Wake Up the Earth!
On17 April it was more than 70 degrees Fahrenheit in Ann Arbor. The daffodills were in full bloom. As usual on Wednesdays at the court house we were protesting the police shooting of Aura Roser last November and the prosecutor who refused to indict the policeman for that crime. Suddenly, such a racket of bird song poured out from the tree above us as a robin red breast sang his heart out and circled hysterically around a female! Spring had arrived at last. It has come so suddenly after an aching long winter.
Looking at the birds and the flowers it might seem that the earth could wake itself up without our help. ‘Fraid not.
The first Earth Day was 20 April 1970, the brainchild of Gaylord Nelson, Senator from Wisconsin. It was followed by a series of important environmental laws. It was preceded by the re-publication of perhaps the most important environmental book of the 19th century, apart from Darwin’s Origin of Species and Marx’s Das Kapital. I refer to Man and Nature; Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action written by George Perkins Marsh and published in July 1864. It helped to quicken the Earth Day crusade launched forty-five years ago.
He wrote of the disaster to come. “Another era of equal human crime and human improvidence … would reduce [the earth] to such a condition of impoverished productiveness, of shattered surface, of climatic excess, as to threaten deprivation, barbarism, and perhaps even extinction of the species.” He showed that forest clearance depletes the soil, impairs drainage, deranges nature, and leads to over-grazing. Despite the contemporary appearance of his prophecy, this was fully of its time, a 19th century book. Here’s an example of the writing which dates it, beautiful as the sentence is,
“For fuel to warm our bodies and seethe our pottage we are even now, breaking up the floor and wainscoting and doors and window frames of our dwelling.”
We no longer build our own houses, we heat by oil or gas not wood, and we certainly don’t panel our walls with the superior oak known as “wainscot.” As to ‘seething pottage’ near as I can make out this means to simmer lentil soup.
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