Earth Day reflections from Jane, our Creative Director.
Here in Tennessee it’s a lovely, wet and overcast Spring day. Last night brought the first good rain we’ve had in a while. Everything is lush, leafy and intensely green. The earth seems happy. My first peony has bloomed and the clematis covering the porch rail has begun to flower. The thick green coat of green pollen that covered my porch and car all week has been rinsed away. My sinuses are happy, and so am I.
I remember how much fun I made of my mother for her obsession with gardens, her boundless fascination with nature. And here I am, gobstruck by each new bloom, walking on air when I spot a cardinal or a squirrel. There was no use fighting it, this love of the natural world. It runs in the blood. It runs in all of our blood. Or at least it should. My earliest designs told me this long ago; milkweed creeping onto mirrors, passion vine crawling up lamps. My drawing hand knew better than my head. It was saying happy Earth Day all along... And now, I say it without fear of seeming corny or trite. Happy Earth Day.
I wonder, however, how happy the earth is today? We’ve put our gorgeous green mother through the ringer of late. Two centuries of industrialization have left her pock-marked and bruised, burned and parched, transgressions we’ve only begun to redress. Our small, green planet is the origin of infinite inspiration, not to mention the source of all known life. I can’t be the only one who finds the administration's dismantling of the EPA so senseless and cruel. Why would we knowingly harm the font of our existence? Don’t misunderstand me, I am all for profits and prosperity. And it’s not as if I think certain businesses, oil, petrochemicals, factory farms, set out to ruin the earth. The damage was not readily apparent in the beginning. And hardly anyone dreamt we might cause irreparable harm. But the data is in, the evidence is in front of us. It’s time to adapt our ways to sustain nature, before nature can no longer sustain us.
As a native Chattanoogan, I’m just old enough to have a smoggy memory of what it was like here when the city had the dubious designation of “the most polluted city in the United States.” It wasn’t pretty. A shroud of smog blanketed the city most mornings, soot stained buildings,there was often a chemical stench. You couldn’t see town from the mountain most mornings. Chattanooga Creek, which I can see from my porch, ran a fluorescent green . Occasionally, it caught fire. And then Nixon, for all his faults, signed the EPA into law. And slowly, around here at least, nature began to repair itself.
It took Chattanooga a full 50 years, endless hard work and coordination with government agencies (like the EPA) , and millions upon millions of dollars to get us to where we are today, the freshly appointed and very first National Park City in North America.👊 The executive order behind EPA’s recent spree of deadly deregulations promises to obliterate all that in short order. I for one, do not want to return to the pre-EPA “good old days”, to live and breathe in a corrosive miasma of toxins, to watch wildlife and environment succumb to slow poisons, to think that children might subsist on contaminated water, frolic unknowingly in world carcinogens and rising temperatures. There is a way forward. It appears to be clean, and nature-friendly and in the end, more profitable and prosperous than the model it’s time to leave behind. Only greed and ignorance stand in our way. But lately, they are standing tall.
What I don’t understand is who actually supports this. Who thinks it is a great idea to NOT protect our environment? When the ballots were cast in November, was the annihilation of the EPA a priority for half of the voters? Am I missing something? Are there people in our country who are looking forward to more sewage and chemical waste being dumped into our rivers and waterways? Are there big fans of forever chemicals out there? Who is thrilled by the promise of more soot spewed into the atmosphere?
Politically, we’re deeply divided, I know. But for the life of me, I can’t understand how this is a partisan issue. Whatever our political affiliation, tax bracket, zip code, spiritual or ethnic identity, we all want clean air and water.
As a child, in Sunday school, I was taught that we were put on earth to be stewards of God’s creation, to tend the garden not to trash it. This, in my mind, is the work of the divine. So chin up my friends, let’s get to work and put right what lately seems to have gone wrong. Happy Earth Day to Mother Nature, may her force be with you.
