A day that is the ultimate result of a president, inspired by a senator, failing to make people more conscious about ecology. The love child of governmental failure and a grassroots uprising, Earth Day is a beautiful idea, but like many beautiful ideas its intentions got lost in the shuffle. Who remembers what day Earth day is? In my experience the majority fall into three major categories.
1. People in advertising, attempting to show their beautiful green colors for about one month out of twelve
2. People who are already living relatively earth friendly lives and thus don't need their awareness expanded
3. People who's calendars just happen to include "Earth Day" in that neat little spot where they put "groundhog's day" and occasionally holidays one is seriously unlikely to be celebrating as they are taking place in other countries.
The people who take the time to observe Earth Day may watch how much gas they use, plant a tree, support World Wildlife Fund, or something else just as admirable.. My question is this - What about the other 364 days of the year? Why is it that on special occasions we do something to give back to the earth that supports us instead of splurging on special occasions and letting those fewer days be the ones we're a little naughty? We could have a symbiotic relationship with our host organism but instead we choose to be parasitic, we have made our models the leech, the tape worm and the crab-hitchhiker.
Anyway, I could rant on the subject but I won't... Much... I'll just say this: We have the widest spread, the biggest toys and the most monumental impact on the planet, we are rivaled by no other species on the planet... But the planet remains the greater being. We don't need to save the planet, earth will survive all by her lonesome, her and whatever microorganisms are left after we're gone. They will do as has been done before and one can only hope that once sentient life does evolve it has more sense than we've had... Or! We can pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, put on a brave face, set aside our current social norms and step forward with the sincere intent to do something about this clusterf--- we've gotten ourselves into.
So, they tell me today is Earth Day. Today I experienced the sudden compulsion to bake, went to the store and bought flour and chocolate and veggies (not all of which went into the same dish). I came home and made three different types of cookies, which my son tried to steal, and a veggie pie from scratch, which is now missing 1/3. I can't say that I celebrated Earth Day, but I celebrated the day and every day I try to be more Earth friendly than the one before (with exceptions for occasional splurges!) so I think that's O.K.
