Earth Day is still a time of hope 55 years later even as Northland completes its successful mission

Chequmegon Bay as the sun sets on Northland College

The last 55 years or so has been a time of change of a geologic scale.

The debate over the term Anthropocene, describing a new epoch has been going on since  atmospheric chemist and Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen popularized it in 2000, according to the Smithsonian Magazine. Many geologists believe it’s too soon to declare a new epoch replacing the Holocene that began more than 11,000 years ago when the last Ice Age ended.

Those who support the term say the new epoch began when humans influence became the dominant force on the planet. Whether it started with the Industrial Revolution, the Atomic Age or some other moment, for me the critical point for us as a human race was when we started to recognize it.

That day was April 22, 1970, Earth Day, which began as an idea of the late Gaylord Nelson.

From where I sat in the Fox River Valley west of Chicago the impact was obvious then. Rivers and creeks were too polluted to swim and air pollution from the Chicagoland area floated over our farm thick and sometimes deadly.

A junior high school teacher James Phillips got so fed up that he began plugging industrial pipes of sludge, capping smoke stacks and spilling hazardous waste on the carpet of corporate executives’ offices. The Fox kept his identity hidden until he died in 2001, capping a second career as an inspector during the 1970s of the same plants he had targeted in the 1960s.

Since then I have covered the environmental movement that today reaches into all aspects of society. If you are someone who doesn’t like environmentalists I will paraphrase the popular phrase of a comic character of the time Pogo: “We have seen the enemy and it is us.”

I covered all of the old fights. I watched businesses resist cleaning up rivers and the air after the passage of the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act.

I watched farmers and ranchers exert their political power to stop changes in traditional practices that added to erosion, hurt air quality and destroyed habitat. I watched governmental agencies cause landscape scale changes to further their mission and power.

And I watch as a new generation of many of the same industries cleaned up their operations, not only because the rules but because it was more economical. More ranchers and farmers are becoming stewards of the land.

And government agencies at all levels are making sustainability and energy efficiency critical parts of their mission.  There remains room for improvement but I don't think that's what's happening now under the Trump Administration.

The most threatening trend is how divorced from nature so many people are. Children are not allowed to run and play like I did as a boy in a small town.

Computer and television screens are removing us from the sights, the smells and touch of the earth on which we depend. These experiences link us with our wild past, a critical element in our humanity.

Wildness existed before humans. It was the place from which we came. Wildness carved the grooves of ancient truth into our souls.

These are the ideas of a man  was lucky enough to get to know 54 years ago, Sigurd Olson. He wrote in The Singing Wilderness of a day spent on an old estate in the south of England, far from home, far from wilderness:

“Then suddenly I heard a sound that changed everything: a soft nasal twang from high in the branches, the call of a nuthatch, Instantly that beech grove was transformed into a stand of tall, stately pines; the brown beech leaves on the ground became a smooth carpet of golden needles, and beyond this cared-for forest were rugged ridges and deep, timbered valleys, roaring rivers and placid lakes, with a smell of resin and duff in the sun. The call of the nuthatch had done all that, had given me a vision of the wilderness as vivid as though for the moment I had actually been there.”

Olson fought hard to protect wilderness and to pass the Wilderness Act. But his wilderness vision transcended the lands he helped to protect. His wilderness words speak across the generations to those who live in a world transforming before our eyes by climate change.

The instant transporting he experienced through the music of the nuthatch is a powerful description of nature’s deep stirrings in the human soul. This connection will survive in the new epoch in us even as the warming climate unwinds so much of what we hold dear. The challenge will be to fight to turn around climate change before it has destroyed even us, while preserving and expanding the spiritual and healing values of nature that Olson knew.

We need to keep Olson's legacy alive in institutions like the Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute now at Northland College. The school will close at the end of May after 133 years. But the Board of Trustees can help those of us who are trying to keep the work of Sigurd Olson alive in the North Country by handing it off to a new center.