Earth Day: An expression of enduring hope

Earth Day: a celebration of hope and dirty fingernails. As Americans, we’re dreamers and hard workers; our ideals and innovation launch great visions which sometime create problems requiring more ingenuity to solve. Earth Day and wilderness: two uniquely American solutions intertwined with each other and with our eternal hope for a better future.

In 1900, there were 8,000 automobiles in the United States, playthings of the wealthy. We mostly traveled by train. Henry Ford used the world’s first assembly line to mass produce Model Ts and, by 1920, cars were common. Huge swaths of countryside were gobbled up under an increasing network of highways. Coastal plains become connected to remote mountains but the landscape also became fragmented. Wildlands shrank.

Aldo Leopold, was appalled and convinced the Forest Service to set aside the country’s first primitive area preserving some places from encroaching civilization. Car production continued and, by 1929, there were 23 million in America.

During the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt created the Civilian Conservation Corps, putting men to work building more highways and facilities, transforming remote national parks into tourist attractions. America’s love of the automobile collided with her love of nature.

Skyline Drive, built along the spine of the Shenandoah National Park, crossed the Appalachian Trail more than two dozen times. Then the CCC began work on the Blue Ridge Parkway, further paving over the Appalachians.

Benton MacKaye, “father” of the Appalachian Trail, was working for the Tennessee Valley Authority designing dams and cities. Robert Marshall was conducting road surveys. In 1935, en route to a CCC work camp with Harvey Broome and Bernard Frank they pulled off the road and drafted the Wilderness Society’s founding charter.

After World War II, our global network of military bases and financial aid secured a steady supply of oil from the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Soon we had a surplus. American businessmen created new products: synthetic fertilizers, pesticides and plastic, transformed society. From Miracle-Gro to Miracle Whip, we could feed more people. Cheap and disposable, plastic became the building block for modern stuff.

With overwhelming bipartisan support, the Wilderness Act was passed by Congress in 1964 and President Lyndon Johnson signed it with these words: “If future generations are to remember us with gratitude rather than contempt, we must leave them something more than the miracles of technology. We must leave them a glimpse of the world as it was in the beginning, not just after we got through with it.”

It was a bold vision. At a time marked by civil strife we coalesced around an American ideal: protecting our natural heritage from the consequences of technology.

The “baby boom” hit full stride and our economy consumed more than ever. From factories to farms pollution increased rapidly, degrading our water and air. Disposable stuff littered the landscape.

U.S. Sen. Gaylord Nelson, and an army of young idealists, stepped up in 1970 to tackle the problem with a new idea: Earth Day. It was filled with speeches and “teach-ins,” and marked by people simply picking up garbage.

TV commercials began showing a Native American crying over the polluted landscape. “Middle America” shifted toward supporting environmental regulations and President Richard Nixon signed into law major protections including the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act.

In the 1980s, government deregulation reigned but our bedrock environmental regulations survived. And we actually began to reduce, reuse and recycle. We turned more to conservation, including wilderness.

With increased demands for resources and recreation we must carefully plan how to satisfy these needs along with our need to set aside some area as wilderness: our source for pure water, quiet recreation and a place where we can hear ourselves think.

As civilization crowds us further, wilderness is a gift to future generations, an expression of our best hope and our best planning. In Earth Day and in Wilderness we celebrate our pragmatism and our dreams and make the planet a better place. It is America at our best.