Experiencing Nature and the Earth with “Earth Song” by Sara Barkat

Do you know where you were on April 22, 1970? 

On a warm April Wednesday, I was on the parade ground at Louisiana State University, sitting in the grass with about a thousand other people. We were part of the first nationwide Earth Day, inspired in part by the infamous Santa Barbara oil spill the year before. We listened to speeches and music, we signed petitions, and we chanted slogans. We knew we had become something larger than ourselves, and we knew that college and high school students all over the country were doing exactly what we were doing.

 

I also got sunburned. 

 

Four days earlier, on April 18, poet Allen Ginsburg participated in what may have been one for the first Earth Day poetry readings. At Sr. Generosity’s in New York City, Ginsberg and two other poets read Earth Day poetry. Ginsberg’s reading, apparently, included chanting along with Hare Krishnas. 

 

Earth Day 1970 witnessed the birth of the national environmental movement, bringing together a number of disparate streams of concern that had been building over the previous decade. Twenty years later, in 1990, Earth Day went global.

 

More than 50 years after that first Earth Day, we’re still concerned about the planet. We’re still observing Earth Day. National governments have made the environment a special area of focus. 

 

And we’re still reading, and writing, poetry about the earth. It turns out we’ve been doing that far longer than Earth Day 1970.

 

Writer, artist, book illustrator, dancer, and medieval armorist Sara Barkat has edited a collection of 93 poems about the earth or some facet of it. Earth Song: a nature poems experience includes poems well-known and not-so-well-known. It includes poets who are household words and poets who are striving to be household words. It includes poems you might expect and some you don’t. And it surprises: I didn’t know, for example, that novelist Louise Erdrich also wrote poetry.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

The Conspicuous Virtue of Sunburn

Forty years ago today, Earth Day was born, the brainchild of Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin and organizer Dennis Hayes. If you were in college at the time, it was a big deal. At LSU in Baton Rouge, where I was a freshman, I remember speeches, how –to demonstrations and information booths (and just possibly bands performing but that might be what I remember and not what really happened). Yet there is one memory that overwhelms all the rest.

I got sunburned.

So did a lot of other people, including many of my professors. In fact, for a short time at least, the Earth Day Sunburn became a way of saying you had been there and so you were environmentally conscious. And you could feel slightly superior to all your pale-faced brethren who did boring and conventional things like go to class. I sported the only sunburn in my fraternity house, in fact. Which sounds slightly oxymoronic.

Even that early in Earth Day and environmentalism history, conspicuous virtue was embedded as a kind of purposeful deliberate rejection of the “conspicuous consumption” of the 1950s and early 1960s. Of course, truth be told, conspicuous consumption – or advertising your wealth and position to the obviously excessive – has always been part of the American, and human, landscape. We used to like people to know we were materially well off, and we can’t remind people too much.

Today, we like people to know we’re virtuous. It’s like letting our neighbors know we’re going to church on Sundays. So we do it conspicuously without the inconvenience of actually going to church and we create a sociological phenomenon. I didn’t invent this idea, by the way. To give credit where credit is due, I first heard about it more than three years ago from the Wall Street Journal. (See “My Goodness! Conspicuous Consumption and the Sustainable Sofa”).

In my self-inflated importance, I convinced my mother to stop using colored toilet paper, because the inks could harm the environment. My father said nothing; what he was probably thinking was “We’re sending him to college to learn about colored toilet paper?”

My career took me in directions far from colored toilet paper – to issues much closer to what the environmental movement was all about. Except I was seemingly in a different place. Like BIG OIL. And BIG CHEMICAL. The bad guys. Evil incarnate. The OTHER.

And yet, something about that sunburn must have stuck. By the time of Earth Day 20 in 1990, I had helped write two speeches that helped change the course of corporate environmental history. The change came about not so much because of my peerless prose (although the speechwriter in me argues otherwise, as all good speechwriters would) as because who gave the speeches – two corporate executives who led their company and their industry in a very different environmental direction.

Today, 40 years after I sat and wandered around LSU’s Parade Ground, listening to speeches and earnest exhortations and believing most of what I heard, I can look back and say, conspicuous virtue or not, that sunburn mattered.

"Wyoming Wind," photograph by Nancy Rosback. Used with Permission.