Fifty Years Past the First Earth Day, a Frayed Planet—and a Sublime One - The New Yorker

Blue flowers on the floor of a forest. — Yes, forests have begun to burn with shocking intensity, but others remain calm, quiet, sometimes with the spring of moss underfoot.Photograph by Yves Herman / Reuters

On the fiftieth anniversary of the first Earth Day, let’s think for a moment about the Earth—backdrop for our busy and dramatic life, but also a planet.

One can observe it dispassionately, through scientific instruments, as if it were any other planet. And here’s how it looks, these past five decades:

The white ice at the northern pole, one of the most obvious features on the planet, has shrunk dramatically: at least half the summer sea ice in the Arctic is now gone.
The largest living systems on Earth have frayed badly: the Amazon and the African rain forests are threadbare, patchy, increasingly prone to fire. The coral reefs, including the giant system fringing the coast of Australia, are shrinking fast, bleaching white as hotter water sloshes through them.
Great droughts have spread on the various continental landmasses, drying for a time some of the globe’s vast river systems—in the Colorado Basin, in the United States, and in the Murray-Darling Basin, in Australia—while storms of unprecedented intensity have lashed islands in the Pacific and the Atlantic.
There has been, on average, a sixty-per-cent decline in populations of wild animals, part of an epic silencing with few precedents even in the deep record that geology provides.
The composition of its atmosphere has changed with shocking speed, and, as a result, the temperature has risen sharply—in the air, in the oceans.

But one can also observe our planet passionately, through eye and hand and foot, through nose and ear and heart.

Yes, the oceans have begun to rise, washing out beaches—but there are still strips of sand where the sea washes in with a warm hiss or a bracing crash.

Yes, the glaciers have begun to melt in earnest, but there are still high valleys where ice hangs like a curtain, still seasons and latitudes where snow still falls, erasing friction. This morning there was a new spread of snow in the woods of Vermont—late, but welcome.

Yes, the forests have begun to burn with shocking intensity, but they remain calm, quiet, sometimes with the spring of moss underfoot. And people have come to understand the complexity of these woodlands in new and charming ways: the groves of aspen that turn out to be one living thing, the miles of fungi “talking” beneath us.

Yes, the extinction tables show a mounting tally, and yet there is still the hoot of owls in the evening, still the flash of orange as monarch butterflies make their way north with the spring, still the boil of water before a fluke breaks the surface, still the squawk and stench of a hundred thousand penguin chicks in a rookery, still the patient trudge of a tortoise across the sand, still the slap of a beaver tail against a still nighttime pond, still the craning neck of a giraffe stretching for the last acacia leaf at the top of a tree.

Yes, too many of the leaders of our species are coarse and brutal, and far too much wealth and power have ended up in far too few hands. And yet so much goodness and kindness endure. Even in these strange silent weeks of the pandemic, most people shift their lives to protect others, and some—heroes—walk each day into the hospitals and clinics to tend to the weakest and most vulnerable.

Yes, it’s a planet badly degraded, and, yes, it’s a planet worth fighting for, as hard as we know how.

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