KEY WORDS: EARTH DAY, EPA, CLEAN POWER PLAN, ELIZABETH SOUTHERLAND, FOSSIL FUEL, STEWARDSHIP, ZOOM, RESTORATION, EXPLOITATION, COVID-19, NEW PROTOCOL
The last minutes of Earth Day, 2020...
It’s worth remembering the beginning, 50 years ago now, the aspiration for a healthier and more sustainable environment, to be stewards – a word utterly lost on the current administration – of the natural wonders that sustain our lives, meaning clean air and water, restoration of contaminated lands, controlling greenhouse gas emissions, and more.
In fits and starts our country began cleanups, added rules controlling pollution, made cars more fuel-efficient, but then, with the advent of Trump, suddenly began to reverse all of it.
Just a short list:
- the EPA is now run by a former coal lobbyist uninterested in science, focused intently on unraveling protections of streams and wetlands, on rolling back much of what began all those years ago.
- the Trump EPA has dumped entirely or substantially weakened nearly 100 environmental protections – junking the Obama Clean Power Plan, also a rollback of car pollution rules likely to increase greenhouse gas emissions by 1.5 billion metric tons over the next two decades. In sum, putting politics and fossil fuel lobbyists before stewardship.
“Under this administration, the EPA has been transformed from an agency of environmental protection to an accommodating servant of special interests.”
- Dr. Elizabeth Southerland, EPA director of Science and Technology 1984-2017 (resigned when it became clear the Trump leadership of EPA had no respect for science and no longer wanted to hear from long-time EPA experts on climate and environment)
- We say it so often – and here again – votes in November can begin a restoration, a return to stewardship over exploitation.
Let’s not miss the moment. We cannot.......
The elevator door opens, but someone’s already in the cab, and the reaction by now – six weeks or so into this new realm – is automatic. She/he waves, you wave back but do not enter – both of us know the new protocol of our lives. We are apart, never closer than 6-8 feet, never in groups, and the life of yesterday – sitting in auditorium seats or stadium rows, inches from people we do not know, but together enjoying cinema/sports/an orchestra on stage (not even possible itself now – one cellist asked the other day if anyone was still practicing at home, the last rehearsal now barely remembered) – recedes daily into a vividly remembered but somehow remote past.
In the early days of the COVID-19 thing it was almost an amusement. Barely weeks ago we did the elbow touch rather than handshake but still met, all together, inches apart, for a film lecture and pizza feed after, laughing at the absence of the usual Italian cheek-to-cheek greeting. That’s gone now – when to return? Or our next group experience, other than seeing ourselves in Zoom squares on the laptop?
We thought then, oh, it’s just for a few weeks, but that fantasy faded into a new reality, that some kind of distancing, this new pattern of apartness, will be with us in some way for months as each date for at least beginning the journey back to normal is readjusted and delayed. Again. And when that moment, even an incremental opening, comes, will we embrace it, break out of a now habitual wariness to take a seat in a theater or restaurant even if – as will surely be necessary – the chairs and tables are spaced to keep us apart?
An essay in The Guardian just now sums the likely strangeness of that return, when and if it comes:
“The virus will still be out there whenever we are allowed out again, and the physical caution learned over weeks of captivity may be surprisingly hard to overcome. Like hostages emerging blinking from a darkened cell, we may need longer than we think to acclimatize to the light.” [1]
And I expect my own new and strange sense of time – in the absence of the usual patterns and rhythms – to linger into that unknown future. I will ask where the hours go so swiftly, as they do daily now – as in, how on earth on this Thursday can it already be 11:00 p.m.?
We adapt so easily, but perhaps unadapting is a new skill we’ll need to learn.
For now, stay safe.......
Reference