Madonna Luers: A retrospective on the 50th anniversary of Earth Day

Wednesday will be the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, a milestone we won’t be celebrating together because wildlife-human interfaces and pollution have helped set the stage for a worldwide pandemic.

Maybe it takes catastrophes like this to get our attention about being better stewards of our planet. Maybe some of the things we’re doing during this stay-home time – slowing down, conserving resources, getting to know and care for our own spot on the Earth – will become our new habits.

We environmentalists can dream anyway, and at least look back on this commemoration to see how far we’ve come.

April 22, 1970, in Spokane was a day of “teach-ins,” talks to students of all ages by Gov. Dan Evans, Washington Attorney General Slade Gorton and several university professors who warned of dire consequences from the proposed dams on the Snake River, the need to address air and water pollution, and global warming.

That’s what The Spokesman-Review’s archives relayed anyway, as I wasn’t here then. I was a high school sophomore in Omaha, Nebraska, marching the streets with other students donning “gas masks” and waving signs about the need for clean air.

The first couple of decades of Earth Days were full of advancements to celebrate – national air quality standards were set, the Environmental Protection Agency was created, the pesticide DDT was banned to protect wildlife like bald eagles and peregrine falcons, the Endangered Species Act was passed. But disasters also showed us how much more needed to be done – hazardous waste in New York’s Love Canal, Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island and the Soviet Union’s Chernobyl nuclear accidents, and the poisonous gas leak from a pesticide plant in Bhopal, Indai.

In 1995, on the 25thth anniversary of Earth Day, I helped with a multiagency/organization celebration “Where On Earth But Spokane.” In those 25 years since the first Earth Day, Spokane County’s population had grown by about 35%, requiring compliance with Washington’s new Growth Management Act. A health advisory was issued when PCB contamination was found in the Spokane River, but it was also Spokane’s first year on record with no air quality standard violations. Endangered wolves were reintroduced to the West with transplants from Canada to Yellowstone National Park and Idaho wilderness areas.

In 1999, at the 25thth anniversary of Spokane’s Expo ’74 – the first World’s Fair with an environmental awareness credo – I met Bernadine VanThiel, a retired teacher and lifelong advocate for “Earth care,” who had just witnessed “Procession of the Species” in Portland. Her enthusiasm for this celebration of wildlife – through a parade of people wearing animal costumes made from recycled materials and dancing to drumming – was contagious. We joined forces to make it a part of the 30thth anniversary of Earth Day in Riverfront Park, securing a grant to cover expenses for costume-making workshops and soliciting help from the Spokane Art School, Children’s Museum of Spokane, environmental groups, and local stars like artist Karen Mobley, singer Chad Mitchel, and drummer Michael Moonbear.

Although the doom and gloom of environmental awareness-raising is important, the procession became a light-hearted, creative way to coax more people to celebrate Earth Day. The first year I made a quail costume from recycled cardboard, the next time a bright orange octopus from braided hay bale twine. VanThiel, who led the procession, always wore a nest of songbirds on her head. Over four Earth Day processions, from 2000 through 2003, there were hundreds of animals of nearly every kind, from leaf-cutter ants to whales. One group even made 40 papier-mache caribou, one for each of the last woodland caribou left in the Selkirk Mountain ecosystem.

We passed coordination of procession to the West Valley School District’s Outdoor Learning Center and Spokane’s Earth Day organizers, who have incorporated smaller forms of it into the annual celebration.

But not this year, of course, and VanThiel and I recently shared our sadness about that. She’s isolated in a senior care center, although even when the virus protection is lifted, at 95 she doesn’t get out and around as much anymore. She keeps up on environmental issues though, and has been a frequent writer to The Spokesman-Review’s letters to the editor.

I told her Spokane is fortunate to have a spark plug like her introduce a joyful event like Procession of the Species. She said it gave her renewed purpose after her husband, who was just as passionate about nature, died in 1998. She doesn’t recall how they celebrated the first Earth Day in 1970 when they were busy raising their three children in Arizona. Both were born and raised in Wisconsin, the birthplace of Earth Day (via Sen. Gaylord Nelson).

We agreed much progress has been made on the “Earth care” front, but it seems some lessons we keep having to relearn. Maybe this pandemic shutdown of life as we knew it will remind us how we can do with less stuff and the need to take better care of ourselves, each other and the Earth.

VanThiel shared this stanza from a song she learned at an Earth Elders conference years ago:

Every day is Earth Day, an opportunity

To make a healthier planet for you and you for me.

We can shape tomorrow by what we do today.

We can build the future a cleaner, wiser way.