Earth Day, Every Day

Even when the world is falling apart.

While some of the challenges before us have changed, our responsibilities are the same today as those recognized 20 years ago. As a nation, we must acknowledge that our environment and economy are interdependent. We must also go beyond the traditional regulatory role of government and continue to seek solutions that embrace all sectors of society in preventing pollution and ecological damage before they occur.

The first Earth Day helped increase dramatically public awareness of ecological issues. Across the country, millions of people rallied to express their concerns about pollution and to learn how they could help clean up and protect the environment. Thanks to the educational programs and volunteer programs established since then, many Americans now are more faithful stewards of our precious natural resources.

Today the United States is a leader in environmental protection. We have made important progress toward improving air quality through enforcement of the Clean Air Act, the phasing out of leaded gasoline, and more stringent fuel efficiency standards for automobiles. We have expanded our parks, wildlife refuges, and wilderness areas. We have made major advances in protecting our lakes, rivers, and streams; and we have begun to clean up once-neglected toxic waste sites. The United States has also been a leader in the worldwide effort to study and address global climate change. Through our participation in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we are working to promote environmental safeguards not only at home but also abroad. - George H.W. Bush, Proclamation 6085 - Earth Day, 1990.

Medina River, Medina River Natural Area in San Antonio, Texas. January 2023.

I have struggled mightily these last few months to write about the on-going undoing of our environmental legacy here in the United States. It is very painful for me, and I’ve seen others trying to grapple with the pain as well. I’ve mostly been avoiding the worst bits of news, though it is a necrosis that is slowly killing everything around it and it is impossible to truly ignore.

And here I am, quoting Republican George H.W. Bush, 41st President of the United States about Earth Day.

Can you see how far we’ve fallen?

In 35 years we’ve gone from a representative of supposedly the same political party in office today touting our commitments as a country to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (albeit with some heavy private sector undertones), to the dismantling and destruction of our nation’s foremost environmental protection agencies with the flick of a pen in an Executive Order. Despite pleas and calls to elected congressional officials, who have in the past been critical about the past/current Trump administration, all of the destruction continues.

Personally and professionally, this is showing up in my own life. Agency officials I or others in my office have worked with for years are taking buyouts and early retirements, often leaving projects in a lurch while they are handed off to other overburdened federal employees. People I know who have been working at Dream Jobs for federal agencies are faced with taking the buyouts or be fired in a few months, or were fired back in February with the first round of farcical cuts.

Everywhere you turn something environmental is on the chopping block.

Sharing calls for action and ideas for activism has felt very trite to me. I shouted for four years to anyone who would listen and shouted again here in Texas to save Fairfield Lake State Park and look where that got us. I realize this is a long-haul situation and yet, we haven’t been here before. Sure, we’ve been at the beginning where we took no cares and pillaged the land, and there have always been adjustments to regulations during different presidential administrations, but this? This is entirely new. This isn’t a hand wave to absolve something, to say it’s temporary and it’ll be fine in four years. I cynically laugh at how many environmental and naturalist folks I followed on Instagram got excited about RFK Jr and how his past environmental policies might sway the current administration. How’d that work out for ya?

It was always smoke and mirrors.

So, now we have propositions to roll back what constitutes harm with regard to endangered species, that destroying habitat that a species relies upon isn’t harm because it isn’t an outright act of killing or maiming. Oh yeah, that endangered orchid is going to thrive so hard when you drain the wetland it grows in! Bald eagles are gonna love having their nests destroyed because a developer logged the trees they built their nests in. Migratory birds such as whooping cranes that rely upon extensive wetlands are gonna love having them filled and turned into developments.

Passenger pigeons were numerous until they weren’t.

You cannot undo development in habitat, whether it is for critical species or not. Once it is gone, it is gone. One thing I have to hit home again and again with many folks is that just because they see “green” they cannot automatically think it is habitat for wildlife. Sure, some of the more wide-ranging species can make a living in suburban backyards and urban woodlots as much as they thrive in a many thousand acre tract of undeveloped land, but many, if not most, species simply cannot. Habitat conversion is a far more critically important issue than many give it credit for. It leads the way to other things like pollution runoff, increased traffic and roadkill deaths, wildlife loss due to pets and home pesticide/herbicide poisonings, and habitat conversion in the form of horticultural and invasive species plantings. A lawn of Bermuda or St. Augustine with few foundation plantings is nothing compared to the hardwood forest or bluestem/mixed-grass prairie that may have existed before development, or heck even the converted pasture it may have been. And you certainly lose massive amounts of water storage seeping into the ground when you cover everything in pavement, which increases risks for flooding in areas previously unknown for that to happen.

“We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost's familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road — the one less traveled by — offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

Rachel Carson did not live long enough to see her endless campaigns as an environmentalist and conservationist come to fruition in the 1970s with the influx of environmental regulations coming out of, again, a Republican administration. Though many have followed in her footsteps around the country to continue to pursue the tireless advocacy needed to see these regulations and protections placed, it has been an ever constant battle to see them enforced and expanded to the capacity needed in the face of revolving/evolving threats. Unfortunately this is a long haul situation. It always has been.

We have to keep writing and keep advocating. We have to talk to friends and family about what is going on and why it matters. Clean drinking water is important! You don’t have to bring up sensitive endangered species topics to your grandfather who is a hunter but I’m willing to bet he probably likes having drinking water that isn’t full of pollutants. It is also hard to make a change or even change an opinion when you don’t even know the information at hand—you don’t know what you don’t know. This is why conversations are still important, even if they are hard. And trust me, I am the last person to be telling anyone this because I have a difficult time with it myself.

There will be losses, significant ones I suspect. And they are going to hurt like hell.

But we have to keep going, keep celebrating Earth Day, and carry into the future the hope that we can someday arrive at the destination that Rachel Carson wrote about in Silent Spring.