“Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds, cannot change anything.”
The world has changed. And so has Earth Day.
When, at a UNESCO conference in San Francisco in 1969, peace activist and Earth Society Foundation founder John McConnell first proposed a day to honour the Earth and the concept of peace, hardly anyone could have imagined that, five decades later, the bear population would have quadrupled in Yosemite National Park in just 16 short weeks, or that leatherback sea turtles would be nesting unmolested on abandoned Florida beaches in unprecedented numbers; or that a kangaroo would be seen hopping down a deserted street in downtown Adelaide, in Australia.
Then again, hardly anyone in 1970 could have foreseen a pandemic — caused, ironically enough, by a zoonotic virus, meaning that it jumped from animals to people — would drive half the world’s population indoors, waiting for the signal that it’s to go outside again.
Hardly anyone, that is, but for avid readers of dystopian science-fiction novels, and anyone who lined up to pay to see a sci-fi movie called Soylent Green.
Soylent Green was released in movie theatres in 1973. Today, 1973 doesn’t seem that long ago, all of a sudden. Will the movie theatre experience be the same ever again?
Earth, the green planet we call home, is in trouble. There are 8 billion people in the world today; in 1970, there were just 4 billion.
Worse, overconsumption of the Earth’s resources by q a handful of rich, developed northern nations has created a societal, environmental and climatological imbalance. Wise minds — Jane Goodall and David Attenborough among them — tell us that this Earth Day, the first celebration of the natural world during the age of Covid-19, presents a unique, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to press the reset button.
Those who follow history know differently, of course, but they’re reluctant to say so. They’re staying silent. No one wants to be pegged as the Cassandra who scolds anyone who’ll listen that we’ll go straight back to doing what we were doing before, only more so — even if, deep down, the Cassandra knows it to be true.
So Jane Goodall, age 86, looks at Greta Thunberg, age 17, and sees a kindred soul. She can be forgiven, though, for worrying about Thunberg’s future, and the generation like her.
The medium is the message, as always.
Covid-19 has driven planned commemorative actions like the Great Global CleanUp indoors and online, in the digital sphere — online. Not even 1970s futurist Alvin Toffler could have predicted that, one, day, in the not-too-distant future, humanity would be honouring Earth
Day indoors, “sheltering-in-place,” in front of a computer screen,. George Orwell might have predicted it. Aldous Huxley might have predicted it. Ray Bradbury did predict it. Civic engagement has moved into cyberspace.
Toffler published Future Shock in 1970. He defined the term \as a psychological condition of both individuals and entire societies.
When asked to describe what he meant, using simpler language, Toffler replied simply: “Too much change in too short a period of time.”
Well, yes and no.
Humankind has been present on planet Earth, in one form or another, for no more than a blink-of-an-eye in geological terms. Weigh that millions of years of planetary evolution. Four months of Covid-19 is but a blink in the proverbial blink-of-an-eye.
The irony, of course, is that the past 12 months have also witnessed dramatic, unprecedented discoveries in the study of early humankind. Receding ice and melting permafrost, brought on by climate change, has uncovered dramatic evidence of early humans’ day-to-day lives.
Back to Earth Day today, on this day, 22 April 2020.
Coyotes have been seen on Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. Deer are roaming a housing estate in Essex, in the UK. Animals are moving into the spaces we humans have vacated, The Guardian noted in an editorial, just the other day. “When days seem so indistinct, the appearance of a new bird in our backyard suddenly seizes our attention. . . Birdsong is clearer now that the traffic has hushed. ”
The news is not all good.
Poaching is said to have spiked in Africa, as desperate people turn to other means to survive. Work to protect wildlife has slowed or in some cases stopped altogether, due to social distancing measures. Nature conservation groups — both the big NGOs and smaller, homegrown conservancies that work at the local, community level — are strapped for cash at the best of times. The sudden absence of tourism and the revenue it generates, coupled with the scaling back of monitoring and enforcement, has created an untenable situation in many developing countries.
“When the pandemic is finally over, wildlife may vanish as fast as it emerged – and we may not really notice. The need to feed families may soon subsume broader considerations of wellbeing. Yet this strange and frightening interlude is reminding us that there may be better ways to arrange our lives.”
Perhaps. Perhaps not. We can only hope. Hope, like spring, springs eternal.
©Mohamed Hassan-Pixabay