Who Goes First, Me or the Planet?

Reflections on Earth Day 1970, 2022

I wake around 5 in the morning, put on a warm parka and unzip the tent door. The sun has journeyed close enough to the horizon that I can see the tracery of the firs and spruce as they raise their arms to the just-lightening sky, discern the outline of the dark humps of granite boulders that populate the campsite like giant turtles. A friend and I have driven as far east as my pea green VW bug could navigate and still be on dry land, checked in to the Acadia National Park campsite the night before and put up our tent.  I was twenty-five, it was April 22, 1970, the first Earth Day, and for some reason, lost to me now, we decided to celebrate the day not by joining the millions throughout the country who marched in the streets, but by watching the sun’s first light as it crawled over the horizon, the sea before us, the layers of gray glacial rocks stacked under our feet.

If you’d asked me then to imagine my life on Earth Day fifty-two years later, nothing, absolutely nothing about my experience then would have allowed me to anticipate this moment so well-articulated by this headline in the Guardian:

“Climate scientists are desperate: we’re crying, begging and getting arrested… I’m a climate scientist and a desperate father. How can I plead any harder? What will it take? What can my colleagues and I do to stop this catastrophe unfolding now all around us with such excruciating clarity?”

I still remember the glory of that moment in 1970 when the sun rose at the easternmost tip of land in America. Everything before me seemed endless: the cloudless sky and the vast sea and the deep forest; time not yet elided by age; solidarity with millions who marched for the environment or marched for peace. The future was bright, the horizon endless. I had a graduate degree paid for in full by an NIMH grant so big it even paid my wine bill; a job at an esteemed institution I felt born to do.  My parents were still young and healthy, my high-rise apartment in Chicago overlooked the Lake and the rent was reasonable. Jobs were plentiful, cars were cheap, the shop windows were filled with the allure of silks and leather.

Of course, there were things I was blind to, in particular the institutional racism that privileged all my success.  And I was blind to the price we’d one day in the far-off future pay for the ideas and cultural norms that undergirded the glory of that moment: ideas about unlimited growth, progress, success, individuality, separation, nature, development.  And the price for burning all that oil that built those dreams.   

Eight months after we stood on that granite cliff overlooking the ocean, Nixon would establish the Environmental Protection Agency, and within the year, sign into law the National Environmental Policy Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act and a few years later, the Clean Water Act.  Recount that to yourself!!  Nixon, with the support of the Republican Party, would sign all this sweeping environmental legislation into law. Recalling these facts about the past leads me to a draw between feelings of hope and feelings of despair.  Look it happened once, it could happen again vs. look how far down we’ve descended into the slough of polarized beliefs about what’s important, worth saving.

Waking this Earth Day at home, three hours’ drive south from that cliff in Acadia, I have a hard time getting going.  On top of the climate emergency and the nasty political polarization that has eroded trust and common beliefs, factors necessary for a democracy to thrive, there is of course the war in Ukraine, the threat of all-out nuclear war, the ongoing uncertainty about Covid, the possibility of Roe v. Wade being overturned. It is all exhausting. Nothing feels like it did fifty-two years ago: there is no expansiveness, no exuberance for the infinite possibilities of life and of humankind.

I scan the morning’s trove of emails and news reports: Earth Day is referred to in almost every post, including the ads for sustainable clothing and coffee and $5 contributed to Earth Works for any purchase of $100 or more for a pair of shoes.  Even the home page of Google has time stamped pictures of forests decimated by drought or development. Every environmental organization is asking me for money to support their work. The Sierra Club has invited me to take a hike with them.  I don’t see any local marches or demonstrations nearby I could join this time.

I put the computer aside and decide I need flowers. Masses of bright pansies in deep purples and bright orange. I can drive 30 miles on a plug-in charge on my Hyundai and can almost make it a fossil free trip to the Garden Spot in Pownal for a 9 am opening.  They grow their own flowers there and sell them in cardboard trays.  Their flowers all look healthy and happy to have had their start in such a nice home. 

While waiting to check out, a woman my age comes into the store with two hanging baskets of red, white and blue flowers. She nods at me and I smile.  She wants to know about my hair. She says hers is so thin and says mine is so pretty.  I tell her my hair is as thin as hers is, it’s just that I use a mousse.  She wants to know what kind. Of course, I can’t remember the brand. I tell her it’s hard getting old and having thin hair and sometimes I just want to shave it all off.

Just minutes before my conversation with her, I read a text from an old friend...old as in my age, as in closer to 80 than any other round number, and old as in we’ve known each other for forty years and all during that time we’ve shared our minds.  She’s asked me how I am doing this morning, recognizing it’s Earth Day and where my mind is about the crisis life on this earth is facing.  Then she adds that for her:

“Seeds of hope couple with heavy clouds of fear and despair.  Was on a webinar that is making me more aware of my age and the limited time I have left on this fragile planet.  Who goes first…me or the planet?”

You wouldn’t think I’d feel relief reading these words, but just knowing she too is posing these questions, has found some language for her experience and wants to share that with me picks up my spirits. I hadn’t yet put that question into words.

While I have read much about the concern for the emotional state of children and young adults as they face the climate crisis, I have read nothing about the effect on people of my generation: the silent generation who lived through some part of WW2 or on the fringes of the baby boomers.  How are we all processing this demise of our dreams, this evidence that we really fucked things up, that the price of all this growth and progress is death and diminishment?  How is it changing us? Who are we now? Where are we headed?

The woman in the plant store tells me she’s buying the flowers for a friend who is dying. “So many friends have cancer,’ she tells me.  “It’s a really hard time,” I say back to her. “My husband died two years ago,” she added, not wanting to leave him out of the tally. 

“It’s so hard,” I repeat. “All this death and illness we have to face at the end of our lives while at the same time the earth is in such terrible shape.” I risk saying this to her, curious about how she’s processing getting old and dying while all the ecosystems are also facing extinction. She picks up on it right away and says something else I’ve been thinking but hadn’t yet said out loud. “When my parents were old like me, they didn’t have to deal with their own deaths as well as the looming death of so much life on the planet. It was so much easier for them.” 

A few days before Earth Day, another woman, who found me through my Zoom presentation at Third Act last winter and reads my blog, reached out to me for a conversation. She’s almost 80 and like my old friend and the woman in the plant store with the thin hair, she too is in one way or another asking the question, who goes first, me or the planet? She’d been feeling very much alone with this question and wanted to talk about how that question informs her decisions about how she lives her life now and she wanted to know how I was dealing with it. We talked for an hour and at the end we both felt a deep connection to each other not only because we both, when provoked, like to say the word fuck. 

There are so many things to reckon with here at the end besides thinning hair and the mind-altering challenge of learning how to use spread sheets and Google Docs and Doodle polls. Is it enough just to say goodbye, I’m sorry, so sorry?

Can we talk about death: mine, yours, the planet’s? If we talk about death and reckon with our terrible blindness and the harm we’ve caused, will we find more joy, more love, more compassion, more room for beauty? Do I need to pack up a tent next Earth Day and go up to Acadia and watch the sun rise from the perspective of a whole new self, one with a deeper understanding of what it means to be a living creature on this earth?

Is there still time?  Who goes first, me or the planet?