Earth Day ... Woo hoo!

I've taken a little heat from some loyal readers about some of my remarks about well-meaning green folks. Sure and I'm not talking about the little people ...

I just know too many people who live to root through other people's trash to shame them into recycling the way some mildly literate people live to correct other people's grammar.

So tomorrow is Earth Day, and I'll be outside all day working on some more freckles. The program looks like this: alumni will come to talk to students about their environmental jobs, and then we'll have a folk singer, and then we'll unveil the new biodiesel bus. It will be fun, and we'll give out pizza, and we'll give reusable water bottles to those who bring in recyclables.



Still, I can't get past the idea that we're pissing in the ocean here. Even if it isn't too late, and I hope it isn't, I don't think highly enough of human nature or of the educability (yow) of our leaders to believe things are going to change quickly enough, deeply enough. We're too married to our way of life.

I take the most comfort in the thought that while we've probably screwed over the Earth for intelligent life as we know it, life itself will probably carry on. The dinosaurs were around a lot longer than we have been--a much more successful experiment--and they're gone now. Someday a few hundred million years from now the intelligent cockroaches will dig through our landfills and run their buggy eyes across what's left of our Victoria's Secret catalogs and their invisible buggy ears through our discarded last-year's Ipods, and hopefully they'll have learned something.

Ah, I'm just messing with you. Maybe everything will be okay. Lots of good people are working hard to get people to wise up, and maybe their wisdom will overcome all of the nest-fouling stupidity.

But you might enjoy this Robinson Jeffers poem nonetheless:

"Shine, Perishing Republic"