short essay as bedrock called, Four Changes. Written in the summer of 1969, Four Changes quickly became the environmental manifesto that helped to lift up Earth Day and all that it stands for. The manifesto calls us to a radical shift in thinking about our relationship with the planet in four critical areas: population, pollution, consumption, and the transformation of our society and ourselves. When I first read Four Changes, I found hidden truths to living harmoniously with the Earth that changed the course of my environmental thought and perspective.

At the 25-year mark of Earth Day, in 1995, Gary Snyder wrote, “The apprehension we felt in 1969 has not abated. It would be a fine thing to be able to say, ‘We were wrong. The natural world is no longer as threatened as we said then.’ One can take no pleasure, in this case, in having been on the right track… Naïve and utopian as some of it sounds now, I still stand by the basics of ‘Four Changes.’”

Six years later, shortly after the events of 9/11 I wondered if Gary Snyder had anything he could offer in the aftermath. I found a Berkley email address for him and wrote to Mr. Snyder. I shared that his writings had influenced my thinking and my relationship with my father and asked if he had any words of wisdom to offer in reflection on 9/11. A couple weeks went by and then, unexpectedly, I received a response: “This is what my friend Wendell Berry has to say about it.” He inserted a link, an early version of Mr. Berry’s essay, Thoughts in the Presence of Fear. Wendell Berry’s essay is another manifesto, a call to change. It also reveals hidden truths and changed my thoughts on environmentalism and social justice.  

Leading up to the 50th Earth Day, with COVID-19 as the backdrop, I reread both of these seminal essays. I inserted COVID-19 where appropriate and in this way their words become a manifesto for this moment as well. Rather conspicuously, neither writing points to saving the whales, or polar bears, or forests. They are not about environmental protection or preservation per say. They are short guidebooks on how to establish a more equitable and resilient economy and society. They point the direction toward environmental and social equity as a singular issue, not as separate issues to be addressed independent of each other. In this way addressing COVID-19 and its inequitable health and economic hardship is addressing changing climate. To meaningfully address climate change, we don’t need new technologies, we need new behavior, and social, political, and economic structural changes. We are witnessing this truth right now with the collapse of oil largely due to a lack of demand. Issues of resilience require holistic solutions that are politically, economically, socially, and environmentally intertwined.

On this Earth Day 2020, I stand by Four Changes and Thoughts in the Presence of Fear, and I am hopeful.

I am hopeful that through our collective work to address COVID-19 and the inequitable health and economic devastation created in its wake, we will also be holistically addressing the intertwined issues of resource scarcity, social equity, and climate change. At the center of 50 years of Earth Days, a turning has begun, and I am hopeful.

For more on hope, here is a short writing by another one of my heroes, Krista Tippet. On Hope.