Generational righteousness on env. issues isn’t right

[HereSince1628]

It is not today’s young who have a corner on environmentalism or even environmental awareness. I’m glad that young voices are joining the choir. Not every old fart is an environmentalist. . . but come on, there was an entire song book written before you were born.

For that matter, there was a song book written BEFORE I was born or any of my baby-boom counterparts .

That isn’t to demean the work of folks like Al Gore, and all those early computer modelers (like myself) who first constructed models that warned us of the impacts of weather on parasitic disease (hey that brought me into a PHD program in 1983) and general climatic implications to human activity back in the 1960's 70's, and 80’s. Those folks are us/me who hail from your parents’ and grandparents' generations.

I remember standing on a bridge over the Fox River in Elgin Illinois on the 1st Earth Day. Kids from both High Schools in town converged on the bridge for a funeral service for the polluted stream that separated our town. And we contemplated which was worse, the thermonuclear bomb or the Population Bomb? Those ideas didn’t originate with us.

Earth Day WAS NOT brought to our generation by our own generation alone although we showed up in the hundreds of thousands to be educated in its teach-ins.

Earth Day was brought to us in the US through the efforts of folks like Gaylord Nelson and Rachael Carson (whose Silent Spring was one of the 5 most important books of the last century and whose personal sacrifices in the struggle against cancer while fighting the insults thrown at her becasue of her campaign against the careless use of pesticides were beyond heroic)—of the Greatest Generation, and also because people like Lynn White, who saw the roots of our environmental callousness as Biblical rather than modern, and also by Justice William O Douglass, born in 1898 (a member of the WWI generation) who formerly asked who speaks for the trees?

And actually dozens of judges who ruled in the the early 20th century that the creation of public health threats through pollution were justifiably seen as harms to individuals, municipalities and society in general who then had the right to seek injunctions against polluters.

And before them there was Gillford Pinchot and John Muir, who stood to argue the merits of conservation and preservation (and whose arguments against each other’s movements are classic introductions to the issue of natural resource use vs its absolute preservation).

And before them there were Henry David Thoreau and Emerson whose writings chronicled the devastation that had been caused by humans within a single life-span. They saw the end of nature as it had been, they listened to old people tell of the destruction of nature in an attempt to tame it, not only the passing Last of the Mohicans.

So. I rejoice that the transgenerational struggle that _is_ the history of the environmental movement in America is still transgenerational.

Previous generations hold not only the guilty, but also heroes of the environmental movement, and not just heroes but many ordinary soldiers who from many cultural perspectives shared love and respect for nature in their teaching ...an act of giving real values from one generation to the next, and without which, there would be only the very rudimentary beginnings of an environmental movement, if their were any movement at all.

Just because they/we did not stop the assault on the environment does not mean they/we were not and are not part of a struggle to do so. Just because our youngest generation will not likely win the war against the assault on the environment does not mean they will not fight their battles and keep the movement alive.

We are all in on this together. There is but one earth, and there is for all our differences only one people on it. Among that people are those who appreciate and implement the gift their teachers have given them: appreciation of the need for environmental stewardship. We have a misson to do that must span many generations its responsibility belongs to all of us.