Happy Earth Day, I Think.
It’s Earth Day, the one day of the year that’s not about us but the living planet and its multitudes, of which we are but one. For that reason alone, it’s a good day.
But obviously, relegating a single day to that which creates the air we breathe, cleanses and circulates the water we drink, nourishes our bodies with other bodies, is a bit parsimonious, and suggests how awkward we’ve become amongst our fellow creatures on this living Earth. It’ll take more than a day a year to repair that breach, but at least there’s a day where we try.
Though I’m beginning to wonder. A few days ago I got on the earthday.org website, official organizers of Earth Day. The landing page holds a blue-toned image of faces in a protest, all vaguely blurred as though in the background, except for one sign held up in the middle, its letters crisp and bold. “Science is Actually Useful,” it reads. Hmm. That’s true, but isn’t that an odd message to illuminate for a day meant to celebrate something other than us and our big brains? And isn’t science-being-useful kind of what got us into this mess in the first place? Would we have forever chemicals if science hadn’t been useful in making fabrics and paper products oil resistant by creating pfa’s?
I scrolled down to next the screen, which shows a satellite image of Earth in a black sea of space. To the left is written the Earth Day date, April 22, 2023, and below it, “On Earth Day I…” like a pronouncement. I tapped the screen to see what I was going to do.
Windmills, towering white columns of them, swinging 170-foot-long blades behind the words, in bold face white: Invest in Our Planet. The next image is a student before a whiteboard with technical diagrams on it, explaining something to his classmates. To his left is a solar panel, to his right, carboard mock-ups of windmills, and again the words: Invest in Our Planet. Then rows of shiny solar arrays in lowering golden sunlight: Invest in our Planet. Four people standing among solar panels in reflective construction vests with rolls of plans having a very “can-do” conversation: Invest in Our Planet. Then two people in a lab. On the desk of one, little models of wind mills: Invest in Our Planet. It goes on. There are even two images with kids in different postures of engagement with their computers: Invest in Our Planet.
Thankfully, there are a couple of nature images before the final image which consists of words flying in from the margins then disappearing. I catch renewable, biodiversity, youth, policy, sustainability, then slowing to rest again on renewable, which dissolves to, in case you forgot: Invest in Our Planet.
I shut the computer. Out the window the new green leaves of a Mountain Ash were being snowed on by the white blossoms of the plumb tree beside it. On Earth Day I…will consider the ecological dissonance of promoting renewable infrastructure on Earth Day.
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I realize the aim of this technology is to bring down carbon emissions, and most people promoting it have good intentions. I share that aim and recognize the good intentions. This isn’t a blanket rejection of all renewable technology, but to point out they aren’t exactly green. I’m also aware that the only times we’ve actually lowered emissions were during economic slowdowns, first the 2009 recession and later during COVID. We can argue about the economic and political complications of contracting economies, but this being Earth Day, I want to keep the focus on the Earth.
Others have written about the intense mining, high-heat metallurgy, toxics generation and industrial shipping required for things like solar and wind. Less has been written about the land requirements.
It’s hard to put a number to the global acreage required for all the windmills, solar arrays, geothermal plants, dams and industrial biofuel plantations necessary to run the global economy with renewables, But Princeton University attempted to do so for the lower 48 US states in a 2019 report called Net Zero America. They predict a range of .25 to 1.1 million square kilometers of land needed for the US to reach net zero by 2050, depending on the extent of nuclear, biomass, carbon storage, and land restriction. Since that’s a big range, so to avoid quibbling over numbers let’s split it down the middle and call it 675,000 square kilometers.
To put that number in context, “only” around 6,200 square kilometers per year of US land is currently being lost to all forms of development combined, enough to precipitate what a recent Natureserve study describes as a “biodiversity crisis,” with 40 % of animals in the US headed for extinction along with 34% of plants. Of America’s ecosystems, 41% “are at risk of collapse.” The main cause? “Land conversion,” otherwise known as habitat destruction, “a major contributor to the alarming numbers of species at risk.”
How, we must ask, on Earth Day of all days, will a land base currently unable to handle 6,200 km2 of “land conversion” per year cope with 675,000 km2, or 25,000 km2 per year for twenty-seven years? These are not abstract numbers. Already, even without fast tracking, which is in the works, and at a fraction of full buildout, the ecological damage is profound. As Patrick Donnelly, Great Basin Director for the Center for Biological Diversity, puts it, “I’m a triage nurse in a desert endangered species emergency room and we’re in the middle of a patient surge.” And this is just for the US. The dynamics are of course global.
There is another dissonance at work here. It has to do with climate science. Though the mainstream climate narrative treats carbon emissions as the sole human cause of climate change, science has always known that land destruction (or what science calls “land change”) also causes climate change, only in different ways having to do with water cycles more than the greenhouse effect.
It’s why one of the first international scientific climate reports, produced in 1970 by MIT and the Swedish Academy of Sciences, contains an entire section devoted to “The Climatic Effects of Man-Made Surface Change.” Decades of research have since made those effects increasingly clear. When we damage land we damage its ability to cycle water, cool itself and its locale, make clouds, produce rain, moderate temperature extremes and absorb/store moisture against flood and drought. The result is higher temperatures, increased drought and flooding, and climatic extremes. Sound familiar?
Why don’t we know this? Partly, because living processes are too wild and complex to be reduced to the mathematical terms necessary for computer modelling, which lies at the heart of the IPCC’s “Physical Science Basis.” In essence, computer models have trouble “seeing” these living processes. And since we currently view the climate through computer models, we have trouble seeing them too.
But our view of climate is changing. More and more scientists are dissatisfied with what is increasingly termed a “CO2-only” view of climate, calling for broader inclusion of water cycles and ecological processes in the analysis. There’s also a growing movement of citizens around the world learning the science for themselves (sometimes doing it) and breaking trail for a more ecologically sound approach to the climate crisis.
This is a hopeful trend for Earth on this Earth Day. Rather than a physical machine with a carbon dial, the climate is increasingly being recognized as the product of a living Earth. Some scientists argue they are in a sense one in the same thing. The indigenous and an increasing number of scientists have it right. Rather than trying to fix a broken machine, the need is to heal the living Earth, of which the climate is a part. Earth has the capacity, not us.
I’ve cast shade on earthday.org for their theme and marketing this year, but I don’t mean to do so for the entire organization. They are doing good projects around many issues, like fast fashion and plastics pollution. And Earth Day is bigger than any one organization. It’s both global and personal; each person has their own way of acknowledging or not acknowledging it.
For me, Earth Day has always been a time of quiet and reflection. I try to be outside a lot and notice the sounds, sights, smells and textures of living things. And I almost always write a poem. They are usually brief affairs. This year’s poem is a little different.
Thanks for reading, and have a happy Earth Day, I think.
Run, Earth. Fly, swim, crawl
paddle, sidewind, crab-step, sprout, blossom
branch and feather your very best,
your most determined.
It’s going to get harder.
We have new uses for you
and are investing the needed sums.
The markets will expect their returns.
Hope the sunlight is not too profitable
where you are trying to grow
or have dug your burrow
or are weaving a nest
or generating soil.
Hope the breezeways you fly on
are not the useful ones.
Learn to discern from a distance
the slow then racing blades.
Keep putting up your flowers.
Keep waving from the roadsides.
Keep singing from the trees.
Keep salmon determined in their faith.
Keep the rivers flowing.
Move the water around.
Beneath the canopies
and between the horizons
new trails are appearing.
They braille beneath our feet
as we walk them.
Forward and back,
side to side
all the ways home.