On the first Earth Day in 1970, I was a high school junior. I remember the day, plus images and ideas of the era:
from NASA Apollo 17, Dec.7,1972the first good photo of a small blue planet in space;- fossil fuels, speed limits, and "drive 55;"
- major cities choking with air too thick to breathe;
- a river on fire;
- planes spraying DDT over our local pond;
- Rachel Carson's book "Silent Spring;"
- the word "ecology" entering daily use, along with talk of ecosystems, rain forests, and systems in general;
- "carrying capacity," and some unpleasant discussions about "lifeboats;"
- Alvin Toffler's book "Future Shock;"
- the phrase "spaceship Earth," and the analogy of species as rivets holding our ship together.
My world in 1970 was shifting … from permanence, stasis, and my obsession about fish and fishing, toward change, evolution, time, cycles, systems of systems, patterns, relationships … toward geography. I spent the summer of 1975 on the Juneau Icefield, studying climate change. That autumn, the chart of greenhouse gases plus the accumulation of patterns and relationships drove me to become a geography teacher.
In one of my college papers, I borrowed this excerpt from the Francis Thompson's poem "The Mistress of Vision":
All things by immortal power,
Near or far,
Hiddenly,
To each other link-ed are,
That thou canst not stir a flower
Without troubling of a star…
National Geographic MapMaker, https://esri.com/mapmakerThose immortal powers, I saw, were the patterns and relationships, the systems and feedback loops; they powered the sun, made rain forests, let people live in deserts and cities, fed epidemics and wars, and shaped discovery, invention, diffusion, and differentiation. Along the way, humans have acquired the powers of conceiving, modeling, forecasting ... and acting.
Today, people of all ages can build key knowledge with basic GIS tools. On this Earth Day #55, I hope we as a species will explore these patterns and relationships, study the trajectories, and act with knowledge. Our remarkable planet is a complex system of systems, and we need to care for all things, near or far.