Nature doesn’t teach from a distance
Living on the earth…
April 22, 2020, was the fiftieth anniversary of Earth Day. The occasion didn’t warrant much attention in the news. We get it. So much is bearing down us in these uncertain and increasingly frightening times. Overwhelmed by the present and agonizing over the future, how can we find space in our lives for gauzy nostalgia? Our collective memory is still vividly aware of that historic year, 1968, remembered and curated and analyzed so exhaustively throughout 2018. 1968 was a year that defined us. 1970 pales as a milestone year. What happened? Who remembers 1970?
April 22, 1970: the very first Earth Day. Maybe was an “OK, boomer” moment. Marches and teach-ins and buttons worn on Army jackets and work-shirts. Signs with the words “Love Your Mother” superimposed on images of the Earth. Efforts at organizing - wasn’t it all about organizing? - and mobilizing, and getting back to the land. Recycling. Composting. Saying no to plastic. Growing organic food, joining the local co-op, planting marigolds in lieu of using pesticides in your garden. Bicycling instead of driving. Lots of good intentions.
Were good intentions enough?
In 1970, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young released the joyous and instructive song, “Teach Your Children.” Its circle-of-life message survived the generational differences of that tumultuous era. The lyric “Teach your children well,'“ segued into “Teach your parents well.” Advice no one could argue with. If not for the fact that my own parents were too busy messing up my life to listen to me, we could have found some common ground. Maybe we could have learned from each other.
At the age of fourteen, I couldn’t imagine myself as a parent. Enmeshed in the generational struggles of that era, I was too focused on how my parents had failed. How was I to live the free and creative life I was destined for, when they were stifling me, crippling me, breaking my wings? They didn’t understand me and never would. I would not repeat their mistakes. My parents were not teaching me well.
On that first Earth Day, I desperately wanted to march, to hand out flyers, to do something meaningful. I cared about the earth. The very existence of the word “ecology” meant that tending to the planet was important, serious, warranting an entirely new field of learning. Something you could choose as a college major, like biology or psychology or sociology. But how could I get to a rally, when my parents refused to drive me to one? They were not about to drop me off at the dangerous and scary University of Minnesota campus. They had never even allowed me to take the city bus. I had no friends with cars; I barely had friends. And if my fellow students actually held political views, they did not express them. Their lives were full of social jostling and concern over the right clothes, the right attitude, and where to score pot. Their parents were not teaching them well.
And at school? The assistant principal, a crew-cut former Marine, threw boys against the lockers for wearing their hair too long. “Too long” was half an inch below the collar. Jeans? Their back pockets had rivets. Rivets scratched the seats of the ancient wooden desks. Never mind that the bell bottoms of that era had no rivets. Any kid, boy or girl, got sent home for wearing denim. Rules were rules. Our teachers were not teaching us well.
On April 22, 2020, no one was able to march. Covid-19 gave us empty streets, closed and vacant stadiums. We distance ourselves socially. It is challenging to get to the grocery store, put on our masks, to queue in parking lots in order to wait in lines marked off every six feet with tape. A rally? Really? Any gathering of more than ten people could be deadly.
This year, we can see how our tepid stewardship has failed. We - a few of us - are now able to choose from an impressive selection of organic (and non-GMO and free-range and cruelty-free) foods. We have the option to skip the lines and order from Whole Foods. But our privilege feels shaming: how can we care about nitrate-free bacon when a frightening number of us can’t afford to shop at any grocery store? It is heartbreaking to see news reports showing mile-long lines of cars full of people waiting for handouts of food. And now the President of the United States has decided that meatpacking factories are so essential to the nation’s food supply that they must remain open. How can we continue to eat pork, beef, or chicken, when exposure to the virus is killing workers in shocking numbers? Is it unpatriotic to suggest that our country might survive without hamburgers?
As I sit on the front porch of my home in St. Paul, I am grateful for a job that pays me to stay at home. I am thankful for the time to slow down. To be attentive, to learn. For the first time in years, I have the energy to dig out perennials and divide them. I welcome the ache in my shoulders that comes after a morning spent pushing a spade into soil. I am foolhardy enough to drive to the local nursery to score six varieties of basil, three of which will, inevitably, fail. When I find that last year’s butterfly bush - a zone 5 plant but maybe with a bit of luck tolerant to Zone 4 - has died, I return. A second transaction takes place with a sheet of plexiglass separating me from the cashier.
I want to have a party to celebrate spring. It’s been ages since I saw my millennial daughter and son and their partners. When I get out my phone to text them, I remember the six-foot rule. Outdoors, then?
Did we - the boomers - teach our children well? I believe, I want to believe, that we did. They have taken on the brutal reality of our failure to stop the destruction of our planet. They have embraced our token gestures towards conservation and recycling and healthy living, incorporating them into their lives in a way we did not. But did we prepare them for a fragile, uncertain future? Could we have foreseen crippling student debt, inequality of income, gig jobs, lives put indefinitely on hold? All that was before this pandemic. God only knows what further disasters await. But I have faith in their hardiness.
They have taught me well.
I celebrated the fiftieth Earth Day scolded by a pair of robins building a nest on a shelf just a few feet from my head. I shared the slightly chilly but sunlit day with the year’s first star magnolia blossom.
For the last twenty years, my magnolia has astonished and humbled me. Its white, magnificent flowering tells me that we have survived yet another Minnesota winter. In a few days, the tree will be gloriously filled with blossoms. It still humbles me that a magnolia can bloom so abundantly in this harsh climate. Mother Earth teaches me the same lesson each year. Two words: Hope. Resilience.
A magnolia. A pair of robins. She doesn’t teach from a distance.
I sit up straight and pay attention.
